I could write a whole book about this (Jan7-13)

Happy Saturday to you!

“If we leave right now, we can make it,” Will said as the four of us sat still-eating at the breakfast table. I looked at each of the boys in turn: Eric, halfway through his muffin, shook his head. Will’s empty cereal bowl was already in hand, so Daniel and I met eyes and agreed. We stood up together, and took our breakfast dishes to the sink.

We threw on shoes and coats, Will looking like a Slavic officer with tall boots, a green wool trench coat buttoned tight and his long hair tied up under a black cap. On our way out, we ducked into the cellar to get his mom a “bag of Lays potato chips and nothing else” transforming Will’s intimidating demeanor to a goofy one as he carried a blisteringly yellow bag of capitalistic goodness by hand.

I think of Will and Eric as Lutherans, and they were baptized as such (we spent more Easters with them in Germany than at home in Poland), but the red-brick church “only built in the 1700s, an eyesore among the steeples of Wiesbaden,” we were walking to is Anglican, the cathedral of St. Augustine. Eric attends mass when he is home in Mainz, Will is part of a Nigerian Catholic community in Nuremberg, Daniel attends a Baptist church plant in Yokohama, and I lean Pentecostal and/or Charismatic when I go to churches across the U.S.

But on the last Sunday of 2023, as we walked in 7 minutes late to the service, we sang to our God, interceded for the saints, heard the Gospel proclaimed, and as baptized Christians, ate crackers and old grape juice together with expats and Germans who technically are accountable to King Charles for their worship, but claim allegiance to King Jesus over everything.

I was 6, maybe 7 when I asked Dad to baptize me in a hot tub in a hotel in Idaho as we were itinerating to go overseas. We had been traveling across the U.S. for a few months already in our preparation to be missionaries. I knew that my next expression of faith needed to be baptism - I had prayed “the sinner’s prayer” to get my get-out-of-hell-free card a couple years prior, but since we were going to be super-Christians and leave the country to tell Poles about who Jesus really was, I figured I shouldn’t go as a fraud. But with all of the travel, there was no way for me to be baptized publicly (and I was obnoxiously shy at that age) so as we warmed up in the hot tub between cannon-balls into the icy pool, I asked Dad,

“How many people have to witness your baptism for it to be real?”

My parents assured me that, “where two or three are gathered in my name, [Christ] will be with them.” And since they were both licensed and ordained ministers, we could do it right there, right then. So Dad led me through a profession of my faith, showed me how to hold my nose and cross my hands so that as he dunked me “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” I wouldn’t get chemicals all up in my system. I was excited to be baptized! But even as I broke through the water, I felt like a fraud. I didn’t know Jesus any better thanks of the profession or the dunking — and I was supposed to tell strangers in a foreign language about him?

Religion class is a mandatory part of children’s education in Poland. Crucifixes hung over every door in every room of every building in the country when I was growing up, and so I learned catechism with my classmates in 2nd grade as they prepared to take their First Communion in the Spring. In the fall semester, religion class was functionally Sunday-school and so the priest and I got along swimmingly because I already knew all the Bible stories my classmates were learning for the first time even though I was a Pentecostal heretic who spoke poor Polish. By the time he started teaching them the proper doctrine that would make them accountable to eat the bread and drink the wine in January, my Polish was near-fluent, and I was a bit more of a problem because I would ask questions like why the age of accountability was 8, or how did the bread become body and the wine become blood in a church but not in the supermarket - like, if a priest also worked as a baker was the bakery liable of producing Jesus?

At the end of that school year I went to mass and sat in the back of a tall cathedral (an original building, Krakow wasn’t bombed by the Nazis) as all of my classmates, for their first time, received Christ’s body, broken for them, and his blood, poured out for them. That next Sunday when I attended church as a Polish Pentecostal, I resented that their age of accountability wasn’t until 16. My friends (the pastor’s daughter and the deacon’s son) weren’t allowed to be baptized until 16, let alone take communion.

As a baptized Christian, the first time I was served communion at our home church, I tried to take a piece of bread. It was quickly snatched away by the server because, obviously, I was a child and couldn’t have been meaningfully baptized. That didn’t help the feeling of fraudulence. Fortunately my parents followed my logic, because Mom ripped an extra large piece of bread and snuck me some of it when the Pentecostals weren’t looking. And so for the 8 years that I was too young to take communion, my parents would ask and see if I wanted to participate or not and sneak me body (blood was too tricky to sneak, and usually wine instead of grape juice).

Somehow the bread and wine was only holy for the 15 minutes during service, because after church it was left at the front of the stage for anyone to come and eat. So my brother and I, the pastor’s daughter, and the deacon’s son would gobble up what had been proclaimed Christ’s body. It only now occurs to me that this was still communion - and in a hilarious way, probably a truer expression of it than the severe presentation with all the elder saints.

I can’t confirm this, but I think liturgical churches adopted crackers instead of bread during the pandemic for the dramatic effect: held overhead, the priest breaks the contemplative silence of Christ’s body by loudly snapping the cracker in half. In a cathedral designed for whispers at the altar to be audible in the balcony, the crack lingers in the room as the priest holds each half of the wafer aloft for all to remember, so even 8-year-olds in the back of the room can see Him over the adults.

Sometimes when I stand to get in line to take the elements, I still feel fraudulent. I’m not Anglican. I’m not Lutheran. I’m not Catholic. Sometimes, I’m not even sure I’m Pentecostal or Charismatic. My baptism was only nominally public.

But Christ’s body wasn’t broken for just the Baptists or the Orthodox or the Wesleyans. His blood wasn’t poured out only for those who call on his name according to doctrinally correct mental assent with his claims or for people old enough to assent or for people who assented publicly enough… he died once, he died for all, and whenever his people gather in his name we are supposed to eat and drink to remember him.

Which is why I prefer liturgical communion to Pentecostal communion. Instead of sitting alone in your seat, you go to the front for all to see, “this is Christ’s body.” Your friends. Your family. Your neighbors. We all bear his mark and image. He parades before you across the altar, young and old, rich and poor, man and woman, all sinners now saints redeemed by the same cross of love that still, to my knowledge, hangs over every door in every room of every Polish building.

The word “denomination” means “division” of the saints, and while I prefer to pray to God directly instead of appealing to his witnesses who have gone before and while I think I’m a whole person included in God’s call to teach, preach, and bring the kingdom even though I’m anatomically endowed with boobs and while it really doesn’t matter to me if the styrofoam crackers and old grape juice really are or only symbolically are the body and blood of Christ broken and poured out for me, his people aren’t so different after all.

We all have come to his table feeling like frauds — maybe even being frauds — but He receives, even welcomes us anyways. May we share the same kindness and grace to each other as we join him in rememberance.

—Beth