A Prayer of Thanksgiving: Seeking the Presence of God

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

—Isaiah 55:6-7

The first time I walked into the church's prayer chapel, my heart sank. The dank, dimly lit room had become essentially a catchall. The walls were lined with boxes and dusty bookshelves overstuffed with old certificates, pictures, and other mementos (the congregation was gearing up for its 150th anniversary celebration). There were baskets of prayer request slips from services held years before. I don't even want to know how old the tissue box was! This space, once consecrated to God, was no longer used on a regular basis for the originally intended purpose. Instead it had become overrun with stuff, a lot of it junk.

There I was, the new pastor of a church that had a strong, proud heritage but more recently had experienced several decades of slow decline while nobly carrying on, a congregation like so many others these days. I was trying to envision through hope-filled eyes the potential for renewal and growth in that setting, but as I stepped into the prayer chapel that day almost all I could see was a bunch of clutter in a space that was supposed to be devoted to prayer.

One way to gauge the vitality of a church is to look at the place of prayer in that church's life. The same is true on a personal level; the role of prayer in one's life probably gives a good indication of the depth, breadth, and power of that person's faith. God calls us to be a people of prayer, a people attentive to God's presence.

So easily, though, the stuff of our lives can spread and take over, as it did in that prayer chapel. We will likely find such a place in most churches, as well as most human hearts and lives—spaces or areas that were at one point dedicated to God and God's presence, but have since begun serving other purposes or no purpose at all. Without sufficient formation and care, without the light and order that we need, without remaining open to the fresh air of God's grace stirring among and within us, parts of our lives can become cluttered and musty, stifling rather than encouraging spiritual vitality.

Thankfully, God gives us the sacraments, sacred gifts endowed with divine power to clean up our lives. By these outward signs of an inward grace and God's goodwill toward us, the Holy Spirit works invisibly in us, and quickens, strengthens, and confirms our faith in Christ. God authorizes and graciously imparts the sacraments to us for our sanctification. In his provocative treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther identifies three essential elements of a sacrament: a divine promise, Christ's institution, and a physical sign. As we in the church today face our own captivity to the forces of shallow banalities, cultural accommodation, and debilitating apathy, what better place to turn than the sacraments? Sacraments are those signs whose substance conveys to us the promised presence of Jesus Christ to the glory of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. Baptism and the Eucharist are grounded in the activity of the triune God. As the medieval theologian Hugh of St. Victor explains, in the sacraments God sets before the external senses these physical or material elements that represent by likeness, signify by institution, and contain by sanctification some invisible and spiritual grace. Through the waters of baptism God cleanses us, and through the Eucharist God feeds us and quenches our thirsty souls.

God with Us?

Before saying any more about what a sacrament is, though, and before focusing on the nature and purpose of the Lord's Supper in particular, we should return to the metaphor above about the cluttered space in our churches and lives that had once been devoted to God. The metaphor points to a deeper dilemma for us all: How can finite, messy, imperfect human beings encounter the infinite, perfectly holy God? What are human beings that God would want to be with us? For that to happen, surely God must make a way. The fundamental claim of the Christian faith is that God has made a way, a way through the one who called himself "the way, and the truth, and the life," Jesus Christ (John 14:6). Long before we ever thought to seek God, God had it in mind to come to us—and has done just that in Christ.

The saving benefits of Christ's coming into the world reach us as we believe and trust in him. He gives himself to us by his grace as a free, unmerited gift that we receive by faith. Before ascending into heaven, the risen Lord made this promise: "remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). Jesus Christ is God with us, always and everywhere.

Thankfully, Christ's presence is not dependent on our actions. We do not need to have our lives all together for him to work in us. Taking the initiative, he meets us where we are. He met Peter and Andrew fishing and James and John mending their nets, and immediately they followed him (Matthew 4:18-22). Against the social customs of the day, he met the woman seeking a drink at Jacob's well in Samaria, and that encounter changed not only her life but also the lives of many others who believed in Jesus because of the woman's testimony (John 4:142). Jesus has a way of coming to us as we go about our daily activities as well. He comes to us and draws us to himself so that we, too, may follow him.

Before he would become one of the most influential figures of his era, as well as one of the great saints in the history of the church, Augustine was a young man enslaved by worldly desires. One day in a Milan garden, in the midst of a personal crisis, he was weeping in bitter agony when God spoke words of cleansing, freedom, and new life to his tortured, tainted soul. Augustine describes the events in this way:

suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again "Pick up and read, pick up and read." At once my countenance changed, and I began to think intently whether there might be some sort of children's game in which such a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one. I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find.... So I hurried back to the place where ... I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit.

It was Romans 13:13-14: "Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its...