Do This In Remembrance of Me

As we approach the week before Easter, called Holy Week, things get out of control in the church.  We have some sort of event happening every day from this Saturday's early egg hunt right through Easter Sunday eight days later.
Part of the preparation includes planning for the services we will have.  Some services have communion, others do not.  As the person in charge of communion supplies, I have been privy to some situations people could only imagine. It's why I write this blog!
Our church normally serves the little white wafers on Sunday. We experimented with bread for a while, but the bread has to be unleavened bread and so that means you can't just buy a loaf of Sunbeam bread from the grocery. You can buy Pita bread but it doesn't break nicely.  We had a volunteer make it for us. Well she didn't want to make the bread every week so she began to bake 4 loaves at a time. The first part of the month was great, but by the end of the month we were serving stale bread. The final straw was when we found mold. Wafers tasted great after that incident.

You should know that the wafers aren't exempt from staleness either. They will take on a "flexible" texture after some time. As a kid I thought this was the normal texture, but fresh wafers are crisp like a cracker.
Recently I was looking at our inventory and discovered a large supply of wafers. More than six months. Concerned for freshness, I asked about them.  I was told there were some from a store that had gone out of business. What? A store that sells the little communion wafers went out of business? Well lucky day for us. Or was it? Upon inspection of the wafers, they were two years old. Is that bad? We tasted them.
I think it's ok to eat them if they aren't blessed by a priest. Without the blessing it is just wine from the grocery store and little styrofoam wafers from a store that sells them. But after the priest says the blessing, they somehow become Holy. I am not making fun of that, it's true. Don't ask me how or why I believe that. "Do this in remembrance of me." Like Nike says, just do it. We threw out the stale wafers.
Wafers come in all sizes too. We have some that are so big they have perforations so they can be broken easily into 24 pieces. Nobody knows how we got them, but we decided to keep them and use them anyway.  We served those at our early service at 8am. Normally a crowd of 24 or less. Mostly older folks. They didn't like the broken wafers. Why? Because they had sharp edges. I can't make this stuff up. They preferred the round individual serving size wafers.
As a kid I used to play church with my grandfather. We ate Necco wafers for communion. I have often thought how great it would be to have those at church. But take out the pink ones that taste like Pepto Bismol and the black ones that are licorice. May as well remove the white ones too because they are a bit spicy.
I heard recently that churches that don't use real bread get made fun of by the ones that do. What do they call our little communion wafers that we serve? Jeezits. I suppose I should be offended, but my first thought was it's a little bit funny and kind of clever.  After all, we are a church that uses a small plate of wafers that has a tiny cup with the wine attached.  Very sanitary.  The person takes their own wafer and dips it in the wine.  I have heard this referred to as chips and dip. I am pretty sure this departs from the "do this in remembrance of me" command.
Almost to Easter, we re-tell the story of the crucifixion this week.  This is the time of year where we hear the words of Jesus say "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do".  I say ditto.