On New Year’s Eve, 1968, Alan Hodgson came forward for Communion and was converted. I did not know it at the time; he told me later.

It was at a Watch Night Service in the little Methodist chapel in Wolverhampton, England, where I served as a seminary intern for one year. A Watch Night Service is a Wesleyan emphasis on starting the New Year by renewing our covenant with God, something much more binding and significant than making New Year’s resolutions. We hold such a service here at the Temple each December 31st.

Alan came to church for the first time that night. Why, he did not say, though I think one of his friends invited him. Our open invitation was extended, he came forward, untutored and unbaptized in the faith, experienced the power of God’s presence, (his heart was “strangely warmed” we are given to say in our Methodist lexicon), he made a commitment to become a Christian that night, and subsequently, some years later, he became a minister.

Holy Communion can do that . . . it can convert people to the Christian faith. So, watch out! There is power at the table of the Lord.

That is why our invitation each time we serve the elements of the Last Supper is open. “You need not be a member of this congregation, or of this denomination. Simply, come forward in the name of Christ and receive God’s gift of grace.” We offer gluten-free bread because we want to include everybody. We offer a non-alcoholic version of the “fruit of the vine” not because we are moralistic but because we want to include children and those who choose not to partake of wine.

Children receive Holy Communion here at the direction of their parents. That was not true when I was growing up in the old Methodist Church. I had to be baptized, for sure, and then confirmed before I could receive Holy Communion. That makes some sense, knowing what it is that you are doing before you do it. But, that kept children away from the table, and if this is the table of God’s family, then children ought not to be shunted off to a kiddy table in the kitchen but rather brought into the center of things.  And such restrictions would have prohibited Alan Hodgson from meeting God that New Year’s Eve.

How much do any of us comprehend what is going on when we take the bread, dip it into the cup, and eat? My hunch is that children understand as much as we adults. Look in their eyes and see that they sense something important is going on here. They may not be able to put it into words, but they know. There is a sense of awe. If only we adults could recapture the wonder of it all.

One of our families with a pre-schooler recounted how at our Homecoming Sunday open house outside in the Miro Plaza the child took a brownie from a plate at one of the tables, examined it in his hands, then lifted it up above his head and broke it in two. That is what we want . . . a sense of grandeur that converts us to seeing the world in a new way.

“Holy Communion,” “the Eucharist,” “the Lord’s Supper,” “the Last Supper,” all mean the same thing, and it is a “converting ordinance,” said John Wesley.

But it also, and maybe more often, is a “confirming ordinance,” something we do that strengthens the faith we already have. “Draw near with faith and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort,” the ancient liturgy says. When we confess our sins and hear again the blessed assurance of God’s forgiveness, then we are able to come forward with pen hands and receive the gift of life. It confirms us in our faith, and we cannot do that too often.

Sometimes people will say that they cannot take Communion because they are not “right with God.” We know what they mean. We cannot fully receive God’s grace until we have made amends for our sins – those things we have said and done that were harmful, those times when we should have said and done the right thing but did not. That is why Confession always precedes Communion. But we can never wait until we have reached the state of perfection before we dare come into God’s presence. None of us would ever receive Communion. None of us would ever qualify.

We never deserve God’s holy meal. We only can accept God’s invitation with joy. And it never can be too often. John Wesley said that we Methodists must engage in “constant Communion.”

Here at the Chicago Temple we have Holy Communion every Saturday night at 5 p.m., every Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m., every other Sunday at 11 a.m., every Wednesday morning between 7:30 and 9 a.m., and after every Wednesday noontime service. That is not “constant,” but that is often, especially in the American experience of Methodism.

In England, Methodism was a movement within the Church of England. It was a spiritual and sacramental renewal. The Established Church had become lax in serving Communion, so Wesley instructed his followers to go to the parish church and demand the sacrament. The sacramental ministry was part of the church’s obligation overseen by ordained clergy.

But in America after the Revolutionary War the Church of England on these shores went home. And that left Methodists without a church, without the sacraments. So, John Wesley “irregularly” ordained some clergy to come as circuit riders and provide Communion and baptism to the Methodists who now were spread across the frontier. So, why did the early Methodists in America have Communion only four times a year? Because that was the timing on the circuit for the ordained minister. But, about a century ago we moved from circuit riders to residential clergy, so now we can approximate more nearly Wesley’s sense of “constant” Communion.

Holy Communion – open and often.

Our brief episode from the Gospel of Mark is significant in this regard. In Jesus’ day children were considered non-persons. They were neither to be seen nor heard. They had no place in society because they could not work, make things, or contribute to the finances of the household. They had nothing to offer. How different from our culture that, in our more extravagant moments, idealizes and idolizes children.

So, when Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me; do not hinder them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs,” he was not being nice to kids. He was being offensive to adults. It was an insult to the values of adults. And which adults were these? Not the scribes. Not the Pharisees. Not the usual villains of the gospel. It was the disciples who disgusted Jesus.

People were bringing children to him so that he might touch them and bless them, but the disciples spoke harshly, “Don’t bother Jesus with such irrelevant concerns. He doesn’t have time for trivialities.” But Jesus intervenes and chastises his own followers in front of the crowd, “Truly, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

Receive the kingdom of God as a little child . . . how is that? With empty hands. With nothing to offer. With no claim of deserving God’s love, with no resumé to impress God with our faithfulness, with no standing in society that signifies that we are really important people, with nothing but the need to be taken up in God’s arms and to be blessed. It is all grace, God’s grace.

 The final scene in the 1984 movie, “Places in the Heart” – if you have not seen it, I am about to ruin it for you. The movie begins and ends with communion, informal and formal. As I recall, it opens with a view of a small church, the choir singing “Blessed Assurance,” and we see glimpses of people beginning their Sunday meals. It is during the Great Depression, but there is food to eat. A family sits around a table and offers grace, a homeless woman sits in her only shelter, her beat-up car, and eats what she has found, someone sits in the local diner, a man takes a swig from his wine bottle, and the sheriff chews on a dinner roll that he had stuffed into his pocket on the way to work.

As the plot unfolds the sheriff one evening is called away from his dinner table to tend to a youth shooting at pop cans down by the railroad tracks. The young man is drunk, he accidentally shoots and kills the sheriff, and because he is black, he is tracked down and murdered by the townsfolk.

The sheriff’s widow now must figure out how to keep her home and small cotton farm. She takes in a blind boarder, goes to the hostile banker to ask for a loan, enlists the help of her sister in the running of the family, and accepts the help of a homeless black sharecropper to plant the cotton. There is everything in the movie – racism, contempt for a woman trying to make it on her own, violence, adultery, drought, and tornadoes – but in the end, Edna Spalding prevails. But the movie does not end there. It moves beyond feeling good to portraying a kind of redemption.

Back in the church as the choir moves from “Blessed Assurance” to “I Walk in the Garden Alone” the congregation sits in the pews and passes the elements of Holy Communion, serving each other and saying, “The peace of God be with you.” The mother serving her children, the children serving their aunt . . . and the blind man, and the banker, and the cotton gin operator, and some of the Klan members unmasked, and then the murdered sheriff serving his young killer, and the youth saying, “The peace of God be with you.” And way at the back, having just returned after barely escaping town with his life, the sharecropper.

They all are there . . . the good and the bad, the living and the dead, the faithful and the sinners. They all are there to join in the Lord’s Supper. That is the power of the sacrament . . . it converts, and it confirms. It is grace; all of it is grace. Amen.