“Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” (John 13:8-9)
I’ve been privileged to serve communion for 47 years as a part of worship leadership, either in church, at church camp, or in retreat settings. If I kept a running total of how many communion trays I have passed and how many words of remembrance I have said, I’d guess I could round the figure up to a couple thousand.
So it was quite alarming this past Sunday when one of the bread trays was knocked off the communion table and clanged onto the carpet, spilling the remaining cardboard-like pieces of bread. If anyone in the sanctuary had been meditating (the Baptist term for “taking a snooze”), their time in intimate conversation with Jesus was abruptly halted. At least the mishap occurred after the bread trays were returned. A full tray might have catapulted one of the bread bullets into one of the eyes of the servers.
Sometimes our life is defined by errors, but rescued by grace. If a pastor can drop a communion tray during the quietest moment of worship and not run out of the room weeping, perhaps others can understand that those embarrassing moments of our lives are redeemable.
One of the servers whispered to me, as he knelt to help me pick up the spillage, “It’s okay. I remember my first time serving also.” We quietly chuckled together. After the service, another man came to me, a wide grin on his face, and said, “That brought back memories of when I was an altar boy. That was my worst fear, dropping something.” And then there was another saintly gentleman who told me when he dropped a full tray of communion cups on the front row of a visiting choir positioned in the choir loft.
It’s interesting that most of us can remember the flubs we’ve had through the years. During my last year of seminary, I was serving as Director of Youth at First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, Illinois. One Sunday I was put in charge of the pastoral prayer time. As part of the duties, I was to announce any celebrations of newborns, as well as inform the congregation of the deaths of anyone. On one of those assigned Sundays I confused the two and said, “Congratulations to Ruth Smith on the death of her father.” Decades later, I can remember the stunned looks on the faces of the 500 people gathered in that sanctuary.
We all have those moments of temporary clumsiness and misspoken words that cause us to feel like one of The Three Stooges. The difference is whether someone can forgive himself and know that God is not so much concerned about the performance being perfect, as He does about the intent being right. Remembering Jesus’ last meal with His disciples as a part of our worship gathering is more important to our Creator than whether or not there was an absence of clanging metal trays or a residue of bread crumbs left behind.
As I securely held the communion cup in my hand after the bread-boggle, I told the congregation it was okay: “God still loves me!” The words were greeted with smiles. They had all been there in some way at some time.
Words from WW Blog 