...lift life heavenward

Lord, You make the common holy: “This My body, this My blood.”

Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward,

asking that the world around us share Your children’s liberty:

with the Spirit’s gifts empower us for the work of ministry.

---Jeffrey Rowthorn, 1978

Have you ever known someone with the touch? Someone who could take the most ordinary day and imbue it with otherworldliness? Turn an everyday action into a ritual of uncommon beauty? Take a passing conversation and bless the words exchanged, draw out the pain and joy masked behind safely neutral words and phrases?

I feel like Jesus must have been one of these rare persons. There are so many recorded instances of him breathing holiness into the mundane everyday of existence—everyday tasks, everyday conversations, everyday touches. In Jesus’ hands, touch healed disease and stigma, the fruit of wheat and vine became sacred sign. In Jesus’ mouth, names spoken called fishermen from their nets, taxmen from their graft, the dead from their repose, faithful women from their grief.

Is the gift for crafting sacredness from ordinariness, then, Jesus’ gift uniquely? Or are we to be imitators of Christ in this too, always open for the Spirit to move in us to transform the common into the holy…in the midst of us…through us?

Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward…

...practice makes permanent

In the bread of life here given, we become what we receive.

In the cup of love here offered, affirm what we believe.

In the word of God proclaimed here, the good news of truth is heard.

In the telling of the stories, be open to God’s word.

---James Chepponis, 2002

Been there. Done that. I admit it. I am the first to make the jaded comment, or, on choking it back, to think it. This again? Or maybe, like Yogi Berra, It’s like deja-vu, all over again. And it’s kind of true.

Each time we gather and take communion, there is a familiarity to the elements, a sense of ritual in the setting. If I’m not careful, I can coast through the serving of the elements, the doing this in remembrance, on autopilot. If I am not present in the moment and attending to the story of my friend Jesus’ sacrificial love for me, a high holy moment can be, instead, just another holy snack pack and some pretty mumbling.

And those Bible stories? For heaven’s sake, I’ve been coming to church now for, well, for a long time. I have heard them all. Twice. What good does it do me, really, to be here with you, listening to the stories again? To sit and listen to the same old words and phrases over and over, till they are so burned into my soul that I could tell them myself? To know them so well that the words spring, unbidden, to my mind at unlikely times during the week? What good are a bunch of stories?

I have to be careful. I wouldn’t want to mix up being transformed with being done. Because being transformed? That could take a lifetime.