nothing but the blood

Image Description: Three images. The image on the left is of a gold communion cup filled with wine sitting on a table. Along with it are grapes and a gold bowl of communion wafers. On the right are two gold communion plates sitting on a table, one holding bits of bread and one holding small glasses of wine. In the center is an abstract picture of Jesus on the cross. Jesus is depicted in back in front of a white and red background.

I’ve only been to a Catholic mass three times. One was a funeral for a beloved father, one was a sendoff for a beloved priest, and one was a graduation ceremony for a beloved group of eighth graders.

At least I think they were masses. You still call it a mass right? I mean there was music, a homily, and communion. Or Eucharist. Or mass. A feast in remembrance of the beloved Christ.

The first was in high school. My choir director’s father-in-law had passed away, and the family asked that our school’s chamber choir would provide the music for the funeral service. We stood in the balcony of this beautiful church drenched in sorrow and injected it with songs of praise as our weeping and smiling director conducted. He had been very clear that our presence was to be one of celebration, singing songs to send this cherished man into the arms of God.

The second and third were both at the same church. Located in Chicago’s Mexican neighborhood of Little Village, it hosts the largest Latino congregation in the Midwest. The goodbye-service for the priest—which was entirely in Spanish—was on the first day of a month I spent living with a family who lives in the community and provides the music during the services. It was maybe my first time truly being in a space formed by a culture other than my own. I watched everyone around me out of the corner of my eyes to know when to sit or stand or kneel and tried to piece meaning together from their faces and the few isolated words I could understand. I don’t remember communion, but I’m sure it was offered, and I’m sure I didn’t partake out of respect for the tradition. But the meaning I pieced together from these indicators of otherness wasn’t one of exclusivity. Rather, it was one of inclusion. I felt welcomed by the novelty of otherness and continued to for the next month as this family and community let me into their homes and their lives. After the service was a celebration with food and performances and dancing, all to say goodbye to this priest who had clearly had an impact.

Almost a year later, I returned to the church on a Friday night with that same family. Becky, the youngest of the two kids, was graduating from the private school ran by the church, which ends at eighth grade. Once again it was a sendoff for these kids who had spent years together in this school and were now moving on to a number of other high schools across the city. There were smiles and nervous giggles and hugs and tears and laughter. I sat with this family I had lived with a year before in this neighborhood I had lived in once and have since lived in again. I sang and prayed and sat and stood and kneeled, but I didn’t go up when the Eucharist was offered.

And this time, for some reason, I actually thought about it. I actually realized it, you could say. In some small way, in that moment, I was being shut off from grace, from Christ. Sure, it’s symbolic. But the sacrament is heavy with meaning and power, a heaviness I wasn’t allowed to step into. And I thought about how rare it is for me to ever have to be shut off from anything, about how my able-bodied, white, English-speaking, American-born self had spent virtually all of my life in spaces that had been created with me in mind.

But it isn’t the same for many of the people I was sitting with in that room. The current top pick for president for one of our country’s main political parties has decried the evils of Mexico and Mexican immigrants several times, claiming they’re “raping us at the border” and proposing that we build a wall spanning the border between us and them. Us and them.

For immigrant families, these walls are constant. They are always being shut off, whether legally or socially or politically or religiously. They are constantly reminded that this place is not for them.

Mark 7:24-30 tells a story of a woman who was reminded that she was out of place because of her nationality. She was a Greek, a Gentile not a part of God’s chosen people. “She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter,” who was possessed.

“First let the children eat all they want, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”

Said Jesus.

The super inclusive, radical, loving Jesus of the Gospels.

This wasn’t a one-time deal. This isn’t like me being kinda sorta being shut off from grace for a moment. This was one moment within a history of exclusion and nationalism that claimed the Divine was only for us, not for them.

But she didn’t back down. “Yes, Lord,” she replied, “but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

I can’t help but to think that Jesus was shocked and had to compose himself before saying this: “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”

Even if this woman only got the crumbs, she got what she came for and more. Not only had Jesus changed her circumstances, but she changed Jesus’ outlook on a people. Jesus and his disciples go on to create new communities where “there is no Jew or Gentile.” Did this encounter have something to do with it? Did a momentary exclusion lead to an outpouring of grace and reconciliation?

After the graduation ceremony was over, we went to the gym to celebrate this changing of seasons for these kids, as we had for the priest the year before and for my choir director’s father-in-law years ago. We were served a crazy amount of food like enchiladas and tacos and beans and chips and salsa, food I had missed in my year away from the neighborhood. I hadn’t been invited to the table in the service, but “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” The crumbs that fell like manna came as an outpouring of grace that welcomed me into a home and a community and a culture I could have been excluded from.

Two days later, I attended a small Protestant church in a nearby neighborhood I’d been to twice before, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the incredible author and theologian Brenda Salter-McNeil was giving a guest sermon that morning. She got up and told us that she had prepared a sermon on some other topic, but felt during worship that she was to preach on a different topic: unity. 

“What you’re trying to do here is hard,” she told us. The church had been committed to racial diversity and racial justice since its beginnings eight years before. I learned that Salter-McNeil had been connected to the church throughout its short history, acting as a mentor and friend for the pastor and others in the church.

At some point, she turned the conversation to Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement. “This isn’t like the Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “This isn’t being lead by a pastor. These people aren’t singing hymns as they march. These people are mad, and they hate the Church.”

But this was not an indictment of the movement or the protestors, but of the Church. “They hate the Church because of our misogyny. They hate us because of our racism.”

And as she rebuked the Church, she repeatedly put forth a call: “Come together.”

And we did. Communion was offered after, and this time I stood up and joined the line. In the churches I had grown up with, communion had always been passed around in a metal tray holding Styrofoam-like bits of “bread” and tiny cups of grape juice. It had always just come, with no action or intention on my part, no interaction with the servers. I grabbed a bit of bread.

“The body of Christ, broken for you.”

Dipped it in the wine (or, grape juice, I think).

“The blood of Christ, poured out for you.”

I ate the broken body and reflected on the broken Church, on this institution I had been born into that had shown me more good and more than anything else. I’ve seen the ugly, and the pain, and the wondering why anyone thought this was a good idea. But the fountain of Jesus’ blood poured out then and now bursts through the cracks as a fountain of grace.

Communion isn’t only done once, but we always need more of it. We need more grace, because blood is always being shed. In the weeks following the communion service, a white terrorist entered a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina during a Bible study and killed 9 people. It was the most egregious act following a year of highly publicized racial violence.

Only a couple of days after the massacre, family members of the slain stood up in a courtroom in front of the killer of their beloved. Instead of using their words to start a “race war” as the shooter had hoped, which would have been understandable, they said something far more radical:

“I forgive you.”

Their words echoed the crucified Christ:

“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

There in the midst of incomprehensible pain was an equally incomprehensible outpouring of grace and reconciliation, a fountain of blood transformed into a fountain of grace bursting through the cracks of despair.

Two days ago I sat in a church I had never been to. I’m living in a small town in Central Illinois for the semester and had heard of this church from a friend, deciding to go without researching it beforehand. Everything was too familiar, the 90’s worship songs and coffee bar and large welcome table and the congregation filled with white people all remnants of the tradition I grew up in and have, somewhat, distanced myself from. So why did I feel like I didn’t belong? I felt uncomfortable for some reasons that may have been justified and some reasons that weren’t, and I wondered through the songs and through the sermon what put me in the same group as the kind people sitting around me.

Then I saw ushers hovering in the back with metal trays holding Styrofoam-like bits of “bread” and tiny cups of grape juice. Someone played the piano as they passed around the Eucharist in the form most familiar to me even as I felt like a foreigner.

I took the body and the blood in my seat on my own, as did the rest of the congregation. This time there was no beloved father-in-law who had passed away, no beloved priest who was leaving, no beloved group of 8^th graders graduation, no beloved Church seeking unity, so I could only focus on the beloved Christ on a cross, fountains of blood flowing through time and into my cup as a fountain of grace and reconciliation. I saw this church, this Church, this tradition I had grown up with, this family I had seen feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, invite strangers in, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned. And I knew. I was one with these people because we drank from the same cup, were sustained by the same dying and rising Christ.

And I thought about how exclusion works all ways. And I thought about the Greek woman with the broken daughter who took any crumb of this grace she could get, about Brenda Salter-McNeil’s call to the broken Church to “come together,” about the forgiveness of the broken family members of the Charleston 9, about the cry of the broken Jesus as he hung on a cross: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Of course Jesus wasn’t saying his crucifixion was okay or that the playing field was suddenly evened out in his forgiveness. But his forgiveness opened the door for repentance, for a genuine change of heart, for people to turn and walk together in bringing forth the Kingdom of God on Earth as it is in Heaven. The forgiveness of Christ in the face of racism doesn’t look like #AllLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatterToGod. Jesus always focused on the broken, those broken by the exclusion of others, and rebuked oppressors and abusers. But while he ate with the hungry, he also ate with the tax collectors who made them so. This isn’t cheap grace that ignores suffering, but grace as costly as the cross that bleeds grace into every space and to every person we don’t want it to. The blood of Christ flows into a fountain of grace, and everyone who is touched is family.

This thing we call the church is messy. But of course it is. It’s held together by blood.

I didn’t get bread and wine on the night of the commencement, but I got chips and salsa. Communion was served.