First Communion

By Norman Kolenbrander

On a leafy Sunday morning, the girls adorned in lacy white dresses, the boys in immaculate suits and ties, excitedly joined their families in a colorful parade to Our Lady of Grace on Avenue W in Brooklyn, New York. Our son’s second grade friends and their parents had spent weeks preparing for the big day—First Communion. Following the church service, joyous celebrations resounded amidst backyard grape vines, fig trees, and colorful lanterns.

The term “first communion” was new to me. I was a young pastor serving a Reformed Church in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, at the time, the 1970’s, a predominately Italian Catholic community.

I grew up in the Reformed Church in America in a couple of small Midwestern communities. In those years, most Reformed Churches limited participation in the Lord’s Supper to “confessing” members, usually involving those of high school age or older.

At least eight years of instruction in the Heidelberg Catechism and countless Sunday School classes and church services were considered preparation for becoming a “confessing” member. Thus when age, faith, and courage came together, a gaggle of youth would conspire to appear before the Board of Elders to be examined, encouraged, and hopefully received.

The following Sunday we would be presented before the congregation to publicly affirm our Christian faith, making us now eligible to participate in communion. However, since in that era, most Reformed Churches celebrated communion only four times per year, there would likely be a delay before the opportunity to actually participate arrived. My own first experience of that occasion is not one I can recall.

I do recall however, as a second or third grader, my holy participation in what I now think of as my “first communion.” At the time, we lived in Middleburg, Iowa, a community of a dozen or so homes with one gravel road running through it and no post office, fire department or police force. The homes however, were safely anchored between the Christian Reformed Church on the east end and the Reformed Church on the west, where my father was the pastor.

On the Sunday I have in mind, an older sister and I watched our father prepare the bread for communion as he cut it into bite-sized pieces on our kitchen table. He then carried it across the yard to our church where he finalized preparations for the service. My sister and I, alone in the kitchen, suddenly found ourselves drawn to the crusts of bread that had been discarded.

My sister and I, alone in the kitchen, suddenly found ourselves drawn to the crusts of bread that had been discarded.

Our meeting had not been planned, but we each spontaneously reached for a crust and with solemn trepidation reverently chewed and swallowed. I knew that Jesus had died for me and quietly affirmed my love for my Savior. About half-an-hour later, with our hair combed and ears passing inspection, my mother ushered us together with two younger sisters, into the church pew with the green cushion reserved for the pastor’s family.

After hymns were sung and the Word proclaimed, the communion liturgy was read. In later years, I learned the liturgy being used at the time had been approved by the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America in 1905. Over the years, it had undergone a number of revisions, but retained echoes of a liturgy approved by the Reformed Church of the Netherland’s National Synod of Dort, 1618-19.

The longest section of the endless liturgy covered in excruciating detail solemn warnings concerning the many reasons why one should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if living in unrepented sin. These sins included but were not limited to:

all idolaters;
all those who invoke deceased saints, angels, or other creatures;
all those who worship images;
all enchanters, diviners, charmers, and those who confide in such enchantments;
all despisers of God and His Word, and of the holy Sacraments;
all blasphemers;
all those who are given to raise discord, sects, and mutiny, in church or state; all perjured persons; all those who are disobedient to their parents and superiors;
all murderers, contentious persons, and those who live in hatred and envy against their neighbors;
all adulterers, whoremongers, drunkards, thieves, usurers, robbers, gamesters, covetous;
and all who lead offensive lives.

Since the time I had started school, my father had engaged me with the Reader’s Digest’s monthly feature: “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power.” The liturgy to which I was listening effortlessly exceeded the Digest’s furthest reach. Many of the words in the little black book in my father’s hands were utterly incomprehensible to me, yet at the same time were strangely thrilling. Here was word power that suggested worlds well beyond my limited understanding. Meanwhile the little phrase “all those who are disobedient to their parents,” should have created a small knot in my stomach.

Fortunately, the red flags of the liturgy were lowered to half-mast by a concluding assurance offering some comfort:

Rest assured that no sin or infirmity, which still remaineth against our
will in us, can hinder us from being received of God in mercy, and from
being made worthy partakers of this heavenly meat and drink.

Following the reading of the liturgy, the elders came forward to remove and ritually fold the snowy white linen cloth covering the communion table. While speaking the Words of Institution, my father began pouring the deep red wine from a large silver beaker into three simple silver chalices. As he did so, a mysterious, sweet, musty, holy aroma pervaded the entire sanctuary.

In 1947, our congregation had not yet fallen prey to the thimble-sized communion glasses that later became ubiquitous in Protestant churches. The adults in the congregation received the bread, and then sipped the wine from one of the communion chalices.

Though as a child, I was excluded from going to the table, it was as if the table had come to me. I inhaled deeply the pervasive, heady perfume of the wine and reverently bowed my head to thank Jesus for his sacrifice on my behalf. I had completed my first communion.

Looking back, I think of my experience as a spontaneous living out the story of my baptism and an age-appropriate awareness of belonging to God that the covenant theology of my church proclaimed.

Mine was no intentional flaunting of the rules, no pioneering move to include children at the Lord’s Table, not even a new and regular practice to be surreptitiously adopted during my growing years. Nor do I recall ever speaking to my parents about my experience at the time. For me, it became a seed, a hint, a whiff of things to come—a promise tucked away in my heart. It is a memory that to this day enriches my participation at the Lord’s Table.

Norman Kolenbrander is a “retired” pastor in the Reformed Church in America, living in Pella, Iowa.