A Methodist View of the Real Presence
Explaining what Methodists believe about Holy Communion is difficult, partly because we have not taught our doctrine effectively for many years, but partly because of our own founders’ reticence to be pinned down to exactly what we believe happens in the sacrament.
Thus far, Charles Wesley, in one of his better-known eucharistic hymns. It looks as if we hadn’t a clue; maybe it’s all mystical or symbolic? Actually, the Wesleys were being more definite than one might think. As good Anglicans, they rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but they refused to commit to the Lutheran doctrine of consusbstantiation. Yet, they believed in the same Real Presence confessed by those two Christian traditions. They just refused to try to pin God down on how that Presence was communicated to us in the bread and wine.
The polemics over the eucharist dominate much of the popular response to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the 16th Century. The Protestants objected to several features of Roman Catholic eucharistic theology. First, they denied transubstantiation for technical reasons (see below). Further, they objected to the over-the-top sacrificial language of Roman Catholic theologians, which seemed to imply (and often, outright state) that Christ was being re-sacrificed at every communion service – a denial, in their view, of the once-for-all character of the sacrifice on the cross. Finally, they felt that RC theology of the mass was little better than a claim to do magic: I say/do this, and it works this miracle, automatically. Combine this critique with an overall allergy to what they viewed as “popery” and you get a strong desire to find some other way to describe what God does through the Supper.
And yet, Luther and Cranmer and even Calvin continued to profess that the eucharist was a sacrament, something in which God was the primary actor, not the human recipients. God and Man both meet at the Table, and exchange between them happens, but God’s action remains paramount. To make clear how this colors what Methodists believe happens in communion, we need to contrast it with the low-church understanding of communion as an ordinance. This is the view of Zwingli, perhaps of Knox, and certainly of the Anabaptists and later Restorationists.
As an ordinance, the low-church Protestants emphasize human activity over divine activity. The central command is “Remember.” This means constructing a memory in our own minds, a conscious recall of what Christ did for us on the cross. Remembering what Christ did then leads to remembering specifically how he has worked in our lives to bring us to repentance and salvation. We also remember his promise for the future, for the resurrection and eternal life. The work of constructing these memories should then lead us to examine our life, leading to repentance, thankfulness, and peace.
So why, if all this is done in our heads, do we need bread and wine at all? Couldn’t we just remember him every day in our prayers? Well, yes; and we do. But this is how Christ wanted it done, and we honor him and show we mean it by our obedience to his explicit command. In the ordinance-view of the Supper, God’s activity is no more than he is always doing, through everything, and the bread and wine are not in any real sense the body and blood of Christ, just bread and wine – ordinary food and drink, though used by us to remember the true nourishment of our souls, who is Jesus Christ.
This was a novel idea when it was first formulated; hitherto, most controversies had centered on the attempt to describe how God was acting in the Supper generally, and specifically what he was making of the bread and wine. The RC doctrine was transubstantiation, meaning that the bread and wine were changed by God into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ – that same Christ whose body hung on the cross and was raised from the dead – though they still looked and felt and smelt and tasted like ordinary food. In Aristotelian terms, their substance was exchanged for the flesh and blood of Christ, but their accidents remained as they were. And since what was presented to our senses was somehow, beyond the ability of our senses to detect, the actual physical body and blood of Christ, therefore Christ himself was present not only in spirit but bodily: every communion service was, in effect, a physical manifestation of the resurrected Body, just as had appeared to the women and the apostles at various times. The elements were therefore not merely part of him – sliced off the roast, so to speak – but the whole of him, personally.
This explains why Catholics direct devotions directly to the host displayed over the altar. As the RC eucharistic hymn “Tantum ergo” puts it,
Now, in repudiating this doctrine, Lutherans and Anglicans (and with them, Methodists) did not argue that Christ was not really present – both in spirit and in the material bread and wine – only that they thought transubstantiation, as it was taught, incredible. Luther offered consubstantiation as his theory; that is, that though the bread and wine do not cease to be bread and wine, nevertheless, they become charged with the body and blood of Christ as iron heated cherry red in the fire remains iron, and yet communicates something more than iron when handled. So when we partake of the Supper, we literally receive Christ’s body and blood along with the bread and wine.
Some early Anglicans thought this made good sense. Others were not satisfied. In any case, there was a terrible political problem to be addressed. The English Reformation had swung back and forth. There was the religious policy of Henry VIII under Cromwell, then a slightly different policy after Cromwell’s fall. His successor Edward was a Hot Gospeller, and had a more low-church view. In his reign, the Prayer Book was changed, then changed again. Then he died, and his sister Mary brought England back into the RC fold. Finally, Elizabeth came to the throne – definitely a Protestant, but what kind she would be remained to be seen, as did what she could get the country to go along with. The issue was very much in doubt.
The Privy Council was working on a restored Prayer Book, but they had two different communion services setting forth two different views of the eucharist. Which one would they go with? In the meantime, the first Easter of Elizabeth’s reign was fast approaching and the churches needed to know how to celebrate communion on this most important of days, the one time of all the year when most Christians in England went to church to receive communion. The first Edwardian Prayer Book had a formula that implied the Real Presence; the second Prayer Book implied a mere commemoration. The Bill on Uniformity was stuck in committee, so an anomalous section was stuck in the Act of Supremacy, which said that the formula would be “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life” [the Real Presence], then “and take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thine heart by faith, with thanksgiving” [a commemoration]. In effect, they just stuck both formulae together so that while the reign was getting started and trying to establish its religious settlement, you could believe whatever you liked and still take communion. Though the Church of England did, finally, tend to support the Real Presence, this ambiguous, double-barreled formula remained standard, and was passed down the generations to other Anglicans, including John and Charles Wesley. You will find it in the old back-of-the-hymnal communion service we Methodists always used to use. From being a necessity, ambiguity became part of the Anglican (and Methodist) mode. “Who shall say,” indeed?
Yet if you pressed Mr. Wesley, he would have said that communion remained much more than a commemoration, though undoubtedly it was that. Christ was really present, and this had been the teaching of the whole Church for fifteen hundred years before the controversies of the Reformation. Wesley knew his early Church Fathers, and he couldn’t repudiate what they said. But, if you believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine, especially because it was taught by the Fathers, how then do you keep from confessing transubstantiation, along with the Roman Catholic Church? Ah, now you’re asking something.
So, let’s go back to the early Church Fathers. Ignatius of Antioch (martyred early 2nd Century) had called the eucharist “the medicine of immortality,” plainly showing that the power of God communicated to the believer was about more than psychological effects. Meanwhile, Irenaeus (martyred early 3rd Century) noted that the celebration of communion was valuable in revealing Gnostic heretics, who typically refused to partake. Gnostics believed all matter was sinful and looked only for a spiritual resurrection; therefore, they disdained the physicality of the bread which was also the body of Christ.
Now, Roman Catholic sources cite these examples and say, See, the Church has always taught transubstantiation – except, of course, for that oaf Berengar and his crew. Who are we talking about? Well, the first seeds of the doctrine of transubstantiation come from the 9th Century, when someone named Paschasius Radbertus claimed an identity between the eucharistic body and the body of Christ in heaven; he was opposed at first, but his idea grew. Berengar of Tours, an 11th Century theologian, definitely opposed this idea, but by then the idea of transubstantiation – that the body we hold in our hands in communion is literally the same body that was taken up into heaven – was becoming mainstream. Berengar was argued down. By the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), transubstantiation was defined as dogma. Increasingly drastic penalties were prescribed for those who denied it.
But the full doctrine – as it was taught at the time – was about more than the Presence. It involved a theory of the risen and glorified Body. For if the bread and wine are exchanged for the actual flesh and blood of Christ, it was theorized, then that Body must exist somewhere, whole and unchanged, for us to have access to it by prayer. That body, however, was taken up into heaven. And under the severe Aristotelian view of things, that meant that “heaven” had volume, for it had to be able to contain a physical object about six feet tall, maybe 165 pounds or so, etc. In other words, heaven was a pocket of the material universe, not an entirely other, spiritual, kind of existence.
Scholars recoiled from this idea. They argued that surely those who were teaching the new doctrine – and by new, they meant “transubstantiation” – couldn’t mean that heaven was a physical place, the upstairs of our world? They kept arguing this, even as the church authorities got ever more specific in their definition of the doctrine and more drastic in the penalties for denying it. Finally, the arguers went underground, speaking obliquely when direct challenge to the doctrine was no longer safe. The form of their argument has come down to us (ironically) as the most useless point ever mooted in debate. For the people who believed in the Real Presence (though not on a cellular level) would propose the following question: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The answer is either “a finite number” or “an infinite number.” For if you believe that heaven is a physical place with spatial dimensions and all that it contains has mass -- in the Physics sense – then angels are not purely spiritual beings, but have bodies that, however finely attenuated, cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time; therefore, only a finite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin. On the other hand, if you believe that heaven is outside the material universe and those who inhabit it are spirits possessing only spiritual bodies, then they are not bound to obey our physical laws, even when they appear among us, and an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a material pin.
The RC theologians would have none of it. I do not accuse them of believing the crudities that were argued in the 11th and 12th Centuries, but I do say that they have pulled a rhetorical rabbit out of a hat. By claiming that Berengar and his followers were deniers of the Real Presence, they bolster their claim that the Church has always taught what they now teach; whereas I would argue that transubstantiation was an invention of the 9th Century and Berengar was in fact appealing to the unbroken tradition of the Church when he argued against it. My RC friends would, of course, deny all this vociferously; however, this is not about them and what they teach today. It is, rather, about what Methodists are supposed to believe.
Methodists, along with Anglicans and Lutherans, but without committing themselves to any particular theory of the matter, would say, along with the whole, undivided Church of the first millennium that Christ is truly present in his own proper person in the Supper, and that the bread and wine are the means chosen by God to convey the life of Christ, which is also the life of his Body, into the believer for the nourishment of both soul and body.
Many of us would also point out that the Passover Seder, out of which Christ instituted the eucharist, is presented as a meeting out of Time; that is, those present must feel that they themselves were brought out of Egypt. So, our meeting at the Table brings us face to face with the Christ who at that first Table gave the bread and cup to his apostles (and others who were probably present), and we are to see ourselves as part of that company. Indeed, all the hosts of heaven join the people of God on earth around that Table, which is the same Table wherever it is set, presided over by the same Master who is himself both the presenter and the food presented.
But more than that, the whole act is presented as a petition to God the Father, as the seder is an act of praise to the God of Israel, from Christ and about Christ, and should include a petition that God send his Spirit to make effective our union with Christ and through him, the Father. The same Spirit who unites us with God in Christ also gives us the assurance that our sins are forgiven and that we are indeed part of Christ’s company.
And since we are all joined to the same Christ, whether we are on earth or in heaven, so we are joined to each other, as children who walk hand in hand with the same friend. So the Body of Christ, which is not only found in the bread and wine but in the whole company of like-minded worshipers, is present to us in a renewed sense. We should not forget that when Paul chides the Corinthians for not perceiving the Body of Christ in communion (1 Cor. 11:29), he isn’t talking about metaphysical theories, but the rude actions of people who say they want to belong to God while treating each other like trash.
All this is primarily the action of the triune God. We don’t have to “understand” it, nor focus our thoughts in any particular manner. We are like children gathered around our elders in the family, and we take what we are given and trust it will do us good, and all we have to know is that we are loved. As we grow, no doubt, we will understand more, and be able to obey better, but to be admitted to the feast we have only to want to belong to Jesus. No doubt we should be baptized, though we Methodists don’t present that as a hard and fast requirement; but neither are we handing out holy food on the street corner to all comers. This is an act which is done discreetly, among those who belong to Christ and each other.
More could be said on the matter, I’m sure. Holy communion is, after all, the principal act of Christian worship. So a lot more could be said, but we must end this piece somewhere. Let us end it on this statement: Methodists believe that communion is a sacrament; that is, an act decreed by Christ in which God is the principal actor, using physical means to communicate spiritual renewal to those who lay hold of his gifts by faith. It is not merely symbolic, like a metaphor or an allegory or an object lesson. In it, Christ is truly present and both gives himself to his people and draws his people into himself. It should be celebrated often and, while not prescribing any particular ceremonial, with at least as much preparation and flourish as one would present a Thanksgiving dinner to one’s extended family, for it is a special occasion, however often we celebrate it.
O the depth of love divine,
Th’unfathomable grace!
Who shall say how bread and wine
God into man conveys!
Thus far, Charles Wesley, in one of his better-known eucharistic hymns. It looks as if we hadn’t a clue; maybe it’s all mystical or symbolic? Actually, the Wesleys were being more definite than one might think. As good Anglicans, they rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but they refused to commit to the Lutheran doctrine of consusbstantiation. Yet, they believed in the same Real Presence confessed by those two Christian traditions. They just refused to try to pin God down on how that Presence was communicated to us in the bread and wine.
The polemics over the eucharist dominate much of the popular response to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the 16th Century. The Protestants objected to several features of Roman Catholic eucharistic theology. First, they denied transubstantiation for technical reasons (see below). Further, they objected to the over-the-top sacrificial language of Roman Catholic theologians, which seemed to imply (and often, outright state) that Christ was being re-sacrificed at every communion service – a denial, in their view, of the once-for-all character of the sacrifice on the cross. Finally, they felt that RC theology of the mass was little better than a claim to do magic: I say/do this, and it works this miracle, automatically. Combine this critique with an overall allergy to what they viewed as “popery” and you get a strong desire to find some other way to describe what God does through the Supper.
And yet, Luther and Cranmer and even Calvin continued to profess that the eucharist was a sacrament, something in which God was the primary actor, not the human recipients. God and Man both meet at the Table, and exchange between them happens, but God’s action remains paramount. To make clear how this colors what Methodists believe happens in communion, we need to contrast it with the low-church understanding of communion as an ordinance. This is the view of Zwingli, perhaps of Knox, and certainly of the Anabaptists and later Restorationists.
As an ordinance, the low-church Protestants emphasize human activity over divine activity. The central command is “Remember.” This means constructing a memory in our own minds, a conscious recall of what Christ did for us on the cross. Remembering what Christ did then leads to remembering specifically how he has worked in our lives to bring us to repentance and salvation. We also remember his promise for the future, for the resurrection and eternal life. The work of constructing these memories should then lead us to examine our life, leading to repentance, thankfulness, and peace.
So why, if all this is done in our heads, do we need bread and wine at all? Couldn’t we just remember him every day in our prayers? Well, yes; and we do. But this is how Christ wanted it done, and we honor him and show we mean it by our obedience to his explicit command. In the ordinance-view of the Supper, God’s activity is no more than he is always doing, through everything, and the bread and wine are not in any real sense the body and blood of Christ, just bread and wine – ordinary food and drink, though used by us to remember the true nourishment of our souls, who is Jesus Christ.
This was a novel idea when it was first formulated; hitherto, most controversies had centered on the attempt to describe how God was acting in the Supper generally, and specifically what he was making of the bread and wine. The RC doctrine was transubstantiation, meaning that the bread and wine were changed by God into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ – that same Christ whose body hung on the cross and was raised from the dead – though they still looked and felt and smelt and tasted like ordinary food. In Aristotelian terms, their substance was exchanged for the flesh and blood of Christ, but their accidents remained as they were. And since what was presented to our senses was somehow, beyond the ability of our senses to detect, the actual physical body and blood of Christ, therefore Christ himself was present not only in spirit but bodily: every communion service was, in effect, a physical manifestation of the resurrected Body, just as had appeared to the women and the apostles at various times. The elements were therefore not merely part of him – sliced off the roast, so to speak – but the whole of him, personally.
This explains why Catholics direct devotions directly to the host displayed over the altar. As the RC eucharistic hymn “Tantum ergo” puts it,
Down in adoration falling,
Lo! the sacred host we hail.
Lo, o’er ancient forms departing
Newer rites prevail,
Faith for all defects supplying
Where the feeble senses fail.
Now, in repudiating this doctrine, Lutherans and Anglicans (and with them, Methodists) did not argue that Christ was not really present – both in spirit and in the material bread and wine – only that they thought transubstantiation, as it was taught, incredible. Luther offered consubstantiation as his theory; that is, that though the bread and wine do not cease to be bread and wine, nevertheless, they become charged with the body and blood of Christ as iron heated cherry red in the fire remains iron, and yet communicates something more than iron when handled. So when we partake of the Supper, we literally receive Christ’s body and blood along with the bread and wine.
Some early Anglicans thought this made good sense. Others were not satisfied. In any case, there was a terrible political problem to be addressed. The English Reformation had swung back and forth. There was the religious policy of Henry VIII under Cromwell, then a slightly different policy after Cromwell’s fall. His successor Edward was a Hot Gospeller, and had a more low-church view. In his reign, the Prayer Book was changed, then changed again. Then he died, and his sister Mary brought England back into the RC fold. Finally, Elizabeth came to the throne – definitely a Protestant, but what kind she would be remained to be seen, as did what she could get the country to go along with. The issue was very much in doubt.
The Privy Council was working on a restored Prayer Book, but they had two different communion services setting forth two different views of the eucharist. Which one would they go with? In the meantime, the first Easter of Elizabeth’s reign was fast approaching and the churches needed to know how to celebrate communion on this most important of days, the one time of all the year when most Christians in England went to church to receive communion. The first Edwardian Prayer Book had a formula that implied the Real Presence; the second Prayer Book implied a mere commemoration. The Bill on Uniformity was stuck in committee, so an anomalous section was stuck in the Act of Supremacy, which said that the formula would be “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life” [the Real Presence], then “and take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thine heart by faith, with thanksgiving” [a commemoration]. In effect, they just stuck both formulae together so that while the reign was getting started and trying to establish its religious settlement, you could believe whatever you liked and still take communion. Though the Church of England did, finally, tend to support the Real Presence, this ambiguous, double-barreled formula remained standard, and was passed down the generations to other Anglicans, including John and Charles Wesley. You will find it in the old back-of-the-hymnal communion service we Methodists always used to use. From being a necessity, ambiguity became part of the Anglican (and Methodist) mode. “Who shall say,” indeed?
Yet if you pressed Mr. Wesley, he would have said that communion remained much more than a commemoration, though undoubtedly it was that. Christ was really present, and this had been the teaching of the whole Church for fifteen hundred years before the controversies of the Reformation. Wesley knew his early Church Fathers, and he couldn’t repudiate what they said. But, if you believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine, especially because it was taught by the Fathers, how then do you keep from confessing transubstantiation, along with the Roman Catholic Church? Ah, now you’re asking something.
So, let’s go back to the early Church Fathers. Ignatius of Antioch (martyred early 2nd Century) had called the eucharist “the medicine of immortality,” plainly showing that the power of God communicated to the believer was about more than psychological effects. Meanwhile, Irenaeus (martyred early 3rd Century) noted that the celebration of communion was valuable in revealing Gnostic heretics, who typically refused to partake. Gnostics believed all matter was sinful and looked only for a spiritual resurrection; therefore, they disdained the physicality of the bread which was also the body of Christ.
Now, Roman Catholic sources cite these examples and say, See, the Church has always taught transubstantiation – except, of course, for that oaf Berengar and his crew. Who are we talking about? Well, the first seeds of the doctrine of transubstantiation come from the 9th Century, when someone named Paschasius Radbertus claimed an identity between the eucharistic body and the body of Christ in heaven; he was opposed at first, but his idea grew. Berengar of Tours, an 11th Century theologian, definitely opposed this idea, but by then the idea of transubstantiation – that the body we hold in our hands in communion is literally the same body that was taken up into heaven – was becoming mainstream. Berengar was argued down. By the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), transubstantiation was defined as dogma. Increasingly drastic penalties were prescribed for those who denied it.
But the full doctrine – as it was taught at the time – was about more than the Presence. It involved a theory of the risen and glorified Body. For if the bread and wine are exchanged for the actual flesh and blood of Christ, it was theorized, then that Body must exist somewhere, whole and unchanged, for us to have access to it by prayer. That body, however, was taken up into heaven. And under the severe Aristotelian view of things, that meant that “heaven” had volume, for it had to be able to contain a physical object about six feet tall, maybe 165 pounds or so, etc. In other words, heaven was a pocket of the material universe, not an entirely other, spiritual, kind of existence.
Scholars recoiled from this idea. They argued that surely those who were teaching the new doctrine – and by new, they meant “transubstantiation” – couldn’t mean that heaven was a physical place, the upstairs of our world? They kept arguing this, even as the church authorities got ever more specific in their definition of the doctrine and more drastic in the penalties for denying it. Finally, the arguers went underground, speaking obliquely when direct challenge to the doctrine was no longer safe. The form of their argument has come down to us (ironically) as the most useless point ever mooted in debate. For the people who believed in the Real Presence (though not on a cellular level) would propose the following question: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The answer is either “a finite number” or “an infinite number.” For if you believe that heaven is a physical place with spatial dimensions and all that it contains has mass -- in the Physics sense – then angels are not purely spiritual beings, but have bodies that, however finely attenuated, cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time; therefore, only a finite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin. On the other hand, if you believe that heaven is outside the material universe and those who inhabit it are spirits possessing only spiritual bodies, then they are not bound to obey our physical laws, even when they appear among us, and an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a material pin.
The RC theologians would have none of it. I do not accuse them of believing the crudities that were argued in the 11th and 12th Centuries, but I do say that they have pulled a rhetorical rabbit out of a hat. By claiming that Berengar and his followers were deniers of the Real Presence, they bolster their claim that the Church has always taught what they now teach; whereas I would argue that transubstantiation was an invention of the 9th Century and Berengar was in fact appealing to the unbroken tradition of the Church when he argued against it. My RC friends would, of course, deny all this vociferously; however, this is not about them and what they teach today. It is, rather, about what Methodists are supposed to believe.
Methodists, along with Anglicans and Lutherans, but without committing themselves to any particular theory of the matter, would say, along with the whole, undivided Church of the first millennium that Christ is truly present in his own proper person in the Supper, and that the bread and wine are the means chosen by God to convey the life of Christ, which is also the life of his Body, into the believer for the nourishment of both soul and body.
Many of us would also point out that the Passover Seder, out of which Christ instituted the eucharist, is presented as a meeting out of Time; that is, those present must feel that they themselves were brought out of Egypt. So, our meeting at the Table brings us face to face with the Christ who at that first Table gave the bread and cup to his apostles (and others who were probably present), and we are to see ourselves as part of that company. Indeed, all the hosts of heaven join the people of God on earth around that Table, which is the same Table wherever it is set, presided over by the same Master who is himself both the presenter and the food presented.
But more than that, the whole act is presented as a petition to God the Father, as the seder is an act of praise to the God of Israel, from Christ and about Christ, and should include a petition that God send his Spirit to make effective our union with Christ and through him, the Father. The same Spirit who unites us with God in Christ also gives us the assurance that our sins are forgiven and that we are indeed part of Christ’s company.
And since we are all joined to the same Christ, whether we are on earth or in heaven, so we are joined to each other, as children who walk hand in hand with the same friend. So the Body of Christ, which is not only found in the bread and wine but in the whole company of like-minded worshipers, is present to us in a renewed sense. We should not forget that when Paul chides the Corinthians for not perceiving the Body of Christ in communion (1 Cor. 11:29), he isn’t talking about metaphysical theories, but the rude actions of people who say they want to belong to God while treating each other like trash.
All this is primarily the action of the triune God. We don’t have to “understand” it, nor focus our thoughts in any particular manner. We are like children gathered around our elders in the family, and we take what we are given and trust it will do us good, and all we have to know is that we are loved. As we grow, no doubt, we will understand more, and be able to obey better, but to be admitted to the feast we have only to want to belong to Jesus. No doubt we should be baptized, though we Methodists don’t present that as a hard and fast requirement; but neither are we handing out holy food on the street corner to all comers. This is an act which is done discreetly, among those who belong to Christ and each other.
More could be said on the matter, I’m sure. Holy communion is, after all, the principal act of Christian worship. So a lot more could be said, but we must end this piece somewhere. Let us end it on this statement: Methodists believe that communion is a sacrament; that is, an act decreed by Christ in which God is the principal actor, using physical means to communicate spiritual renewal to those who lay hold of his gifts by faith. It is not merely symbolic, like a metaphor or an allegory or an object lesson. In it, Christ is truly present and both gives himself to his people and draws his people into himself. It should be celebrated often and, while not prescribing any particular ceremonial, with at least as much preparation and flourish as one would present a Thanksgiving dinner to one’s extended family, for it is a special occasion, however often we celebrate it.