Incarnation

Incarnation
(On receiving the Lord’s Super with an Anglican congregation in Lilongwe.)

Today Jesus stuck in my throat.
I had a hard time swallowing
His body and blood.
In spite of the user-friendly-melt-in-your-mouth wafer,
Jesus just wouldn’t go down smoothly.
It’s happened before,
this experience of finding God
hard to swallow.
But never so literally.
Always before
it was some bony doctrine,
some lumpy theology,
some sticky legalism
that got caught in my throat.
Occasionally, I would even throw up,
regurgitating some non-digestible, half-baked
“Christian Mandate;”
like
“women should shut up and serve,”
or
“everybody but me and my kind are doomed to hell in a hand-basket.”
But this was different.
Jesus just sat there on the edge of my esophagus
making no demands.
Simply waiting.
Waiting for me to make up my mind.
Do I swallow His sacrificial love for me?
Do I ingest His word of life?
Do I feed on His living presence in my body?
Or do I choke?
Gulp!
Paul Heller