Liam Byrnes

Something of a wordplay occurred to me today. I think I have heard it somewhere before¹, but maybe you haven’t and so, I’ll share it with you.

Making it right before taking communion

I’ve been thinking about the practice of communion/Eucharist/Lord’s supper and the common practice of reconciling to others within the body of Christ before engaging in it.

In a world where our Facebook-projections of ourselves can be the only selves we actually know, this practice of asking for forgiveness has fallen by the wayside. We are addicted to seeing and portraying the best version of ourselves to the point that we have become callous towards the impact of the unlovely parts of who we are.

We don’t only have barriers at an individual level but also in our communities too. Rarely is there enough love and common affection found in Christian communities that can allow someone to confess sin to another and not from then on somehow be held at arms length. In fact, confessing sin or offense to one another often seems positively impolite!

How do I understand when I am truly at fault?

While I’m sure there are many causes in addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned, another challenge is our inability to understand where accountability or blame lies.

What is my part, what is their part? What is the fault of my nature or my nurture.

It seems like many of the sciences (neuroscience/psychology/sociology/psychiatry) are discovering impacts on our lives that lead us to believe that almost everything in our lives can be tracked back to something in our biology, our nurture and development, or our social conditioning.

All that being accounted for though, there is a clear need to simply take more responsibility for our own actions. This is why I think in the Lord’s Prayer we ask to be kept from temptation (our responsibility) and delivered from evil (a more external influence) and both of these areas need to be accounted for in our lives.

We humans can be ingenious at squirming our way out of simply reflecting on our action or inaction and saying sorry.

Putting Jesus back together again

After considering the lack of interpersonal repentance in our communion times, I reflected on Jesus’ plain and simple words as he taught the disciples to encounter him through the plain and simple breaking of bread and drinking of wine around a plain and simple table.

“As often as you do this, remember me”

Remember me. Of course the most straight forward way to read this would be; ‘make sure you keep me in mind’, but there is also a word play possible that allows us to see another angle of what Jesus is encouraging here. Jesus is saying re-member me, put my members, another word used for all the parts of a body, put them back together.

Are we re-membering Christ when we participate in communion? Are we putting the body of Christ back together when we sit around his table? I wonder if that is part of his desire. That we would re-member, connect his parts so fully that we are mistaken for one body.

The imagery of one body is used often throughout Paul, but our endless fractures which originated far before the reformation certainly make us look like a dismembered corpse of a church at times. On a more local level it often does not look much prettier. Petty disagreements, mountain from molehills acting as arms-length barriers between us. Holding us back from the image we were gathered to create – the body of Christ.

A little while go I spoke about the church acting as the image of the invisible God, in the way that Colossians talks about Jesus. I wonder if we are obscuring the image because of our pride? Our desire to stand haughtily like parliamentarians across benches rather than family around a table. It’s incredible what diversity and disagreement within familys can be melted away by the simple act of a mealtime together.

In the practise of communion we are welcomed into the very presence of God, encouraged to envisage ourselves as caught up in the very dance of triune life. A common act that catches us up in the awareness of divine love. These are the times where we can perceive the love of God in ways that allow us to be hardy and alive enough to love our enemies. When we rarely practise communion and remember our inclusion in God’s inner life through Christ we are left as fragile ego’s reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty who struggle even to forgive our brothers and sisters nevermind our enemies.

Practising practical Re-memebering

Finally rather than a meditation on forgiveness from 30,000 feet I want to make some practical suggestions towards practicing forgiveness.

1. Spoken forgiveness should not be a passive-aggresive “just to let you know you wronged me….but don’t worry Im big enough to coldly release from your debt towards me”. You are responsible for your affections towards that person, make sure you are not motivated to communicate anything non-verbally and that you have released the debt².
2. You do not need to tell the whole story to the person or even most of the details. Take responsiblity for the grudge and offense and the broken relationship that ensued and repair it, dont dig it back up again.
3. Think of the best of the offending party, normally people have little to no awareness of their offense and are mortified to discover they caused offense. Expect that rather than imagining all the ways in which they intended it from evil intent. It will help your heart to give them the benefit of the doubt and you will approach them with grace rather than fear.
4. Make sure you apologise if you have held on to the offense for far too long, rather than justify it and make the person feel like they are to blame for your decision not to have an open conversation with them.
5. Forgiveness is a matter of perspective. For the offender it is a one-time thing, once it is dealt with, they feel absolved. For the offended it is only a process of re-building trust. It is not fair to openly process with the offender if you feel like your unforgiveness comes and goes, take responsibility for your own process rather than inflict them with it.

Forgiveness is hard, but it re-builds and restores relational connection which by any measure is the major impactor of quality of life. We are meant to be a people who give and receive forgiveness like breath. Not that the offenses are light or meaningless but that we are captured by our own lostness if all our sins were held against us, and out of the overflow of the grace and inclusion God has given us, who are we to withhold that from other.

Let us re-member Christ, who was broken and disfigured, dislocated and wounded for us to be reconnected to God and one another. One body has been broken so that we can venture into wholeness, and we need one another to be the picture of Christ that we are called to be.

Have you ever been driven into the wilderness by the Spirit?

It was a significant time in Jesus’ life, but these days most of our experiences of being driven into the wilderness lead us to rebuke the devil. Now, I don’t believe that God is causing all the suffering in our lives, but often we’re not paying attention to the purposes of God in our discomfort.

When Jesus is in the wilderness the scripture says that he is with wild beasts. People who have studied period of history know that there were no such wild beasts in the deserts around Palestine & Israel during those years.

So what could it mean? Well I wonder if you have ever tried to be silent and alone for an extended period? Soon, your mind is rushing with things that you have a long sought to be distracted from. Issues and anxieties that have never been dealt with and that have consistently been pushed aside through busyness.

When we go to the wilderness we experience these wild beasts. The anxieties, accusations, the desolateness and the fear that accompanies that. In a place where we are apart from the comforts that the world around us creates. The comforts of ego, position, celebration, affirmation. All of the things that life in the city offer us. Those things become uniquely attractive in the wilderness.

In the aloneness we can be tempted to run from finding a truer inner voice that wants to take hold of the authentic desire to become better without the audience of others. We are tempted by the ego to use the time to devise instruments of manipulation and projection for when we return from our wilderness. These temptations are the wild beasts of the wilderness.

To live out our kingdom call we do need to know we are loved, celebrated, know we have a good father in heaven; all the things that are so readily accessible in times of consolation and fullness. But when we are consistently nourished on a diet of felt-nearness we quickly wither and realise how fast this spiritual manna passes through us and leaves us once again empty.

Just as in the lives of children, endless comfort does not build the resources needed in them physically or emotionally to live a flourishing adult life. In our Christian walk we cannot just reside in ghetto’s of christians comfort and enjoyment. Sacrifice, and the surrender that it brings in healthy mature people builds muscles of reliance and trust in God when he cannot be felt or seen. It develops muscles of trust, expectation and longing that orders our inner selves to look for the coming kingdom of God, even when it isn’t immediately satiating our felt needs.

In this season I don’t feel like I am in a season of wilderness, but I am spending time pastorally with followers of Jesus who are often experiencing this. Sometimes for the first times in their lives, others in ways more profound and feeling more deeply abandoned than ever before. The physical signs of God’s goodness; possessions, direction, relationships and health quickly evaporate and we discover that at least in part, things from God have become our gods, in that we cannot have life without them.

In that sense I feel like this season is a season of living on the edge of the city of the spiritual life looking out onto the desert. The desert where many friends currently are and I catch the passing fragrances of this desert time. I catch them at least enough to empathise the weight and struggle of these times. Counter-intuitively this is also another gift of the wilderness, our ability to empathise. Even though each person experiences the desolation of desert times in their own way, there are issues that are common to all humanity as they experience it. In the wilderness we build capacity to navigate our spiritual desolation, we learn something of the way home and the longing to get there. This at least can offer some gift of empathy and understanding, even if it can’t be fully communicated, a loving hug, a knowing look can be offered.

Often we can find a sense of God’s pleasure and presence in the desert in ways we could never experience it in the city. I often think of the parable of the prodigal son as a beautiful allegory of the Spiritual life that God has given us. Our times in the city can be full, but an excess of the city leads us into deep soul sickness (such as in the case of the prodigal son). The long walk home through the desert to the homestead, is often the detox we need to truly experience the riches of the simple homestead we once despised.

The older brother in the homestead shows us that too long in the homestead as well leads us to take simple yet powerful things for granted; the love of Father, a grounded vocation, a community, an identity. When we spend too long taking the homestead for granted we experience the things that should be more truly understood as gifts, and transfigure them in our minds as rights. And rights are what we deserve.

This rights mentality in the kingdom leads us quickly to a place where everything we receive is what we deserve and things held back from us are injustices and a violation of our rights. Receiving the goodness of the homestead as gift instead of rights mean we have the resources to cultivate true joy. Gratitude is the watering of the soil that leads to plants of joy bursting forth. I know from personal experience, joy cannot be made up or brought forth through sheer willpower, it is only the discipline of gratitude that can bring it forth. It is a discipline I am struggling to conform myself to.

So, the deserts of our spiritual lives both detox us from the excesses of the city and sharpen our appreciation of the simple realities that we can often take for granted in our lives in God.