Meals are the cornerstone of societies. My family loves to watch the show Bizarre Foods; it’s one of the few shows that we can all actually agree on. The host, Andrew Zimmern says in the introduction that the best way to experience a culture is to share a meal with the people of that culture. Sharing a meal is not only a great way to get to know someone and to understand where they are from, but the act of sitting at the table with someone creates a connection and strengthens a relationship.
When we talk about meals we are also talking about memories. Memories of times sitting around the table, sharing food, conversation, stories and sharing a part of our lives. Memories of our grandmother’s kitchen or the smell of your mother’s homemade pie baking or the way that the smoke fills your nostrils and burns your eyes as you sit fireside with your stick in hand that holds a marshmallow on it’s tip. Food brings us back to another time and another place unlike anything else.
I think that is one of the reasons why there is such an emphasis on the food in Jewish festivals. It’s not just that food reminds us of how God provides, but when you taste the bitter herbs you remember, not just as recalling a fact, but you actively remember the bitterness of slavery as you push the bitter herbs across your tongue. In many ways, eating is active memory.
Today, we are going to be sharing a meal together, a little different from the one that we shared a couple of weeks ago, so I wanted us to talk about the meal that we are about to partake of—talk about it’s significance and it’s history a little.
Our scripture begins with Jesus and the disciples in Jerusalem as they are about to celebrate the Passover. It begins with preparation. Jesus sends Peter and John to go and get some things done before it is time for the meal. We will read part of these preparations, but there is more than just that… They would have gone to the temple to acquire the lamb for the meal. No butcher shop, no farm. The priests had to slay this one and so you would go there, select and purchase your lamb. There are not a whole lot of options on how you are going to cook this lamb—you cannot shove it on a stick, rotate it for hours and then shave it off into a warm pita and smother it with some tzatziki sauce. You are really only allowed to cook it one of two ways: you can either baste it with wine or you could baste it with olive oil. And then you cook it for three hours.
It’s theologically significant that Jesus chose the Seder meal during Passover to share as his last meal with the disciples. So, let me spend just a few minutes explaining what the Passover is and why this meal is so important.
The book of Genesis tells the story of beginnings, in particular God’s beginnings with us. When Genesis ends, there is a shift in the story. Not that there wasn’t strife and struggle in Genesis, but Exodus begins with unfamiliar leadership, hostile conditions, a people in slavery and a chosen people who had in essence forgotten the one that chose them. For 400 years the Hebrews were making bricks and serving as slaves for the Pharaoh—doing whatever he wanted them to do. They grew in number and this made Pharaoh paranoid and so his treatment of the Hebrews became less and less neighborly. The people would cry out to God in desperation and when the time was right, God would appoint the reluctant Moses to the lead the people.
So, Moses went to Pharaoh and said, God says you need to let His people go—they need to go and worship me somewhere else and Pharaoh was like, “I don’t think so, why would I let my slaves go?” And you remember how the story goes… Pharaoh says no, God tells Moses to go back and to ask again and then to perform a miracle—to bring a plague, Pharaoh is unmoved and the cycle repeats itself over and over until finally God decides to send the mother of all plagues. God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh that that night, an angel was going to come and the angel was going to take the life of the first born in every household. From the Pharaoh’s palace down to the hut of a slave, even the animals in the pastures will experience this pain, this loss.
But God told Moses that if you do these things then your first-born will be saved, but if you don’t obey my orders exactly then you will suffer the same fate. Go and get a lamb, slaughter the lamb and take the blood and smear it over your doorpost, over your lintel and then I want you to roast that lamb and eat it all that night. Don’t save it. Don’t save it. Don’t pack it. Don’t think about taking it. There is no time to make some bread from scratch and let it rise, so make bread without yeast and eat your lamb with the flat bread and some bitter herbs. Do all of this, and when the angel of death comes to town tonight, the angel will see the blood of the lamb and Passover your house and you will be saved.
And so the Seder meal that they eat the first night of the Passover reminds them of this time: a time when God heard their cry and stepped in and intervened in history on their behalf. A time when God took a people that were not a people and made them a people again. And so they gather each year, on this night to retell this story and to eat the meal so that they can remember. And they tell the story to their children and their children’s children because God told them to. Year upon year they remember God’s saving love around the table. And this is the night that Jesus chose to have his last supper with his disciples.
Now listen to the way that Luke tells us the story (Luke 22:8-20):
So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, ‘Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it.’ They asked him, ‘Where do you want us to make preparations for it?’ ‘Listen,’ he said to them, ‘when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house he enters and say to the owner of the house, “The teacher asks you, ‘Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ ” He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there.’ So they went and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal.
When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him. He said to them, ‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he said, ‘Take this and divide it among yourselves; for I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’ Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.
Who would you invite to your last meal? Seriously think about it for a minute. This is your last chance to tell whoever it is that you invite the things that you want to make sure that they understand and know—whether it is how you love them, where the key to the safety security box is, why you shouldn’t wear makeup like that—whatever your great pearl of wisdom is to share… who do you invite to share that with?
Now, let’s think about who Jesus invited. There is the one who will betray him: Judas. I guess that your opinion of him fluctuates with how you view his roll, but he doesn’t come out of this looking or feeling very good. There is the one who is about to deny him: Peter. You might think that after one or two times of boldly denying Jesus, you might not need to a third to be aware of it. And then you have 10 other loved ones that are going to abandon him: the rest of the disciples.
Jesus knew what was in store, he knew that he would be alone when he did what he had to do, he knew that they would all fail him in one way or another and he loved them still. He invited them to one more meal: a meal rich in history, rich in meaning that took on a new meaning that night. Knowing what they would choose to do, he gave them the bread and he gave them the cup and he loved them still.
I actually find comfort in that fact. It’s easy to talk about these men that Jesus called and to talk about their shortcomings and their failings and judge and criticize them. We learn how to be followers of Christ a lot of times by NOT doing what they did. We get to learn from their mess-ups. And here are these guys whose worst moments are caught in scripture for the world to see. They say that you can’t really learn from watching someone else fail—you have to experience it yourself. You have to learn lessons the hard way. We see these stories about betrayal, denial and abandonment and yet we do them ourselves practically every day in very different ways—everyday that we engage the world outside of ourselves we participate in ways that put ourselves first before the Gospel. So, I am hesitant to point a finger because I end up seeing myself when I do that. I end up realizing how none of us are good enough to have earned a place at the table. And yet Jesus invites us all to come.
When I was at Dacula, one of my job responsibilities was to find communion servers. I would look to include people who offered a different voice—I didn’t want to just have the servers be the chairs of committees or the ones who lead the Sunday School classes or the ones who always served—I wanted a greater representation of the Body up there. One Sunday after worship, I went up to a man who attended every Sunday. He sat in the back with his wife and they were quiet. They would come in, she would talk some, but he was always reserved and very shy. They would bolt as soon as worship concluded.
So, I rushed over and went up to him and explained that I scheduled the communion servers and I wanted to know if he would be willing to serve communion the next Sunday. He gave me a very perplexed look, but instead of asking what the look was about I figured that he just wanted to know what he had to do and so I kept talking… I told him about what to say and what to do and that if you forget your line it’s no big deal—you whisper it anyway and no one will notice, gave him the whole spiel and he was still standing there giving me this confused look. So, I just said you think and pray about it and we will talk again and for the first time he said something: “uhh-okay.”
A couple of days later, his wife called me and told me that they had been talking about it and that her husband just couldn’t do it. And then she told me his story that I didn’t know: her husband was an alcoholic. Everyday he struggled not to drink. Everyday he fought his demons and he because he knew himself, he knew that wasn’t worthy to do this.
I was shocked. Not that someone said no to me, but my heart ached that he couldn’t see value in himself, that he couldn’t see any part of himself the way that God sees him, and that somehow he missed the point of Holy Communion. And so I talked to his wife about how that is at the heart of communion, that no one of us are really worthy, but that God loves us so much that he meets us there and at the table of the Lord, we receive forgiveness and grace and love. We come to the table a broken people who God makes whole.
I tend to lose sight of this. When I think of HC, I think of those things that I learned in seminary. Things like:
The word for remember in Greek is anamnesis which does not mean that we remember like we remember an event or why we walked into a room, it’s a different kind of remembering—it’s an active remembering, it’s a physical remembering—it’s to remember not as an act in the past, but a moment in the present.
Communion is about many coming together as one—eating from one loaf, sharing from one cup—and go forth as one. It’s about fellowship
It’s about sacrifice, things to come and so often it feels like it is about ritual. We do it because we are told to. I know that I sometimes loose sight of that. I forget that when I come to the table that it is Christ that I meet there. That I come as broken as the bread is and if I open myself up-- if I allow myself to be fully present at the table-- then God’s grace will change me. HC is about being transformed by God.
Let’s prepare our hearts to be so…
Our scars are often like that-- they show moments of where life has gotten dirty--where we have pain and yet they heal and in them we can see a blessing. The scar that shows that we survived cancer or that we got a new knee. When the time is right, we might be willing to show our scars... to show the world that we made it.