Gospeling Your Life through Communion

 

Read Luke 22-24 ~ This is the third telling of the last supper, crucifixion and resurrection.  What details do you notice in Luke?  What surprised you? 

Now, go get a piece of bread and sip of juice. 

Hold the piece of bread, smell it, imagine the wheat waving in the wind through sunlight and storms.  Imagine the soil that sent its nutrients in a divine dance slowly forming, fashioning the wheat day after day.  Imagine the hands that harvested the wheat, the baker who formed the bread, and the worker who helped check you out when you bought the bread.  In your hands, with this bread, you hold a web of life.  There is a whole world in that one piece of bread.

 

Break the bread.  Jesus breaks open his life, not just in these chapters, but throughout the whole Gospels.  Jesus shows us, embodies for us, vulnerable love that is willing to see the ones on the fringe and fray as well as those who think their halos shine brighter than the sun.  Jesus sits at table with anyone and everyone.  In Luke, Jesus is always eating.  And every time we take bread, Jesus is there.  And especially in the sharp shards of your life today, the broken parts that like the bread in your hand, can’t easily be put back together.  Where does it hurt today?  Where do you ache?  This could be physically, emotionally, spiritually.  Hold that broken bread for in the middle is Christ’s presence.

 

Eat in remembrance of God’s unconditional and unceasing love.

 

Now, take the juice (or coffee or water or whatever).  Jesus said, “Brokenness is never the last word.”  Paul said, “Nothing separates us from the love of God”.  This is the foundational, formation truth.  Love is. 

 

Sometimes I love to take the bread (symbolizing brokenness) and dip it in the juice (symbolizing grace that saturates and soaks all my life).  You may want to do this.  May God, who brought to life Jesus our Christ, raised him from the tomb (which became a womb), out of pain, suffering, brokenness, death to a new way of being in the world.  May God saturate and soak your life each moment this day.  Amen.