Gratitude is the life-giving pulse of our faith. The oldest name given to our practice of gathering and eating at the Lord’s table — the Eucharist — is taken from a Greek word, ­eucharisteo, which means “I give thanks.” 

The Apostle Paul uses this word in 1 Corinthians 11, the passage we use as our Words of Institution when we celebrate Communion: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said . . .” 

Jesus hands out the bread after he gives thanks. Communion is about gratitude. The Lord’s Supper is our eucharisteo.

To gather around Christ’s table is to learn the way of thanksgiving — to present our lives as testimonies of gratitude to the One who gives us life. Through worship, we express thanks to God — for life, for gifts, for each other, for grace, for forgiveness, for strength to endure trials. 

To express our gratitude is to acknowledge we are creatures who owe our existence to the Creator. Our lives are in God’s hands.

The first line of the ancient confession, the Apostles’ Creed, invites Christians to believe in the God who created heaven and Earth. This isn’t only a statement about the primordial past. God’s work of creation did not end at the beginning of time. To believe in God is to recognize that all things flow from God. Christ is all, and in all, and in him all things hold together.

ALL OF THIS WOULD BE clearer to us if we took the Psalms more seriously as a source for our doctrine of creation. 

These poetic pages of scripture invite us to offer prayers of thanksgiving to the Creator who loves us, our neighbors and our world. 

“O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” (Psalm 95:6). 

“Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100:3). 

“You make the springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills, giving drink to every wild animal,” the Psalmist prays to the Creator and Sustainer. “By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation; they sing among the branches” (Psalm 104:10-12). 

Rather than satisfying modern curiosity about how the world began, the Psalms articulate a doctrine of creation by a God whose care and love are the ongoing sources of existence. 

With the Psalms as our guidebook, we learn through prayer to believe in a creating and sustaining God who breathes life into our lives. 

CHRISTIANS are on a lifelong pilgrimage of thanksgiving for the gift of life. This journey includes patterning our lives on routines of worship that help us say thank you to God. 

We live by grace, which means we are fundamentally needy. That’s what it means to be a creature: We depend on the Creator. 

Yet we deny our neediness. As well-adjusted members of a capitalist society, we’ve been conditioned to consider ourselves independent. The North American economy is also an ideology, teaching us to believe we deserve what we have. What’s ours is ours because we’ve earned it — worked hard, invested, sacrificed, saved. 

But our assumptions of independence crumble as soon as we recognize our neediness, the frailty of our finances and our bodies. 

We’re always on the edge of falling apart — the disintegration of our selves, returning to the nothingness from which God made us.

At the Communion table, we admit all of this. We confess the vulnerability of our nature, the weakness of our being. We make public our dependence and acknowledge we live by grace. Communion points us toward God and each other, to a place where we remember who we are as creatures not of our own making but of God’s. 

At Christ’s table we remember that we are beggars, waiting for a handout, living on God’s generosity.