Can we share the Eucharist before the Apostolic Church is Restored?
Before we share a “valid” Lord’s Supper must we first evolve, through the stretching of the Spirit of Jesus into the same kind of community that had actually received the first Eucharist by Jesus in the Gospels? I write at some length about it in the Blueprint. Among other things, the Eucharist was created to be an expression of GOD’s idea of “koinonia” or “brotherhood” or “fellowship” or “church” (“ekklesia”). And His version of “fellowship” is much, much deeper than the typical Protestant version of “accepting Christ” OR of the catholic versions that offer the Eucharist to people who are not personally committed disciples of Jesus. His fellowship/ brotherhood/ church involved the creation of intimate and permanent family life, not the informal and loose-knit version of virtually all of Christendom’s current churches.
The Eucharist does require accepting what Jesus and Paul (and the early churches) taught about the Eucharistic action: that He truly “yokes” himself to the bread and wine, in order to yoke Himself to us, not only in spirit and soul (our invisible parts), but yoked to our body as well. “Christ IN you, the hope o glory!” “In you” means in ALL of you – ALL your “parts,” body, soul, and spirit!
But it also requires that we who share that Eucharistic Presence be in what HE created as “fellowship” with one another, the form of committed union that Paul describes as a “body.” That includes the commitment to share our possessions and talents with one another, in the way that the body’s liver is committed to sharing its vital “juices” with the kidney (and visa versa). Having “all things in common” in the several ways and degrees of doing that is part of the Scriptural literal definition and idea of “koinonia.” The Eucharistic celebration also includes being under the disciplines described for all the members of the body which Jesus and His apostles commanded and fulfilled. The Eucharist was created to be the action of a CHURCH, not only some private thing just between you and your God.
I am very certain about what I just wrote above. What confuses me, however, is that hardly any of us currently have access to that same doctrine, discipline, anointing and body-life that Jesus and His Spirit brought into being. Does that mean that we must wait until God restores His Church before any Eucharist is possible? I personally can live with some committed disciples who all seriously intend to be drawn together into that union, intimacy and fulness of teaching, discipline and anointing – having them share a sort of “prophetic” Eucharist together. But I have no revelation from God that makes me able to offer it with any certainty (that is why is said “prophetic,” referring to a future fulfillment of what must be a partial present reality.) After all, that first Eucharist was offered to disciples who had not yet entered into the suffering of Christ and the anointing of the Holy Spirit: so that Eucharist was rather “prophetic” or them as well, no?
Make sense?
