Sacramental Mimosas

                Sunday morning has become a place of inner conflict.  It is the time where I am forced to make my most conscious decision to not return yet to service.  It’s comfortable; I’m well liked; I know the routine and so on because it is far too easy to fall back in the motions and avoid missing the real journey. 

                Luckily, I had a good excuse by being invited to brunch.  It’s what all the sophisticated “heathens” do on Sunday mornings apparently.  I love it.  It’s a time of laughter and good food coupled with mimosas or the like.  So this is my Sunday morning habit now and I find myself with those realistically unwelcomed in the doors of the church.

Church had become a place to “cure” my worldliness, yet brunch would begin to cure my religion.  In a strange way, it became a better remembrance of the Gospel.  Put better than I could, Micah J. Murray writes:

“When we criticize the Church, please know that we aren’t ashamed of the Gospel.  We are probably just beginning to glimpse what the Gospel really is, and it’s better news than we had ever dreamed. So when we see a stale, moralistic religion marketed as the Gospel, strangled in tradition and politics, our hearts ache. We remember all too clearly the bondage of that false Gospel. And we are so desperately thirsty for the real one.” \

I could not help but remember the Gospel, while taking part of this makeshift “love feast” I found myself a part of.  Taking a step out of organized religion, I found myself with the time to actually live life with these people I now brunched with.  I allowed myself to get close enough to see their faults, brokenness and ultimately what made them lovely.  Yet as beautiful as this realization was, I found myself staring at myself and realized I thought I was morally superior in some way.  Hearing the subtle cultural droning of “us and them” over the years had found root in me no matter how much I wanted to reject the notion.  I found myself in shame taking a sip here or there of my sacramental mimosa trying to reject this Pharisee deep in myself.

           Sip after sip of this unorthodox Eucharist reminded me of the Christ who lived for the “them” and was rejected by us, killed by us, died for us, and rose giving us a new humanity.  It felt a near experience to the early church of misfits—especially when I had my fill of this bottomless mimosa.  It was here that I was beginning to understand that this journey I had set out to undertake was perhaps not about finding myself but perhaps coming to the end of myself again to find what who always there and how to truly love.