Being Present

Once a month, St. Mark’s holds a worship service at a local memory-care assisted living center. We bring communion and sing hymns, say the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect for Purity. Each month, I invite people from St. Mark’s to join us: usually there are four or five people from St. Mark’s there. When people consider coming for the first time, the question they ask me is usually, “Do you need me, or do you have enough people?” My answer is, “We have enough people, and we need you.”

Running the worship doesn’t really take that many people. I do a nursing home worship by myself every month near my home in Mansfield, so I know it’s certainly possible to do a worship service with just one or two people. But our worship service at Bridges isn’t simply about saying a few prayers and handing out the Bread and Wine. It’s a ministry of presence. It’s a ministry of being the Body of Christ, of all parts needing one another.

Our presence sitting among the residents for weekday worship reminds us that the people that gather at St. Mark’s on Sunday morning aren’t the entire Church: our prayers and our worship connect us to those who cannot be with us as well, whether they are prevented from attending by illness or work or even a soccer game. Our prayers are lifted up for the whole world, those who are able to join us on Sunday morning, and those who can’t. In prayer, we are joined together despite time and distance; we are even joined to those who will never worship with us on Sunday, but who are in desperate need of God’s love.

Our presence sitting alongside the residents reminds them that they are not alone. They are still members of the Body of Christ, not merely people for whom things are done, but people who do things -- people who pray, who worship, who lift up those in need and share God’s love. Even now that they are no longer able to volunteer to run the Easter potluck or the stewardship campaign, they remain equal members of the Church, because no member of the Body can say to another, “I don’t need you.” We sit alongside one another, because before God all are equally welcome and loved. We receive communion together, because we are all equally in need of God’s grace and salvation.

In this busy and hectic world, where we all have to-do lists that stretch to the horizon, efficiency points us toward sending only as many people as might be required to lead the worship -- a priest or a lay eucharistic minister, perhaps. But while worship would be accomplished efficiently, our ministry would be diminished. Being present just for the sake of being present makes a difference -- for both us and our brothers and sisters in the assisted living center. Praying alongside one another reminds us all that we are One Body because we share the One Bread.

What do we accomplish? I don’t know that we accomplish a thing: indeed, some of the residents will probably not remember our visit past the evening meal. But we are present to one another, and we remember that Christ is present to us.

“For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This Cup is the new covenant is my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.’ (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)

Thanks be to God.

~ Suzanne