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Space for Grace

As part of the 2021 online conference of the Methodist Church in Ireland I was asked to offer a reflective response to this morning's business which included a piece by Dr Paul Chilcote on grace, something that we should be modelling for the wider world, but sadly, frequently don't.

One of the things that came to mind was that the Methodist understanding of communion as an "open table" is a perfect metaphor of grace, and as I shared with my congregation at communion last Sunday, theologian and psychologist Richard Beck suggests that in the early church:
"The Lord's Supper becomes a profoundly subversive political event in the lives of the participants. The sacrament brings real people—divided in the larger world—into a sweaty, intimate, flesh-and-blood embrace where ‘there shall be no difference between them and the rest.’"
Richard Beck
quoted by Rachel Held Evans: "Searching for Sunday" p151

As someone who isn't a particularly huggy person, I am not terribly sad that the embrace of communion is not quite so "sweaty, intimate" and "flesh-and-blood" as it might be. The individual "shot" glasses used and formal nature of most of our communion services ameliorates any sense of this at the best of times... the fact that I shared this quote in a communion service extremely mitigated by covid restrictions, including the use of individual sealed grape juice and bread packs, makes it almost laughable... but the idea of gracious embrace is an important one, and should shape our communion not only with one another but also with the wider world.

In conclusion I shared, the following haiku that was originally written in the course of the 2020 4 Corners Festival, but seemed equally appropriate here

Build a space for grace -
A place for new perspectives
Facing the future

asking the question "Who do we need to make gracious space for?"

Selah
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