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    Saturday, April 26, 2025

    Psalm 145: 8-9

    8 The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness.
    9 The Lord is loving to everyone and his compassion is over all his works.

     

    A Christian minister once described his first Easter in a concentration camp. He and the small group of other Christians imprisoned there had been stripped of every possession, separated from their wives, and many of their children were living as orphans, now motherless and fatherless. Some of their children were already murdered. They wished on this Easter to celebrate communion, but they had no juice or wine, no water even, nor a cup in which to place it. Not a single crust of bread. Further, if they stood and prayed together in an obvious gathering, the guards might come and beat or kill some of them.

    The Jews in the barracks agreed to stand guard and to talk in a low, steady murmur so that all would seem normal.

    The minister advised his small group to imagine the cup, the loaf, the wine. A communion of empty hands. He turned to the first man and held out his hands, then spoke the words: “The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, poured out for you and for all the sin of the world.” The group finished this service of imagination, then gave thanks to God, stood, and by turn embraced one with another.

    Later, a Jew who had helped guard the ceremony came to the minister and told him, “You people have something special which I would like to have.” Another, the father of a dead girl, said, “I believe that today I have discovered what faith is. Now, I am on the road.”

    I have held this minister’s image in my heart for decades now and have, on rare occasion, celebrated the communion of empty hands when I came to a pastoral visit unprepared, without the proper elements. I have found such communions of imagination to be, if anything, more real than other Lord’s suppers, for I know this was the bread and wine, body and blood which were offered from the cross by a man stripped of everything.

    This was how God showed love for a broken world.

     

    Hymn of the day: I’ve Got a River of Life. Online at Rossford UMC - Media.

     

    Rev. Lawrence Keeler