Trinity Church, Tri Cities (Richland, Kennewick, Pasco), Washington
Emeth Hesed, July 28th, 2007
I am happy to say that I am a member of Trinity Church in Tri Cities (Richland, Kennewick, Pasco), Washington, and that my church has a brand spanking new website as of today. Yay! Go take a look at it. I can’t stop staring at it. It has a feed and a mailing list and everything.
I am also really happy to say that the church started weekly communion last week. Double yay! It seems like a miraculous change. I can’t believe it yet. I can’t believe I’ll go tomorrow and I can take communion. But in a sense, it’s even more depressing than not having communion hardly at all, because now every week, I have to take communion and my baby girl isn’t allowed to. It hurts like hellfire reserved for those God has cut off from Him. We’ll just have to see how long it takes before they start allowing the little children to come unto Him. It’s so hard to wait.
You won’t have to wait long for pictures of the handsome elders, though. I think there is going to be a photo shoot tomorrow.
Everything will be better someday … after I’m dead. I’m a pessimistic postmillennialist.
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“It hurts like hellfire…”
No offense, Emeth, but that’s a pretty ridiculous statement. By the mercies of God you never have nor ever will experience that kind of hurt. There…I just had to say it before Daney came along and did. ;-)
I’ve visited churches that didn’t allow me to take communion. I wasn’t a member and didn’t take their catechism so they weren’t sure that I was worthy … as if the man-made catechism was what saved people, not the Cross.
Being cut off from communion is not ridiculous to me. When people are cut off from communion, they are being handed over to hellfire and the Devil. When my baby is treated that way, it hurts.
Being cut off from communion is not ridiculous to me, either. But saying it is tantamount to hell is giving too much power to the silly people who cut you off — more power than God gives them; the keys of the kingdom and the power to bind and loose are not absolute. They cannot damn you in the sense that hell is damnation. They cannot cause the kind of suffering that hell is. The Lord has managed to preserve His young saints for centuries despite their being wrongly barred from the table. Millions in the last few centuries have even been denied baptism. I’m not arguing that it doesn’t hurt…of course it does! But it can’t hurt as much as hell unless you concede that their view of salvation is actually correct, and the person denied communion really is eternally damned. Hellfire is utter despair, irrevocable hopelessness, unrepentable God-hatred. …and it is eternal. Having Rinah denied the sacrament is bad. And if you want to compare that pain to anything on this earth, I won’t quibble with you. But it simply isn’t tantamount to hell.
I’m delighted you get weekly communion now. And I hope your congregation institutes paedocommunion very, very soon!
Glad you beat me to it V.
As an encouragement Em, I would remind you that our God is magnificent and gracious enough to not let the efforts of man get in his way when he wishes to bless someone with his grace. Whether your session is being negligent by keeping your child from the table or whether you are being negligent by thinking she should not be kept from the table, God’s grace will still abound to Rinah. God’s grace will also still abound to both your session and yourself, whichever of you turns out to be striving out of ignorance. God’s that big. And his grace, which is sufficient for us, cannot be contained by something as small and glorious as the Lord’s table.
I actually know this from experience, having come from a church that wouldn’t baptize until one is a teenager (despite the fact that there is not a moment I can recall when I did not believe) and only offered the supper one Thursday evening a month (a night I could rarely attend). Despite having these means of grace withheld from me, God was ever faithful to establish me in his faith and to pour out his grace upon me.
Truly he is good and you ought not suffer as you do. Remember, his grace is sufficient.