Last weekend after Saturday worship, I had a conversation with Tom Davis. He’s worshiped each week since my return from my sabbatical but this was the first time we were able talk. He said, “Are you getting tired telling everybody how your sabbatical went?”  It was easy to say no. A sabbatical is a family gift, offered by my church family for my well-being and renewal. I enjoy sharing our experiences. In fact, when the personnel committee began planning for my time away, Clay Summers said, “You’ll come back with a couple of years worth of sermon illustrations.”

 

He’s right and here’s one. On Labor Day weekend, Andrew and I visited my alma mater, Texas Christian University. You hear occasionally about me being a fighting Horn Frog although the sports teams of the seventies didn’t have much fight in them. They are doing well now as is the university. There is lots of expansion going on. I barely recognized some of the sections of the campus.

 

I haven’t visited TCU for ten years and I’ve never had the experience of being on campus with Andrew or Claire.  It was a great weekend of nostalgia for me. In addition to touring the campus, I saw friends and took Andrew to two of Fort Worth’s renowned restaurants that all TCU graduates talk about. The first is a barbeque place named Angelos.[1]  The specialty since 1958 is beef brisket and at meal times, people line up around the block. It looked just the way it did in the seventies, except the health departments made them get rid of the sawdust floor. Let me say that again. It looked just the way it did in the seventies. What restaurant do you know that hasn’t remodeled in 35 years? The bar stool with the stuffing coming out of the seat was still there. The place looked tired, very old, in need of repair and I was disappointed. I thought, “Andrew probably thinks this is a dump.” The food was still great and people still lined up to get in. I had to adjust my expectations. I said to myself, “This is okay, not what I expected but this is still something special.”

 

The other restaurant was Joe T. Garcia’s.[2] In 1935, Joe Garcia talked his wife Jessie into opening a restaurant in their house, located near the Fort Worth stockyards. They set up four tables of four in their living room and Jessie made her famous enchiladas. Joe didn’t advertise. He let his restaurant grow by word of mouth. Pretty soon, they needed more room for the long line of customers. Eventually, the Garcia moved out of their home because every room in the house was used as seating. To get to some of the dining rooms, you had to bend down and walk through a hole in the wall that led you through the kitchen. The enchilada family dinner was so good that it was recognized by the James Beard Foundation and Julia Child.

 

I heard that Joe T’s success over the last 30 years was phenomenal but the food was still wonderful. When we got to Joe T’s, I was disappointed because instead of a house, Joe T’s now takes up a full block. They’ve built additional space and added lots of patio seating. You still enter the original house though so I thought, okay, adjust.  We sat down and Andrew asked for a menu. The waitress said, “We don’t have a menu.” I thought, “I told you Andrew. You go to Joe T’s for the family enchilada dinner. They only have one thing.”  Then she said, “We have two family dinners. Do you want enchiladas or fajitas?”  My Joe T’s has fancy patios and fajitas. Like Angelo’s the food was great. But it wasn’t just the food that I wanted. I wanted Andrew to experience exactly what I experienced as a college student when I sat down to break bread.

 

You’ve had those experiences too. Everyone has these experiences. In fact, Ryan Hazen took Ruth, Will and Matt to Angelo’s and Joe T’s during the general assembly this summer and had the very same experience I did. You have these experiences. Sometimes it’s a college restaurant. Other times, it’s a honeymoon location or a favorite restaurant.  You have this memory of a meal or meals. It means a lot to you and when you return, your expectations aren’t met. When you break bread, it’s just not the same and you are forced to change your expectations about what the meal means.  We all have expectations about meals, about what it means to break bread.

 

This experience is as old as humankind and it’s certainly as old as the Bible. Food and meals play a prominent role in scripture. In biblical times, gathering and preparing food occupied a significant part of Israel’s daily life. There was always the danger of crop failures and famines. Food could be scarce; water too. You didn’t turn on a tap to get water. You had to find it and then draw it from a well or a spring. Bread was baked from scratch and required hours to prepare. Food was important because there wasn’t a grocery store or a fast food restaurant on every corner.

 

It’s not surprising then that many religious celebrations center on food. Jewish rituals reminded believers that food was a gift from God. Two of the three major pilgrim festivals centered on food. One is Shavuot or the Festival of Weeks. It falls 50 days after Passover and it celebrates the historic occasion of the giving of the Law. But the festival also celebrates the harvest when the first fruits of the harvest are presented to the Temple in gratitude for God’s abundant blessing. It was at Shavuot, ten days after Jesus ascends into heaven, that the Holy Spirit fills Peter and the disciples and the church begins.  Christians now call Shavuot, Pentecost. But that name came later. When the 3,000 new converts shared with their friends and family, they would have said to friends and family, “At Shavuot, we received the Holy Spirit and since then, we have devoted ourselves “to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)  Their walk on promise road began as the food festival Shavuot ended.

 

The other food festival is Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles or Tents. It’s also called the Festival of Ingathering. Sukkot just ended last Saturday and as it was ending, I heard a rabbi say, “All we’ve done is eat.” In Sukkot celebration, tents are built in memory of the tents that were pitched throughout the forty year journey from Egypt to the Promised Land.  On the road to the Promised Land, God provides food, daily bread in the form of manna, rained down from heaven six days of the week. Exodus 16 says it was like wafers with honey. Sukkot remembers this gift of bread and God as the provider of grain.

 

The image of manna raining down was so important that they believed that when God sent the Messiah, he too would offer them bread. In fact, the Jewish teaching said, "As the first Redeemer brought down the manna ... so will also the last Redeemer cause the manna to come down." (Midrash Qohelet1:9)

 

I think you can begin to see the challenge of the disciples. They have this new congregation of Jewish Christians, fresh off the food festival of Shavuot. Implanted in their minds is the belief that the Messiah will be like Moses. He’ll bring bread. When the Redeemer comes, they won’t have to hunt for food anymore. When the Messiah comes, there won’t be anymore famine. When the Savior arrives, he will bring bread. Everyone understood this. The apostles have to reshape their expectations about what happens when they break bread.

 

I’m stepping out of scripture here to imagine what happened. You won’t find this story in the Bible but it doesn’t stretch my imagination to see it. Peter stands before the 3,000 just like he did on Pentecost, gets their attention and preaches his second sermon in as many days. He says, “We had this experience with Jesus when there were five thousand there to listen to the Teacher. When it came time to eat, I suggested that we send them away to find food. Jesus said no. Instead, He took five loaves and two fish and fed everyone. I’m sure that’s when some began to believe in him because we are taught that when the Redeemer comes, he’ll bring bread.”

 

“The next day, they wanted Him to do it again, to provide a meal. Instead, he said to us, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’” (John 6:35) We really didn’t understand what he meant. I didn’t understand it until after he came back. Then I remembered the night he was betrayed. On that night, when we ate the Passover, “he took bread and said, ‘Eat this; it’s my body.’ Then he passed a cup of wine and said, ‘Drink this. It’s my blood. When you do this, you remember me.’” We are about to break bread together. This isn’t a meal that is going to fill your stomach. This is eating Jesus’ body and blood and it is going to feed your soul.

 

That’s the communion meditation that I think Peter preached. He reshaped their expectations about what was about to happen and then they broke bread and drank wine and they put Jesus inside of them where the Redeemer could live within them and warm their souls.

 

They probably didn’t understand it any more than you and I understand communion sometimes.  In a few years, Paul started writing about what it meant to break bread and by the second century, the doctrine of transubstantiation was described in a document called the “Didache”. But at that moment, they took Jesus inside of them and something mystical happened. “Their eyes were opened”, their “hearts burned within them” (Luke 24:31-32) and they wanted to do it again which of course they did. “Day by day as they spent much time in the Temple, they broke bread….and day by day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:46a, 47b)

 

When you place this story within the context of Jewish history, it is nothing short of a miracle that transformed the expectation of the Savior feeding stomachs to a Messiah which feeds souls. Something as powerful as the winds of Pentecost filled them, something which we have tried to explain for centuries and still aren’t quite there. Their conversion was not just from Jews to Christians but from consumers to pilgrims. Their expectation about what it means to break bread changed.

 

I believe Sara Miles experienced this mysterious, miraculous moment of the first church in her own life. She tells about it in her spiritual memoir titled take this bread.  Raised as an atheist, Miles enthusiastically embraced secular life as a restaurant cook and a writer. In the eighties, she observed first hand the inhumanity and atrocities that took place in the Philippines, El Salvador and Nicaragua. She left the war zone to give birth to her daughter only to find herself in San Francisco, where friends were dying of the AIDS epidemic.  But early one winter Sunday morning, she walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church. She had no reason to be there and no idea why she chose to enter the building. She’d never heard the Gospel read and had never said the Lord’s Prayer. She certainly wasn’t interested in becoming a Christian. As the service began, it crossed her mind that it was all rather ridiculous but expectations about what was going to happen changed rapidly. Let me read it in her words.

 

“We sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and it was all pretty peaceful and sort of interesting. ‘Jesus invites everyone to his table,’ the woman announced…..And then we gathered around the table. And there was more singing and standing, and someone was putting a piece of fresh crumbly bread in my hands, saying ‘the body of Christ,’ and handing me the goblet of sweet wine, saying ‘the blood of Christ,’ and then something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.

 

“I still can’t explain my first communion. It made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced…. The disconnect between what I thought was happening--- was eating a piece of bread and what I heard someone else say was happening—the piece of bread was the ‘body’ of ‘Christ,’….utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry.

 

“All the way home, shocked, I scrambled for explanations. Maybe, all the pent-up sadness, accumulated over a long, hard decade, I was hypersuggestible…Yet that impossible word, Jesus lodged in me like a crumb. I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand. But it was realer than any thought of mine, or even any subjective emotion: It was as real as the actual taste of bread and wine. And the Word was indisputably in my body now, as if I’d swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh.”[3]

 

Wow, Jesus lodged in her like a crumb, burning, radiating inside of her.  It had to be the experience of those first believers walking away from Pentecost filled with the Holy Spirit, and then breaking bread on promise road.

 

I will admit to you that while I can recall a number of experiences around the table of our Lord, none have been as disorienting and transformational as that of Sara Miles. I suspect that few of us have experienced something so mysterious and mystical. But there may be a reason. Maybe we approach this table with the wrong expectations. On this world communion weekend, when believers around the world gathered around this table, what expectations have you brought to this meal? What do you expect to happen? Is it just a weekly ritual, a quick gift of grace for the past week’s sin? It is a nice meal with members of your faith family, something we do before we go home? What are your expectations?

 

If I may, let me change your expectations as we come to this table. This is the body of Christ…this is the blood. Eat, drink, take Jesus inside you.  Let him lodge in you like a crumb. May our Savior be as real inside of you as the taste of this bread and wine.  May the Word burn within and radiate through you, now and ever more.

 

Let us pray: 

Lord Jesus, we bless your bread and wine, your body and your blood. When we eat and drink you, come live within us. Amen. 

           

             

           

 

 

 

 

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