Call to Worship: “And the Table Will be Wide” by Jan Richardson
“… And we will turn toward each other without fear…”

Chalice Lighting: Composed by First Church youth, Ailish, age 7

This bread brings us together.
Brings food to those hungry, is a love symbol with a care-baking cook.
Warms those hungry and cold.
Brings joy to our church, here and now.
Is the way to peace.

First Reading: The Gospel of Luke, chapter 34, verses 13-35 (The Walk to Emmaus)

Second Reading: Logos by Mary Oliver

Sermon:

Friends, if ever there was a week for a barn burner of a social justice sermon, it is this one. It is difficult to even name all the injustices and acts of violence and threats to our democracy we’ve witnessed this week. American cities, including two I have called home, are currently occupied by their own country’s military for no other reason than our current President doesn't really like their politics. Important federal services have ground to a halt and dedicated federal employees are losing their jobs. We’ve witnessed attacks on free speech and insults to the women, LGBTQ+ folks and people of color who serve in our armed forces. And last Sunday, while we gathered joyfully in fellowship hour, an Iraq War veteran with sick kid at home rammed his truck into an LDS church, then opened fire on worshippers before setting fire to the church.

I should be preaching a call-to-action sermon, about democracy or gun control or defending our immigrant neighbors. But those sermons so often require an attitude of righteous anger and if I’m being honest with you all, this week, I mostly feel grief. For the loss of safety and sanctity in our houses of worship and places of learning. For families torn apart by our immigration policies. For the chipping away at democratic principles and freedoms. For loneliness and isolation that beget fear and violence. For all the ways we are failing each other. So today, you’re not getting the barn burner sermon. Maybe next week. Certainly, at some point. But not today. Today we are turning towards something both plain and mysterious, to borrow Mary Oliver’s words. We are going about as back to basics as we can get. To the stories and practices at the heart of worship for the earliest Christian Communities. Today, In our grief and our searching we will look for comfort and hope in ancient scripture and nourishment and healing in the humble grace of broken bread.

So, I return to my favorite Biblical story. One that has brought me hope and joy when I am feeling at my lowest. The story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. I loved this story first because it is engaging narratively and probably reminds you of other religious myths and parables. That’s because it’s a classic example of a “theoxeny myth,” stories of gods and goddesses disguised as traveling strangers often seeking food or shelter from unknowing mortals. These stories are meant to teach lessons of hospitality and found everywhere from Greek mythology to Disney movies (think Beauty and the Beast). My love for the story deepened after learning It is a favorite story of queer theologians, who see the LGBTQ experience reflected in the disciple’s outsider status, intimate friendships, love of food and hospitality, and practice of radical inclusion.

But most relevant for today, it is the story I revisit to untangle what it means to partake in communion. In particular, what it means to practice this ritual when my heart is full of questions and doubt. Of course, the origin of the practice comes to us earlier in the gospels, at the last supper. But this story is our first story of Jesus’s disciples breaking bread after his death. This story tells us what it means to break bread in the shadow of grief when the hope of resurrection is not yet realized.

Let us really sit with this story for a moment and imagine what these disciples were feeling. The gospel author tells us these two companions are leaving Jerusalem with their faces downcast. They have just witnessed their friend and teacher brutally executed at the hands of the empire. As far as they know, this was the end of the movement and community he had formed. A movement of love and hope and radical welcome that they thought would bring about peace and redemption. They had their hopes briefly lifted by the news from the women that Jesus is still alive, only to have them crushed again when their fellow disciples found an empty tomb but no sign of Jesus.

So, they are in a deep and particular kind of pain and grief. They are also probably fearful. They are known associates with a movement that is now an enemy of the state. They’ve witnessed the empire's violent response to the message they carry. Remember, even Peter, the rock of this radical community, denied knowing Jesus three times when asked.

So, it is already risky what they are doing, sharing all of this with a stranger. And then, to top it all off, as night begins to fall, they invite him inside with them for food and shelter.

Even in their most despairing, even when it seems they have given up all hope of the kingdom of God becoming a reality, even when it seems the means aren’t bringing about the end they had so desperately prayed for, they still do not abandon Jesus’s teachings. They welcome the stranger. They share what is on their hearts with honesty, authenticity, and vulnerability. They offer themselves as traveling companions, conversation partners, and welcoming hosts. They are grief-stricken and fearful and still they say to this stranger, “It’s late. You should stay here. Eat and rest with us.”

Then, together they break bread. As they’ve done a thousand times with each other, with their community, with sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes and all the people you aren’t supposed to break bread with. As they did with 5,000 others near Bethsaida when the loaves and fishes multiplied to feed them all. As their friend and teacher instructed them to do in his memory, before his violent death. Through unimaginable grief, at this table miles from Jerusalem, with a stranger, they break bread. And then scripture tells us, he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

This is the first appearance of the risen Christ in the Gospel of Luke. And it’s a physical and embodied appearance. They are eating together. When Jesus appears later to the leadership huddled together in Jerusalem, hiding and discussing strategy, the gospel tells us, ‘they thought they were seeing a ghost.” But these wandering, grieving disciples headed for Emmaus get a glimpse of a living Jesus who touches and eats and tastes.

It is in literally breaking bread together, in this offering of materials hospitality that we experience the real presence of the sacred, not merely a ghostly kind of metaphor.

The vulnerability the disciples were willing to show and the risks they were willing to take to be in the presence of the sacred reminds me of radical priest and anti-war activist Dan Berrigan’s declaration, "When I hear bread breaking, I see something else; it seems almost as though God never meant us to do anything else. So beautiful a sound, the crust breaks up like manna and falls all over everything, and then we eat; bread gets inside humans. Sometime in your life, hope you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope you might have baked it or bought it – or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your hands meeting his across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot – or die a little, even."

Can you see why I love this beautiful, strange story? It reminds us of the unexpected and heartbreakingly human places in which we encounter the divine. The divine is present when we gather together in fear and mourning. When we desire but doubt the hope of resurrection. When we walk alongside friends and strangers on our journey and share our stories or try to make sense of the sacred. The divine shows up among the queers and outsiders and marginalized who offer hospitality and build community and throw fabulous dinner parties even as they are pushed out of the centers of power. When we are willing to be vulnerable and to practice a risky and radical hospitality, to sit at a table and break bread with friends and strangers, that is when our eyes too will be opened to the presence of the divine.

That, for me, is the power of communion. It’s not merely a ritual commandment but a sacred commitment to walking the walk. To staying alert to God’s presence, to staying tender, to welcoming the stranger, the feeding the hungry, to being in community and to trusting that in doing so that the real, palpable presence of the sacred will be made known to me.

We, gathered here today, are not so different from those two disciples. We have known grief and loss and fear. We’re watching political violence on our screens and trying to resist our own era’s forces of empire. We live in politically uncertain time when living out our values can feel both risky and futile. But we, gathered here today, are not so different from those disciples. We have each other. We have this church. We have this glorious fall day. We have our children composing chalice lightings about bread and community. We have these ancient stories. We have the teachings of prophets, living and dead that we can keep practicing even when hope for the kingdom they will bring about is hard to find.

And we have this bread and wine.

That’s what I can offer you today. Not a fiery call to social action, but bread and wine, and a prayer that in it we might find nourishment, hope and healing for this broken world, that in this humble meal we might encounter the living presence of a loving and liberatory God.

So, grieve when you need to. Mourn and question and lament. Walk away with your faces downcast like the disciples on the road to Emmaus if you must. But do not harden your hearts. Do not fear the stranger. Do not hoard bread, deny shelter, remove seats from the table. Instead, open your mouths and your hearts. Let the bread of life get inside. Accept the miracle, Mary Oliver tells us. Accept each word, spoken with love. Let us now share in communion together.