Wasted Communion

Today we celebrated Easter. The message was powerful and music was really good.

We celebrated communion today. For the past four years I have set-up, or at least overseen the set-up, of almost every communion celebration. I have put out hundreds of trays of crackers and made tens of thousands of little cups of grape juice. It is a tedious process to set-up, but it is the clean-up that gets me.

Every time we celebrate communion, we set out much more than we think we will need. A growing church like ours makes it hard to predict exactly how many people will be there on Sunday. So if I guess we will have 400 people at the final service, we set out enough for over 500 just in case. It takes too much time to whip up another 100 cups in the moment, so you have to prepared.

So after the service, when we are cleaning up, I often find myself standing over a huge trash can pulling each of those little cups out of the communion trays one at a time and dumping the extra crackers into the garbage. I know it seems kinda of sacrilegious, but that is what happens to the leftovers. We can’t save them for the next time.

My point is this, when I am throwing those cups away, I can’t help but think who is out in the world that should have drank that cup and ate that cracker that I am tossing away. Who is missing out on communion because I have not shared the gospel with them? Who should be standing next to me remembering Jesus, but I have been too busy to introduce Jesus to them? Why do I continue to let communion go to waste?