Into Your Hands...

Each Sunday -- in fact, each time we worship -- we celebrate the Lord's Supper.  Sometimes, as on Ash Wednesday, we come forward to take communion; more often, we stay in our seats as the deacons pass trays with pieces of bread and small cups.

If you're like me, you focus on the eating and drinking during Communion.  After all, Jesus directed his disciples in the Upper Room to "Take, eat" and "Drink of this, all of you."

But before the bread and the cup reach our lips, it first passes through our hands.  An Episcopal priest recently spent a sabbatical focused on the use of our hands in the holy sacrament of communion.  She traveled to various Episcopal parishes and took photographs of people receiving the bread into their hands -- in Episcopal practice, congregants come forward, kneel, and the communion wafer is placed into their hands.  After worship, she asked the people she photographed, "What is the most important thing you do with your hands?"

We Christians, who have been taught that we are 'the hands and feet of Christ,' each week take bread and cup representing Christ's body and blood into those same hands.  This makes me wonder: How do I use my hands the rest of the time?

If the sacrament usually reminds us, by eating, to remember whence comes the food that sustains us, it can also remind us, by taking it into our hands, to remember that we are entrusted by God to handle holy things and, by extension, to do holy things in Christ's name.