I visited briefly not long ago with Doug Priest. Doug and Marge were in Athena where he was the minister of the Christian Church part of the time that I lived in Milton-Freewater. We spent several happy hours hiking and fishing in the Wallowa Eagle Cap Wilderness before he took his family to Ethiopia for missionary work. They served in a remote area where the gospel had never been preached before.
One day, when he was on furlough, he mentioned a problem that they had in Ethiopia concerning the Lord's Supper. There were no grapes in their out-of-the-way area. How do you have the Lord's Supper without grape juice? It was not feasible to ship it in and they certainly did not want to introduce wine to the area. Instead, they brought in packets of grape Kool-Aid. However, some areas did not have Kool-Aid so they used lemon juice. He also told me of missionaries in Papua New Guinea where no flour was available for making bread, so they used sweet potatoes.
A more desperate situation was faced by J. Russell Morse when he was a missionary in Southern China. In 1951 he was arrested by the communists and held in solitary confinement for 15 months. He suffered many deprivations and was tortured both mentally and physically in ways that he never described even to his own family. For a long time he expected each day to be his last. He said:
Back in my prison, I prepared to die and I followed a procedure that I feel sure was followed by thousands in the early New Testament Church. ... Daily, for months, I partook of those emblems, using steamed bread and water, which I had saved from my meals. And each day I prepared myself for that death which I thought might come at any hour.
When I think of how so many Christians, in so many places, over hundreds of years have persisted in observing the Lord's Supper in whatever way they could I have to ask, "why bother?"
Morse answered that question for himself -- and I expect for countless other Christians also -- when he said:
I remember that [the early Christians] had been admonished to forsake not the assembling of themselves. Also, in regard to the Lord's Supper, they had been told, "This do ... in remembrance of me", as they partook of the emblems of the Lord's broken body and shed blood. As they themselves faced death, they partook of them, remembering that He had been scourged by Roman soldiers; a crown of thorns had been pressed down upon his head; ... He had been forced to carry the cross upon which he soon was to be nailed to die there. And Jesus had said, "A servant is not greater than his Lord."*
Why do we bother to assemble each Sunday? Why do we bother to take the Lord's Supper? Why bother? How would you answer?
*Gertrude Morse. The Dogs May Bark But the Caravan Moves On, 304.
