In Breaking Bread
Acts 2:42-47; Luke 24:13-35
The community I was raised in had funeral home visitation practices like festivalgoers. They moved in for a few days, did all the things, and then went home and collapsed. So, it was assumed that the grieving family needed nourishment to keep them on their feet… Ladies from the church brought deli trays sweets, and snacks to the funeral home for the family and friends to take a break. I thought that’s what everyone did… Singer / songwriter, Kate Campbell, grew up in the Baptist church and in the South. One of her most requested songs goes like this:
Aunt Fidelia brought the rolls
With her green bean casserole
The widow Smith down the street
Dropped by a bowl of butter beans
Plastic cups and silverware
Lime green Tupperware everywhere
Pass the chicken, pass the pie
We sure eat good when someone dies
My experience being in the church is that food shows up at big life events – sad ones and happy ones. Food is, for some, a love language. I believe this is absolutely true for Christians and has been for centuries. We are carrying on the legacy that the early church practiced. As we heard read from Acts a few moments ago:
42 The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers….46 Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. 47 They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved.
In the days of the early church, the new believers observed communion in the regular breaking of bread together. Rather than the focus being on Jesus’ death, it was on Jesus’ friendship. They continued meeting together and eating together in order to remember him – what he loved, the tastes, sounds and smells. “[Jesus] did not give them something to think about together when he was gone,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “Instead, he gave them concrete things to do… [These practices] would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself… ‘Do this,’ he said– not believe this but do this – ‘in remembrance of me.’”[1]
What does our practice of the sacrament of communion still teach us? I’ve chosen just three things for us to consider today.
The first is, In breaking bread, Jesus is made known.
Two disciples are walking toward Emmaus, a town a couple of miles away from Jerusalem. They’re talking. Processing, no doubt, what has happened in the immediate days following Jesus’ death and resurrection. A fellow traveler joins them on the road. He asks what they’re talking about, and they wonder what rock this guy has been under. Everyone knows about the prophet who was crucified, they exclaim. Their people hoped he was the one who had come to set them free, and then he was killed. But wait there’s more. When some went to prepare his body for burial, it wasn’t there! Some are saying he is alive and that they’ve actually seen him.
The one who joined them, of course, is Jesus. He recognizes them! Confused disciples. One more time, he proceeds to interpret for them all the things said about him, starting with Moses and going through all the prophets. Wouldn’t you love to have heard that explanation from Jesus himself?
The disciples ask Jesus to stay on with them since it is almost evening. Then, it says he took his place at the table with them. And when he took the bread, blessed it and broke it and gave it to them, that’s when they knew. They had seen him do this so many times before. The way his hands tore the bread. The way he spoke the blessing. They remembered how it felt to be with Jesus. And immediately, he disappeared. They say something like, Remember how our hearts were burning when he spoke to us? Remembering is sacred work.
Another thing we learn from practicing the Lord’s supper is the sacred work of remembering.
I love what Frederick Buechner writes about remembering. “When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.”[2]
Every time the early church broke bread, they remembered… “Remember how Jesus ate and drank with us? Laughed with us and cried with us? Remember how he suffered for us and died for us, and gave his life for the world? Remember? Remembering brought Jesus back to life among them. It is easier to remember things together than alone.[3]
Jesus does something radical in his sharing of meals. In every way, he “demolishes the exclusions, restrictions and taboos around table fellowship” of his day. He was criticized for eating with sinners. He ate with everyone!
Finally, another thing we learn in the practice of communion: All are called to one long table.
No one is an insider, or foreigner. None are deserving or undeserving. All come equally in need of grace. All are simply invited. He eats with tentmakers, tax collectors and prostitutes. Fishermen and Pharisees, too. This is the community Jesus intends to create around his table. We are all one. When we receive the bread and the cup, we become the body of Christ. This is the great mystery that when we receive the Body of Christ we become the Body of Christ. “Behold who you are. Become what you see.”
When Rachel Held Evans' aunt died, she caught a plane to Iowa to be with her grieving family and friends. Gathered at her aunt and uncle’s home, she recalls the doorbell ringing every couple of hours so that someone from the First Baptist Church could drop off a casserole, a fruit plate, homemade bread, jello “salad” (how is jello a salad?) and every pie imaginable. Over these meals, she said her family cried, remembered times shared, expressed their disbelief, comforted one another in laughter even. When a lady stood in the doorway, wrapping her uncle in a hug with one arm and balancing a stack of Tupperware in the other, Rachel’s dad said, “Isn’t that the lady who served us communion at church this morning?”
Why, Yes it is.
And here she is serving it again. [4]
Showing up with food and drink for hard circumstances in life is Christian communion. Gathering around tables at “Messy Church” is Christian communion. Going out with the Brew Crew, or friends for Sunday lunch is Christian communion. Certainly, nonbelievers can care for one another and make a casserole. But it is Christians, Evans says, who recognize this act as sacrament, as holy. We believe bread can satisfy not only physical hunger, but spiritual and emotional hunger, too. Our collective memory brings Jesus back to life in every breaking of the bread and pouring of the wine.
May it be so!
[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown An Altar in the World
[2] Buechner, F. Whistling in the Dark, Remember, p.100
[3] Evans, Rachel Held Searching for Sunday, p. 128
[4] Evans, Rachel Held