OYB for Feb 9th

I've been rather slack in my postings. But I've been doing the reading - honest! ;)

The thing than jumped out at me today was in Exodus 29:10-19, which describes the preparation of the bull and the rams for sacrifice. In particular, " ... and Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands on the head of the ..."

In my tradition (Presbyterian) and I assume in many others, part of the process of ordaining ministers and elders involves the laying on of hands. I've never been ordained into one of these positions myself, mostly because my wife was always a minister in whatever church I belonged to, so it would be a conflict of interest for me to be an elder, which is the governing body in a Presbyterian church. But I am active in the Cursillo movement, and one of the traditions that we have in the Houston Presbyterian Cursillo is that each "team" of the staff is installed, in part, by a laying on of hands of another team. Being the recipient of that blessing was a powerful experience, but was nothing compared to the experience of passing that blessing on to the next team.

Now, I have to say that I'm not completely comfortable with continuing to look at this passage from that perspective. Things didn't turn out too well for the bull or the rams, after all. But maybe that's an important piece as well. We're all ordained to service in whatever capacity is needed, not necessarily the one that's most comfortable.

Mike's question:

I've been involved with the serving of communion in a variety of styles. The most common in our tradition is that the elders come through the pews with plates of bite-sized pieces of bread, and individual cups of wine and/or grape juice. But we also do "inticture" where people tear off a hunk of bread and dip it into a cup. I thnk my favorite is a variation on that, again from Cursillo. We form a circle, and pass the elements around the room. Each person serving the person next to them.