I got one of those Q&A email quizzes last week from a friend - you know, the ones that want to know your favorite CD, what's under your bed, vanilla or chocolate, what color underwear you're wearing (gosh, was that embarrassing :)... One of the questions was what's your favorite day of the week, and tho' I would have expected it to be Saturday or Friday, for obvious reasons, to my surprise, I found in thinking about it that I actually look forward to Sunday the most. Nathan's worship that always surprises me and lifts me up, the community of our church - the confession & response together as a body, Jason's teaching that never takes for granted that we're all in the same place of understanding, the acknowledgement of each one's place in the body, from the children to the artists :).
This morning it was the personal nature of communion, which we take every Sunday - the challenge of it not becoming a commonplace ritual placed on me as an act of consciousness & grace, rather than a convenience of scarcity & timing. Several communion servers stand at the front and we approach them row by row to receive the bread and wine/grape juice. This morning I received the bread from our pastor, Jason, who miraculously always seems to know everyone's name, including mine. This morning he looked at me, as I'm sure he did with each participant, and said, "Jennifer, you are justified by the finished work of Christ."
I don't know why it was so profoundly moving & suddenly real to me this morning, since it is a phrase I have grown up with in church. I think maybe because it was spoken to me personally, physically, specifically, an aspect that seems lacking in my faith & that I continue to wrestle with; maybe because I have been on several levels testing my freedom in Christ, and have recently found myself looking over the edge of temptation's precipice - to be affirmed that my acceptance and standing is not based on my choice in those times draws me further from the edge, not closer to it, and brings profound comfort, maybe what I've been looking for in the first place. I think my response was also grounded in Nathan's song he offered as we came forward:
The gospel is all I have.
The gospel is all I have.
No well-kept presentable life to display.
The gospel is all I have.
The gospel is all I have.
The gospel is all I have.
No courage. No virtuous bold use of faith.
The gospel is all I have.
Well, the Lord God Almighty leapt down from the sky,
and he made himself nothing and served till he died,
so that I, just a beggar, at the Judgement might cry,
"The gospel is all I have!"
The gospel is all I have.
The gospel is all I have.
No merit to offer. No excuses to make.
The gospel is all I have.
The gospel is all I have.
The gospel is all I have.
No clever persuasive words I could say.
No debt I could work off. No bribe I could pay.
No goodness. No promise of love that won't fade.
The gospel is all I have.
The gospel is all I have.
In the midst of several weeks of desperately wanting something beyond what I have right now, today I understand, at least for this moment, that Jesus is the satisfaction of all that I am longing for - my justifier, my defender, the knower of my heart, the lover of my soul.
