Pastor’s Note: Rev. Elsa Cook shared with me an article by Rev. Mary Luti, a frequent writer for the Still Speaking Devotionals.whose contributions I appreciate. This piece is very different as it’s not just insightful, spiritual, inspirational. It’s more “academic” – she een uses all the Greek names for the parts of a full, traditional communion liturgy! Rev. Luti is writing about how we do communion, the words we use.
Luti is advocating for a fuller communion liturgy than is often the case in our UCC churches. It turns out that – at least in the UCC churches of congregational heritage in the Northeast – my tendency to abbreviate the communion liturgy is commonplace. She indicates as many as ⅔ use “the short form.”.
Left on my own, I include an opening Invitation (with instructions), the words of institution and a prayer of thanksgiving afterwards. Under Rev. Steiner’s influence, I now always include a prayer of consecration over the bread and the cup too.
Rev. Luti is advocating for an even fuller liturgy, in particular insistiong on the “anaphora” or Great Thanksgiving wherein we remember the saving acts of God – raising up God’s acts for Justice’s sake. I’ll let her explain…
But her suggestion is important, especially as a Fear Not. It’s an example of how what we do as church – even liturgically – matters in the world, because it influences how we see the world and our role in it.
“…At the Last Supper, Jesus gave thanks, and chances are good that the thanks he and his friends offered was a recitation of “the mighty deeds of God,” in good Jewish fashion. “You brought us out of Egypt, you led us through the wilderness, etc.”
If we believe that Communion carries, or ought to carry, the deep resonances of a meal with Jesus, then the liturgy of Communion ought to include a great thanksgiving. But not simply or solely because he did it, since we’re not obliged to replicate to a T everything he did that night. (As I have written elsewhere, not every Eucharist must refer to the Last Supper.)
No, we ought to give thanks – i. e. restore the anaphora to the eucharistic liturgy – because what Jesus did in giving thanks that night was JUST. Eucharistic thanksgiving is an ethical act. Not to give thanks at the Table weakens the ethical wallop of the sacrament.
Why?
Communion is not a holy private act set apart from the world. It’s an enactment of God’s new reality in the world. Each element of the liturgy is public witness. For example:
Gathering, or assembling at the Table, witnesses to the communion / unity that God intends for creation and is a counter to the scattering and dividing the powers of this world thrive on.
Remembering is the way the church makes visible what the Regime erases, the real presence of the Victim, and with him every victim of the world’s powers with whom he is absolutely identified (Matt 25). We refuse to forget.
Blessing bread and grape witnesses to the holiness of the earth’s gifts and the dignity of the labor that elaborates them for human use.
Feeding each other offers a witness to God’s intention that everyone should eat, and a counter-witness to the Empire’s lie that for some to have more than they need, others must has less–or nothing at all.
The anaphora, the prayer of thanks and praise that traditionally precedes the words of institution and is inclusive of them, is also a witness: it makes an emphatic claim about the true source of life and all good, and therefore also about human solidarity and mutual dependence.
As such, the prayer of great thanksgiving is a rotund rebuke of the atomizing lie the Regime thrives on – that you don’t owe anyone anything, you are your own source, self-made, self-contained, self-reliant.
This authoritarian credo is individualistic, distancing, divisive, and designed to gin up anxiety and hostility towards any neighbor who, for the sake of the common good, might lay claim to what you alone earned and what belongs therefore only to you to dispose of as you choose.
This false narrative about the absolute autonomous character of human beings shapes a personal and public ethos in which any acknowledgment of dependence or indebtedness is a character flaw, even a failure of citizenship. Like empathy, being thankful is regarded as a weakness and an embarrassment in public discourse and social life.
Unless, of course, the Regime wants something, which, being insatiable, it always does. Then gratitude becomes useful as a transactional instrument, a pressure tactic, and a threat, as when Trump and Vance bludgeoned Zelensky in the Oval Office because he wasn’t sufficiently grateful for American lip service to the defense of Ukraine.
In authoritarian regimes, the only permissible expression of gratitude is gushing thanks and praise for the unmatched excellence and beaming benevolence of the Dear Leader, the source of all good. (Think fawning cabinet meetings.)
The purpose and effect of this kind of gratitude is to cement unequal relationships. The debtor is always in debt. It’s enslavement, a control mechanism, the price you pay for breathing. The eucharistic anaphora offers a counter-credo, enacting a different world in which human beings give thanks together.
Eucharistic gratitude opens a space for relationships of mutual grace and generosity where one day I may be in your debt, another day you may be in mine, we’re all always in God’s, God exacts nothing in return for divine benevolence, and there’s never a score to settle between us.
Communion’s thanksgiving materializes this new world at our Tables by naming the source of all good and proclaiming the holy character of our indebtedness to God’s love and interdependence with one another; and it does so communally, publicly, persistently, routinely, perseveringly — and defiantly.
And that’s why I think the anaphora is critical and indispensable to the Communion liturgy, maybe its most important feature….
…Why is (the great thanksgiving) just?
Because thanksgiving tells the truth: We’re not self-made, not self-sufficient, not independent of others. We receive and rely on benefits we didn’t generate or earn. When we give thanks, we recognize our finitude, our dependency, our creaturehood, our indebtedness.
Thus, thanksgiving is also an exercise in vulnerability. The thankful Body of Christ at the Table is a Body pierced with holy trembling in the face of life’s fragile beauty. To be grateful is to be in awe of our breath and driven to our knees before the One who grants it. Only creatures do this. Masters of the Universe do not. You never find a tyrant on his knees.
When the Empire claims to be the source of all good (“I alone can fix it”), the eucharistic anaphora rebukes it with a robust statement creed as ancient as the Sh’ma, “There is one God only, from whom all blessings flow. Let us count the ways…”
When the Regime exalts mastery and self-sufficiency, the Great Thanksgiving testifies to and enacts human creaturehood, with its life-giving patterns of dependence and interdependence.
When the powers tell a story of invincibility, of making everything great again, Eucharistic thanksgiving remembers and tells the story of life hanging by a thread, perpetually in doubt except for the unmerited grace and mighty saving deeds of a loving God, with whom we are in covenant.
As we remember and give thanks at the Table with Jesus, we become a Body that enacts this “real” reality — gracious, interdependent, creaturely, and irreducibly social. And so it is truly right and just to give God thanks and praise.
Now, this eucharistic anaphora is not simply a laundry list of all the things we’re generally grateful to God for. As I said, it’s a catalog of “God’s mighty deeds,” a particular and identity-conferring story that the whole community (i. e., the entire communion of saints) recites to God in the direct address of prayer. The traditional anaphora pages through the chapters of faith’s revolutionary story…
…This Great Thanksgiving is corporate, it rises from communal memory, and it is part and parcel of the church’s stubborn refusal to forget in the face of the erasure tactics of the Regime.
By remembering God’s mighty deeds so that we can thank and praise God’s glory rightly, we raise something to visibility that the Regime wants disappeared: namely, all the times and ways that God has worked and still works to liberate and love the people, especially the poor, oppressed, and slaughtered, in the midst of a world that seeks glory in vastly different kinds of deeds: brutal subjugation of the other, acquisition of obscene wealth, relentless waging of war, raw exercise of power, and an offhand, almost whimsical exercise of cruelty.
In giving thanks to God, we serve notice to the Regime that we will not enable it with any of the deadly forms of misplaced gratitude it requires in order to rampage on. We declare that the God who did great things long ago can and will do them again – and is doing them even now — casting the mighty from their thrones, raising the lowly, defending the vulnerable, dignifying the poor. The eucharistic anaphora is a public exercise of defiant trust in God’s present compassionate sovereignty and defiant confidence in God’s inbreaking future.
Eucharistic thanksgiving is also a counter-liturgy to modern western culture’s dissatisfaction machine: My life isn’t complete until I have… you name it.
This sense that turns things we want into things we need into things we deserve into things I must protect–against you — generates distrust, broken relationships, ruthless competition, war, hunger, poverty, gross economic inequality, and the degradation of the natural world. A staggering amount of injustice arises from this place of perpetual dissatisfaction. In contrast, Communion’s prayer of thanksgiving affirms a fundamental satisfaction that there is enough, and enough for all.
Even as we affirm this truth, however, we know that millions u[on millions of our neighbors remain in real want, and so our enacting of our fundamental satisfaction with God becomes also a confession. In turn, our sincere and truthful confession becomes a decision for our neighbors. Thanksgiving is thus the engine of community. It creates social solidarity. And it frees the imagination to consider new political, economic, and social possibilities on every scale, intimate to global.
In the current political situation, the authoritarians have been especially successful at manufacturing and manipulating a particular form of dissatisfaction — grievance. Take, for example, the myth of our nation’s glory days now usurped by foreign invaders and domestic enemies of the people: “What’s ours is being taken from us–privilege, dominance, whiteness, jobs manhood, womanhood, religion, country. It’s unjust and evil. It’s our duty to hate it, mobilize, arm ourselves, wrest back from ‘them’ what belongs exclusively to us.”
Eucharistic thanksgiving is a radical rejoinder to grievance, real or imagined; but it doesn’t waste time arguing on grievance’s affronted terms about whether any particular complaint is justified. It simply gives thanks; it simply embodies and enacts a gracious reality; and thus it emphatically denies the very premise of grievance itself. The public witness of Eucharistic thanksgiving resets the old transactional equation in new terms of gracious, awestruck satisfaction.
Thanks, Rev. Luti for the lesson in the justice witness of the Communion liturgy.
Since this coming Sunday is the third one of the month, we will offer Intimate Communion immediately after the 11 o’clock service. I think I’ll ask us to create our own “great thanksgiving,” how God has acted in saving ways in our lives.
In fatih and courage,
Michael
