Today we will celebrate Communion and in preparation I want to ask an odd question: Where does Communion happen? “In church, of course!” you answer. That’s true but hold that thought. What I mean is, where does the action happen that makes of Communion something more than just eating a very specific, small snack?

One answer is that it happens in the “snack” itself. Something happens to the elements themselves that transforms them and the consumption of them into something extraordinary. We might call this the Catholic approach. When the priest utters the words “This is my body”, the bread, or “Host”, is transformed in such a way that those who eat of it, quite apart from any belief on their part, are now taking of the body of Christ.

Our Protestant forebears reacted against this view of the Lord’s Supper though they did not achieve unity on the best way to talk about it instead. In the absence of a clear alternative, over time, the place of “action” for Communion moved from being located outside the one partaking to inside. That is to say that what makes communion more than just a snack is what happens in me as I take it. Do I believe it? Am I prepared? Am I sincere in my taking? Is it meaningful to me?

But can it be that my internal disposition is that which makes or breaks Communion? That I make it real for myself based on my feelings? If it is my thoughts that count, why do I need the bread and juice? One effect of this mentality is that Communion is no longer “communion.” If the meaningfulness of communion is in my own mind (or “heart”), it is personal not communal. The practice of Communion ceases to be an activity we share with the Church and becomes, instead a “vehicle for self-expression and self-fulfillment” (Ritual and Its Consequences, Seligman, et. al., 10). Something may be happening in me at the same time that it is happening to other people in the sanctuary, but we can’t really say that the same thing is happening because it is personal to you.

The meaning and power of Communion are outside your own head. The “action” of Communion has already happened. God has so ordained that the bread and wine present the body and blood of Christ. And he has given the practice of their consumption to the church as an act with a meaning attached. When we participate in this ritual, we “proclaim the Lord’s death” quite apart from how we feel about it. We cannot make it any more real or meaningful by our feelings or beliefs about it. In participating we assent to the meaning-making that God has already done. And we do so together with others who similarly assent.

So, you were right to say that Communion happens in “the church,” the church as the Body of Christ. Because it was in the body of Christ that the action of Communion first took place, and it is within the Body of Christ, the community of people covenanted to living out the reality of the symbols, that the “action” of Communion is re-lived.