This week we tried something new in our worship.

Well, it was a very old thing, but the way we did it was newish.

We celebrated communion via a prerecorded internet service. And next week that will air on television

This is not ideal. I would have so much preferred eye-to-eye contact as those words “given for you” were spoken. In fact, I’d have really enjoyed the brief touch that happens in the exchange of the bread.

This is so odd. I might have watched the video on Saturday night, another might have been on Sunday morning, a third might join us at the table next week when it is televised. Are we doing this together or apart?

For a time, in my adolescence our family meals were fairly fragmented. Four brothers. Each on a different basketball team. Andy in elementary, Phil in middle school. Paul and Mark on distinct high school teams. Each practice and game was on a different schedule.

My mom diligently would make a supper and reheat it multiple times as we got home. One day she made spaghetti and heated it over and over again. Do you remember the days when this was done on a stove rather than in microwaves?

Myron, a guest in our house at that time, was the last person to eat one night and the spaghetti had been stirred over and over again.

Mom put a plate of it down in front of Myron and apologized. Myron, always of the positive disposition, looked up at her from the spaghetti and smiled, “That’s ok, Lola, I love rice!” It had been stirred that many times.

The way we found ourselves celebrating the Lord’s supper didn’t feel quite right.

Neither did that meal feel quite right the first time Jesus celebrated it.

On that night, he spoke not of the departure from Egypt that usually would center a night in Passover. He spoke of his own upcoming departure. He spoke of his death.

The meal didn’t feel quite right that night.

One of those seated there was plotting against Jesus. The others would leave him alone when the betrayal unfolded. Betrayal never feels quite right.

But maybe the ways this particular meal can go wrong are precisely what make it appropriate to celebrate.

God comes to us when all is prepared and just as it should be. OK. I suppose that happens a few times in every life.

But the good news is God comes to us when we are unprepared and nothing is at it should be.

God comes to us when we are getting it all so wrong, because that is the kind of God we have.

God knows what we are hungry for and is stirring, stirring, stirring the Spirit, so that we can be fed.

God patiently persistent like my mother. God concerned about each one’s hunger.

It may not always be ideal. That is fine. God is accustomed to working in times far from the ideal.

We may be broken and unable to get together or even unable to get it all together.

God in Christ embraces our broken body. Christ becomes a body that inevitably will be broken.

Christ takes what is broken in hands of deep love, in hands that out of love have acquired their own wounds.

These wounded hands have scars broad enough to support the whole wounded, wholly wounded world.

Ready or not, faithful or betraying, present with each other or separated more than we can bear, Christ comes and offers himself to us.

In giving us himself, he also gives us back ourselves.

Broken, we are, but loved back toward wholeness.

It’s ok. Spaghetti is nice, but God loves rice.

About Philip Ruge-Jones

After I served for eighteen years as a professor of theology at Texas Lutheran University, my family decided to return to the Midwest where my wife and I grew up, attended college and seminary. Read more...