Communion in the Milk Barn

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Special to United Methodist Insight | June 30, 2025

I was seven years old, the same age as my grandson, Leonard, when I asked the big Communion question in the barn while helping Dad, the first Leonard Sumwalt, milk cows in 1958.

Dad and I always talked while we were milking. There is something holy about these kinds of father-son-cow moments. The barn at milking time is a hallowed space where the veil between this world and the eternal is thin. There was time, between cows, for a little boy to ask all of the big questions of life.

Milking was simpler in those days. We were only milking about 25 cows, with two Sears & Roebuck Farm Master milking machines. Sometimes Dad would explain how the vacuum pump made the milkers work. And it seemed like he was always fussing with one of the pulsators, the mechanism on top of the milking machine bucket that created the sucking action in the teat cups. Dad would take it apart and blow the dust out to keep it working. (We added two Surge milking machines in later years as the herd grew.)

You can buy an antique Farm Master pulsator on Ebay now for $24.99. A nifty orange and black tin sign with the declaration, “This Farm Uses Farm Master Milking Machine” goes for more than I can afford, though I would like to have one. It includes the Sears & Roebuck pledge of superior quality. I wish I could ask Dad if he had ever seen one of those.  And I would ask if he remembers that day when I asked about Communion.

We only had communion once a quarter in those days. The Evangelical United Brethren Church, like the Methodists who we E.U.B.s merged with in 1968 to become the United Methodist Church, believed that having it more often made it less meaningful. At least that is what they always told me. I learned later that it had more to do with the schedule of the early circuit riders.

Pioneer preachers served as many as 15 or 20 churches on horseback. It took two or three months to make the rounds. Baptism and communion services were held whenever the preacher came to town. The tradition of infrequent communion stuck. Now days, in most of our UM churches, it happen once a month, usually on the first Sunday.

I remember watching people going forward to kneel at the rail on Communion Sundays. It was a holy moment, another thin place. A quiet calm enveloped all, including us kids who were too young to go forward. I found myself longing to be included. It was clearly the most important thing that happened in church.

So I asked Dad the big communion question that day in the barn, as I followed him down the driveway to the milk cart with the three 40-gallon milk cans marked with a red number 34 to distinguish them from all of the others at the cheese factory. I watched as Dad poured a sixteen-quart pail of milk into the strainer positioned over the first can, and blurted out, “Dad, when will I be old enough to take communion?” He looked at me, sizing me up, and responded immediately, “When you are old enough to understand what it means.”

I don’t remember what I said, but I must have got it right – which was better than I did in seminary 20 years later – because Dad said, “Yeah, I think you are ready.”

The very next Sunday that we had communion, I found myself kneeling at the rail between Mom and Dad and receiving the bread and cup from old Reverend Gutknecht. It tasted so good, and I felt something that can only be described as a holy presence, though I didn’t know what to call it then. Dad and I had lots to talk about in the barn that night. I was not to feel anything quite like that again until after ordination in 1978, when I was on the other side of the communion rail.

I understand communion differently now, after 45 years of serving. I think Dad got it wrong, though he was on the side of most theologians who have historically laid down strict guidelines about who can receive communion, and when.

I think of my late Uncle, Max Long, who was developmentally disabled, and lived to be 58 years old. He never became "old enough" to understand the meaning of communion. I doubt that he was ever confirmed, though he was probably baptized, one of the requirements for communion in some churches. I think Uncle Max probably had a better sense of the holy – a discernment of the body of Christ, as the Apostle Paul called it – than many of the rest of us in the family who matured beyond the seven-year-old mentality he attained.

I wish I could ask Dad about that now. Do you suppose they have Holy Communion in heaven? I imagine Dad would tell me that the meaning of communion is much deeper than I could ever imagine.

My colleague, Deen Thompson, who worked at our United Methodist Board of Discipleship in Nashville for many years, explains it this way: “When I serve children, baptized or not, I always say, ‘Take and eat or drink and remember God loves you.’ Many years later, at dinner, when asked to pass the bread, one of those young children responded, ‘Take and eat, and remember God loves you.’”

John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and the author of “Vision Stories” & “How to Preach the Miracles,” johnsumwalt@gmail.com, 414-339-0676.