I Want the Blood! I Want the Body!
After the Divine Service today, I had to send this out. During the Distribution of the Elements, a child at our church was very insistent. He shouted, "I want the Blood! I want the Body." He couldn't understand why he couldn't also receive Christ's body and blood. Why does everyone else get to eat and I don't? As I passed him, I said, "In due time. When it is right."
I am not advocating young children participating in the Sacrament. What I do think that we can learn from this child is His insistence and persistence to receive what God offers. He really wanted it. He needed it. He had to have it. He was upset when he couldn't have it. I think as adults we have a tendency to lose that zeal, that desire for the Sacrament and what God offers. We are used to it. Holy Communion becomes sort of ho-hum. Been there, done that and got the shirt to go with it. We enjoy going up, but maybe we don't go with the same sort of zest and zeal for what is being offered to us: the forgiveness of our sins, life and salvation. May we learn from this little child and have a passion, a gut-level need for what Jesus is offering us: something out of this world. I want the blood! I want the body! Take care. Pastor Haugen
posted by stjohnstrongs @ 11:54 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Might I borrow the lad some Sunday soon?
Pax,
Orycteropus +
I was once one of those lads...confirmed in the ALC/ELCA and not knowing any better until I visited a closed communion practicing Church of the Brethren. What a shock!
Thank God that they bypassed me during the distribution.
Until then, the beauty, value and seriousness of the sacrament never exactly impressed me.
Open communion is merely sycretism going through its motions.
Convictions are important.
George Herbert said it right:
"The time of everyone's first receiving is not so much by years as by understanding; particularly the rule may be this: When any one can distinguish the sacramental from common bread, knowing the institution and the difference, he ought to receive, of what age soever. Children and youths are usually deferred too long under pretence of devotion to the sacrament, but it is for want of instruction; their understandings being ripe enough for ill things, and why not then for better? But parents and masters should make haste in this as to a great purchase for their children and servants, which, while they defer, both sides suffer; the one in wanting many excitings of grace; the other in being worse served and obeyed." (The Country Parson, ch. 22)
I worry for this child, pastor, that being constantly denied what he desires that he might develop either a resentment of the church or a shame at his previous eagerness.
Very nicee blog you have here
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