Sabbath Devotional :: Friends of the Last Supper

My husband and I were teaching our little primary class a few weeks ago about the waters of Mormon. We asked what they had promised when they were baptized.

“To be good and repent,” they said. What else? I pressed. “To take Jesus’ name up on us,” they replied. Anything else? Crickets.

In fairness, their confusion makes sense. I think there is some tendency to talk about baptismal covenants in individual terms. Your sins are washed away. The Spirit will guide you in your life. It’s a step in your development of following Jesus’ example and hoisting yourself towards heaven. And that’s not inaccurate. But I think it is incomplete.

If Alma’s sermon (which, for my money is the most moving treatise on baptism in all of scripture) is any indication, taking the name of Jesus upon you is less about living a super righteous life than it is about putting yourself on the roads that Jesus walked, and committing to the same work of mourning, comforting, bearing, suffering. It’s about becoming involved with the marginalized, the sinful, the broken, the sad.

Of course, we’re not always very good at it. So we recommit ourselves every week.

Every week, we gather together like the friends of the last supper. We eat together, sing together, worship together, try together to be more like Jesus, and commit ourselves once more to His work, knowing we will fail again. Inevitably, we will betray, deny, reject, squabble, and have to come back to the table once again the next week to face each other and our God with dirty feet. The sacrament, like baptism, is an exercise in committing ourselves to a community as broken, imperfect, and beloved as we are.

Still, we try to call each other friends, brother, sister, and to really believe it. We break the bread into as many pieces as it takes to feed everyone, with some left over — five loaves feeding 5,000. And after the prayer, we carry this work out the chapel and into the world, a world bursting at the seams with capacious beauty and cruelty.

I looked at these precious children. There’s so much ahead of them. So much joy and sorrow. Life and death. Grieving and rejoicing. My time with them is so brief. Ten years from now when their life becomes heavy, they won’t remember me.

But they will find people. Strangers who will sit with them, and sing with them, and worship with them. Strangers who will call them friend, brother, sister, and try to make it so. Strangers who will break the bread and pour the water again and again until everyone is fed and their cups runneth over. This is the promise and the miracle of Christianity.

At the end of class, we helped our primary kiddos translate this scripture:

As ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death.

This is what we came up with:

It seems that you want to join the church and be called a Christian. This is what that takes: help people carry what is hard in their lives, share their happiness and sadness, try to feel their sorrows, try to be a support and to be like Jesus wherever you are and whoever you are with for however long you live.

Do you want to try?

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Sarah Perkins is peaceful root director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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