Unknown Table

If you've been around me for very long, you know that I love the Table. It's one of the reasons that I have committed every Friday this year to offering a reflection on it. 

What you might not know is that for the first three years that I attended church (I did not grow up in church, but fell in love with her in my tween/teen years), I was not in a church that celebrated Communion. Ever. 

Not once. 

I didn't even know that this Table existed. 

That probably comes as a shock to those of you who worship in churches where Communion has always been part of the landscape, where you have always known this sacrament. What are the people of God doing if they aren't breaking bread at the Table with Jesus?

On the other hand, there are many of you who read the things that I share and you, too, have no idea what this Table is. Either you worship in churches that don't celebrate the Table or you don't worship in a church at all, and so the entire concept is foreign to you. 

That's okay. 

The truth is that we don't know a whole lot about what went on in the Upper Room the night that Jesus broke bread with His disciples. There is more that we don't know about that night than that we do know, although I will also say that what we do know has been enough to keep us devotionalizing this remembrance for thousands of years. But there is still a lot we don't know. 

We know that it was the Passover, but we know very little about the Passover, relatively, too. We have the description of the first one in Exodus, but the details there are even scant. It would be hard for us to recreate the entire experience of the Passover from what the Bible tells us; we have to depend upon the oral history passed down to us from faithful Jews whose families were there that night, who passed the story on down to them. We have to depend upon the tradition that has been established for thousands of years and gracefully handed on to us. 

The same is true about the Table. There is more that we don't know than that we know from the biblical witness, and yet, we have at our disposal thousands of years of the celebration of this moment to draw on. We have a history and a tradition handed down to us from generations upon generations of Christians who have broken bread together in remembrance of this. I suppose it looks a lot different today than it did in the church in Acts, when Christians were first getting together, but I think there some fundamental similarities that keep us going. 

After all, most every church that does celebrate the Table celebrates it in roughly the same way. There are not wide disparities in how we do it, although there are minor twists in some of the components of it. Yet, here we are, with a very short synopsis and thousands of years of history, gathered around a Table that we both know and don't know. 

And it seems strange to those who don't worship in a church with the Table. 

But can I be honest? 

It seems unreal to those who do, as well.