Some things are worth doing for the heck of it. They may be fun, entertaining, mind numbing, whatever. Other things we do are meaningless, but we do them religiously. You can fill in the blank here for your mind-wasters. One of mine is Solitaire. I swear, sometimes I think I paid $500 for an electronic automated dealer. (Get it…computer purchase… solitaire. hmmm)

Anyhow, the thing I wanted to bring up was, the Church has a few things done routinely for various reasons. We all know why we do Pledge Sunday (gotta pay that Uth Pastor) and we know why we light candles in the services.

But why do we do communion?

Two big reasons.
First, we celebrate communion, or what our Catholic friends call Eucharist, because Jesus told us to. Seems like a good enough reason. In fact, its the only real reason why we do it. He did it with his disciples, then told them to keep doing it.
Second, we do it because the disciples did it. Seems like a no-brainer right considering Jesus asked them to. But we are here, 2000 years later carrying on that tradition set my the Master himself, then respectfully carried forward by the Church ever since. It’s a beautiful thing to partake in communion, we are connecting ourselves with the spiritual mothers and fathers who came before us.

But have you figured out the why behind the why? It’s enough to say, The reason why we take communion is because Jesus said to and teh church has always… But, there’s a big follow-up question. Why did Jesus ask us to.

There’s volumes written on the Lord’s Supper, and anyone wanting to do research into this sacrament would find a literal library worth of commentary to read. But I want to get real non-technical in my response to that question.

Why did Jesus tell us to do this in remembrance of him? Because he knew we could forget. Yes, we’ve got the story, we’ve got the symbolism, we’ve got the tradition. But deep down in you and I, we have this inherited ability to forget. Jesus is saying very simply, Do this and keep doing it and when you do it you will be able to keep remembering that I did it.

We’ll talk more about what communion is as the days go by, but for now, I want to thank God for His simple fatherly advice. Do this, don’t forget.