COMMUNING WITH AUNT NORA [Sun, 8-16-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

COMMUNING WITH AUNT NORA  [Sun, 8-16-20]

 When I was ordained, at the Elliott Hall of Music, at Purdue University, in 1964, Aunt Nora and Uncle Ted gave me a home communion set. It is in a nice black pebbled case and contains four small glasses, a small plastic bottle for grape juice, and a small silver plate that fits on a round container for bread elements. It’s so the pastor can serve communion to shut-ins at home, or patients in the hospital.

 I think that it has always signified my status as a pastor, as ordained, more than any other item I have possessed. More than my pulpit robe, or stole, or certificate on the wall. In the Methodist Church, you must be ordained to serve communion. It’s a special honor to have a home communion set.

 More than that, though, it was special because it came from Aunt Nora, one of the best Christians I have ever known, despite her theology. When I told her about how I had traded my life for my sister’s, how I had told God at age 14 that I would become a preacher if “He” would save Mary V’s life, it was Aunt Nora who assured me that God had, indeed, made Mary V sick to get me to go into the ministry, and that God would let her die if I didn’t carry through on the deal. Aunt Nora always wanted a preacher in the family. [1]

 I did not use the set nearly as much as I thought I would. Partly because I spent a lot of years in campus ministry, and there isn’t much call for home or hospital communion with college students. I served communion to a lot of students, averaging over 100 every Wednesday night by the end of my time at ILSU, but that was in the sanctuary at First Methodist. In the years that followed, though, when pastoring in IL, at Orion and Hoopeston and Charleston and Arcola, from time to time I got to share “the body and blood of Christ” with shut-ins and hospitalized folks. Usually I would just work into our ongoing conversation, at the bed side or beside a chair, as I opened the set and took out the elements, about how Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread and…

 That is a really good communion set. Even after 35 years of active ministry and another 20 of retirement, serving part-time interim pastorates, it still looks brand new. I was looking around for some newly ordained young pastor, one who did not have an Aunt Nora, to whom I could give the set, even though I hated to part with this memento of Aunt Nora and Uncle Ted, when the current pandemic isolation hit.

 Then I realized that the communion set was not done with me yet. Helen and I take communion on the first Sunday of each month with the St. Mark’s service online. Helen is the communion steward, getting bread and juice ready. We serve the elements to each other. From my little home communion set.

 Of course, everyone else in the congregation gets to commune, too, online, with whatever they have available for elements. Their communion is just as meaningful as that handed around in our house, or the homes of the other retired, ordained pastors in our congregation, who may well be using their own home communion sets.

 I’ve always loved the scene at the end in the Places in the Heart movie, where all the people in the story are in church, taking communion, passing the plates along the row, murderer and murdered beside each other, living and dead all in their places. It was so surprising the first time I saw that scene, but that’s the way communion is for all of us, whenever we take the elements--all the people in our lives, living or dead, together in that act.

 There is a special importance for me in that scene, for all my friends and loved ones are taking from my little home companion set-sort of like everyone eating from just one loaf and a couple of fishes-and the one handing the elements to me is Aunt Nora.

 John Robert McFarland

 1] I tell this story more completely in The Strange Calling.