Sacred Ground Ministries

The world has been topsy-turvy to say the least. Some days it feels like we’re living in science-fiction like times. It has been beautiful in some ways yet heartbreaking in others. Heartbreaking for the lives lost and those making great sacrifices to care for others. However, I can’t help but keep thinking about the heartbreak experienced by Christ and his Church as We are scattered.

Scattered into our own individual homes but standing strong as the Church has through many generations before us. Standing strong in the power of what it means to be a part of a worldwide, multiethnic, multigenerational body that knows no physical confines. However, in truth, our practices of meeting together have changed, those old familiar paths of the way we honor the Lord’s Day and keep his ordinances.

This week in the Church calendar is Holy Week, the week leading up to the resurrection of the crucified Christ. Churches all around the world celebrate this time in a spirit of sacred rememberance and joyous celebration. In our tradition, this usually means partaking in the ordinance of communion as an act of rememberance on Thursday, the day of the week in which Jesus celebrated the Passover meal with his disciples on the night He was betrayed. Jesus gave the disciples and thus the Church new meaning to the traditional elements of bread and wine. Jesus gave us a way of remembering Him and bringing ourselves back home to His body of believers.

Usually in a church service, these elements are provided for us, we simply partake. I suppose this is something I have taken for granted, a duty accomplished behind the scenes but a deeply important one. During this time in our culture, we have shifted our worship into our homes, meaning that we are now the ones to prepare the Table.

I happened to be out on Thursday seeing a few clients at work when I remembered that I needed to stop and buy some grape juice to commorate communion at home that evening. I stopped in and walked directly to the juice aisle, searching the shelves. It was a strange and poignant moment, I found myself searching for the representative blood of Christ in a busy store bustling with people buying things like green beans and candy.

I’m not sure why this moment struck me so. Perhaps it’s because the Lord has been stirring in my heart over the last several weeks the total other-worldliness of his followers. For a while I thought, and maybe our culture as a whole did too, that being a Christ follower looked something like being a good person, a good neighbor, or a good citizen. Lately, I’ve been so reminded about the counter-cultural call of Jesus to His followers.

I find myself drawn to people and stories who deeply embody this because I’m finding that it can actually be quite a rare thing, to embrace the call of Christ on a deep level. I find myself wondering if I am among those who are willing to give up whatever it takes to follow Jesus meanwhile praying for the grace to do so. This following is one that calls us to do seemingly backward things like sacrificing ourselves for the sake of others, or opening ourselves up for uncomfortable conversation. Or maybe it looks like buying grape juice to remind me of the blood which was the payment for my sin in the grocery store on a Thursday afternoon. What a strange thing to do.