Yeah Baby!

Tonight I had the great pleasure of visiting with a family in the parish who have joined recently. I don't want to share their names for privacy reasons, but I do want to report on some statements made by their wonderful kindergarten-aged son.

"I don't really like the church part, Reverend Connie," he said. [He means coming in from Sunday school for worship and Communion.] "I just like to go to Sunday school," he said.

(I'm thinking how I never liked Sunday school, only the church part!)

While giving me a tour of the vegetable garden, this young man pointed to a wild onion and solemnly said, "You don't want to eat those. They can kill you!"

And maybe my favorite comment of the evening, because of its honesty: "You know why I don't like the Communion part? The wafers taste bad."

A child's view is so different: I wouldn't have thought about how the wafers taste as a reason to enjoy or not enjoy Communion, but he's right, they don't really taste very good. Of course, they don't need to taste good in order to accomplish their purpose, but if we really do understand the Eucharist as a family meal, maybe we ought to think about taste and texture. Maybe that's why some churches use really great homemade bread, though I have to admit that distributing it is much more unwieldy than distributing those neat little wafers.

My young friend and I ended the evening by sharing a vigorous little dance of joy and glee while we shouted, "Yeah, baby!" I invited this young man to do the same in church, but he said he'd let me do it by myself. (Not any time in the foreseeable future ....)