While You can Only Bring Him Your Nothing

There we were, all of us.Gussied up and looking good. Conversations were easy and the sanctuary was filled with light. Two guitars ushered us in and we sat, invited and received.The occasion was a wedding. We gathered to celebrate our friends Maggie and Austin. She was barefoot, he was in a bow tie; they were stunning and all smiles. And as we gathered around them, we did what you do at a wedding: we cried and laughed and remembered and hoped.Then, Maggie's dad walked up, bread in one hand, wine in the other, and made an announcement. "Before we gather around tables and eat together later, we're going to gather around a single meal together and celebrate the God who gives gifts to all." And then suddenly, there we were, all of us. The light felt different, casting shadows where before there were none.Shipwrekced, jealous, off the wagon, unforgiving. Starving and ragged.But the bread is for those who are starving and the wine is for those who are covered in shame, so we ate and drank.The Eucharist literally means "the great thanksgiving." It is named so because this meal is a remembering: we give thanks to the One who loves us beyond all loveliness and unloveliness, and who gives beyond all worthiness and unworthiness. We give thanks because here we are, all of us, needing nourishing and saving, and there it is, the meal.Carlo Carretto writes that it is a difficult thing to understand the relationship between us and God, where there is such inequity."He brings you his all," Carretto writes in The God Who Comes, "while you can only bring him your nothing."And that is the nature of this meal. You can't bring anything to offer, other than your nothing. No bottle of wine, no favorite dessert, no cheese plate.So here we are, all of us.The table is set. We open up our trembling hands and receive the bread that is life; we open up our mouths and we drink the wine that is salvation.We bring God our nothing, and give thanks for the everything else.