every day dishes
Sunday morning, the plate comes down the row, hand passing to hand—young, rough, wrinkled, busy, tired, dark. All of our hands look so diverse, each etched with their own unique lines. Everybody has different fingerprints. I watch as the bread travels toward us, the delivery of the plates facilitated by volunteers standing in the aisles. Today, a happy accident: three out of the five volunteers wear shirts the color of orange sherbet.
Adam cannot wait for the plate to reach him. He sits on the edge of his chair; he swivels his head. I hold my fingers low, lifting just one, reminding him, “Just one piece, okay?”
The plates look more like chargers–bright, shiny gold, carefully lined with a bit of paper. Watching them pass, I think maybe they should just be every day plates, the kind we eat from and then load into the dishwasher. Jesus is not a special occasion meal, and He’s not a once-a-week treat. He means to be consumed continually, to feed His people daily. Jesus is our manna, our daily bread that’s always exactly enough. Maybe it conveys the wrong thing to make this all seem so formal.
A friend of mine makes the bread we use for communion. I lift a square out of the plate now and put it on my tongue. It flakes, buttery in my mouth. My friend lovingly cuts the careful squares in advance of the service. They sit, piled and golden, on the plates we pass. We have practical reasons for the squares, of course. They protect against too much handling; they make it easier to divide and distribute easily. I’m grateful to my friend. But when I put the bread in my mouth now, I remember that I broke Him with my own hands. The squares look so neat I could forget the ragged way Jesus allowed himself to be torn; I could forget that even when I wonder how He could be enough to feed us all, He feeds us full with more left over. Jesus is lunch for the multitudes. He is the broken and given one who seeks now to multiply me. Could I be passed hand to rare and empty hand; could I be shared diversely?
I look at Adam, who eagerly desires to feast on the remembrance of Christ, and I feel silly cautioning restraint. It hardly looks like any sustenance, this little mountain of unleavened flour, but I can feel him hungering beside me. I give him a careful glance and then pass the plate, wondering if I trust the fingers of Jesus to make enough of my sacrifices. Don’t I also caution the world not to take too much of me? But Jesus is the bread of life; and I am really more like one of a countless number plates, carried to the hungry by the Spirit’s hands. I understand that this is my whole purpose—to carry Jesus, to give Him away. It’s not really me they consume at all. I’m the serving jar whose oil and flour will outlast the famine.
But I’m no gilded charger, that much I can also see. The plate leaves my ropy hands, passes from my thick, knobby fingers to Adam’s long, slender ones. The pads on a few of his fingers look purple with needled, diabetic bruises. No, my son and I are the everyday dishes, the kind with chips along the edges or stains from bleeding beets. When we carry Jesus to hungry people, it’ll be the beautiful, broken wealth of Him that makes them sit forward in their seats. And far from cautioning restraint, the passing Spirit will whisper, “Go ahead and feast.“
