Mystery

Robert and I live across the river from the city of Buffalo of buffalo wings (but not buffalo soldier) renown. The city has planted buffalo sculptures along the highway coming in from Canada in case you forget. It also has a cool car museum downtown with a life-size model of Frank Loyd Wright’s in-the-round gas station. The gas nozzles hang from clear tanks dropped from the ceiling. Although there are beautiful, quiet neighborhoods with old Victorian homes, there are also parts of town where you can buy a house for a dollar as long as you commit to live in it for a year and a half. Maybe Buffalo’s greatest claim to fame, at least because of its influence today, should actually be something everyone has forgotten, that the first meetings defining the fundamentalist evangelical movement took place in Buffalo in 1920 (a similar meeting took place across the river in Niagara on the Lake).

At these meetings, evangelicals reaffirmed their belief in miraculous things like the resurrection, the virgin birth, the second coming, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the atonement of Christ. While many clergymen were preaching that everything about our faith can be explained by modern science (this was the height of the modernist era before war blasted to bits the idea that modern science could solve the world’s problems), there were some stubborn ones still clinging to miracles. These ministers rallied around the term fundamentals, claiming that our faith is founded on things supernatural.

I agree.  But in hindsight I wish those Buffalo preachers had held out for more. For one thing, they bequeathed to us a tendency to make our faith into a list. Fundamentalists today tend to say we’re “in” or “out” depending on fine points of doctrine instead of being in love with Jesus. For another thing, they left out some pretty key things—like the sacraments. The next time you take the Lord’s Supper at your church, listen to how the minister introduces the bread and the wine (what wine?). Sometimes he says, “This bread represents the body of Christ. It’s a symbol.” That’s modernism at work, undercutting the mystery of it all.

I once watched a circle of Baptist ministers in Honduras sharing the Lord’s Supper together during a workshop. The Honduran pastors were accustomed to using the words of Jesus himself  as they are recorded in the Scriptures, “This is my body.” Such simple words. Such powerful, controversial, paradoxical words. “This is my body. This is my blood.” Jesus got in trouble for using such extravagant words. Many of his fans left him when he told them to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  He claimed to be the bread of heaven come to nourish us and satiate us forever. There is a mystery here, some supernatural gift or measure that we can’t understand and can’t define with all our science. When Jesus said, “this is my body,” what did he mean? What did the disciples see with their eyes when they heard those words? Imagine the scene. They saw the bread; they saw Him, his physical body; and they saw one another, his body, too, his Body for all eternity. Jesus said rightly, “This is my body,” and we will take eternity to unpack his words.

Meanwhile, in the circle of Honduran pastors eating the Lord’s body, each took a piece of the bread and passed the loaf to the next person, repeating His words, “This is my body,” until the loaf reached a visiting American pastor. This pastor was waiting eagerly for his turn because he had a lesson to give, a correction to make: “This represents the body of Christ,” he said proudly. He had done his duty and demoted the mystery to an explainable object for an explainable moment.  “It’s only a symbol,” he said. Only a symbol. Can we say of anything that Jesus did that it was only…? Jesus took a familiar (family/daily) and sensuous event, with all its overtones of celebration, hospitality, grace, redemption, and nourishment and transformed it into a date night and a heavenly feast. And we say “only.” Let us not say “only.” Let us keep the feast. Let us keep the words. Let us keep the mystery. Let us remember that when we celebrate this feast, He is there, present in some way we cannot define nor even dare try. His body, his Body, is there in some way we cannot define nor even dare try. Let us remember that Jesus kept his identity hidden even while he walked and talked his way to Emmaus, but when he broke bread with his walking companions, they knew him. He had to show.

For the early church, the Lord’s Supper was the climax of their meetings. They broke bread together every time they met. Paul mentions having the Lord’s Supper every Lord’s Day. The first Christians never tired of welcoming the Lord’s presence through this celebration. They never got bored with it. Is it possible we have swallowed the modernist lie that everything can be explained by science and have forgotten that our faith is based on mystery…a virgin birth, a resurrection, a loaf that is a body, a cup that’s not just wine?