Easter Sunday Sermon: We Are Each Other’s Bread and Wine

John 20:1-18

This sermon concludes our Lent series on “Covenant: The Tie that Binds.”

Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.

Those words from the hymn “What is this place” kept going through my head as I went on my morning walks this past week. In fact, those words have being going through my head throughout this Lent series we’ve been doing on covenanted community. Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night and there it was:

Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine. 

We know from our Education Hour last Sunday that when we attach movements to words, it makes them come alive for us even more. So, please, if you want, do those movements with me:  Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.

We’ve been talking a lot about being bread and wine to each other these past six weeks. Two Sundays ago, some of us met during adult Education Hour to reflect on our series. We heard people say that in some ways this series didn’t feel like a separate series — it’s just who we are, it’s what we talk about a lot. And yet, we needed to have this special emphasis on covenanted community, to be reminded at this time of who are after the fraying experience of the last few years. Remember is  a combination of two root words that mean “again” and “mindful.” So, to remember is to be mindful again. We needed to be mindful again, quoting from our covenant, of our “voluntary commitment to members of our congregation and to communities of the world.”

One person said they felt it was easier to get people together during the past few weeks because of this re-membering.  And it did seem like an unusually rich Lent this year.  I found dozens of photos from events that happened since Lent began — a book reading I did in Oakland, Laeli’s dedication and comforter presentation, presenting Shannon with Clementine’s comforter at the Menno-run Community Music Center, a celebration of the textile arts and a dedication of all the comforters folks in this community helped make that are going to refugees all around the world, celebrating Sylvanna’s birthday — again at Karen and Steve’s house — with mountains of Indonesian food, and so many other meaningful things that happened in this place — moving stories from Russ, Angie and Ed about what it has meant for them to be in covenanted community, footwashing, fun children’s stories, a congregational business meeting and potluck, an Education Hour last Sunday in which many generations played and laughed and moved together.  And this re-membering wasn’t just for the sake of our community. We did a food drive for unhoused immigrant families that set the bar for other congregations, we showed up at a community meeting to support those same immigrant families in asking public officials to commit to support their plan to ensure that no more children live on San Francisco streets, and we showed up again in front of Sen. Alex Padilla’s office with other Christians to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.

What does it mean to say “we are each other’s bread and wine”? “Bread and wine” refers, of course, to communion, the embodied ritual we will do later in this service, in which we re-enact a story foundational to our faith.  Soon, we will say and hear the words: “On the night before Jesus died, he broke bread with his friends and told them, “Take and eat — this is my body given for you. This is my blood, shed for you.”

Jesus, is saying that he is voluntary sacrificing himself for them. Now, I don’t believe in the theology that says that God sent Jesus into the world to be the sacrifice for our sins. That’s not how I understand Jesus’ death. Nor do I like the way the concept of sacrifice is used to convince folks to  consistently put others’ needs ahead of their own because that’s the Christly thing to do.

But. The word “sacrifice,” if you look at its origin, means “to make sacred,” “to make holy.” There is sacred sacrifice — one that’s made voluntarily, from love— and it’s one that we must make if we want to follow Jesus in being bread and wine for each other and for the world.  In the Education Hour I mentioned, Russ referred to this kind of sacred sacrifice when he said: “There have been times in my life when I have not been alive, when a part of me has been dead. And other people have sacrificed of themselves to help me live again.”

I asked Russ more about this concept of sacred sacrifice earlier this week. He told me about how his parents had to sacrifice their vision of the son they thought would have. He said, “Especially the time in which I was born, my parents would not have thought ‘Gee, our son might be gay and move on to a big city and never farm and have kids.’ That’s all what happened in my life. My parents had to let their vision die to let me be who I am.”Because Russ didn’t stay in Kansas and take over the farm from his father — which is what his father had done — that land is no longer in the family. And neither Russ nor his sister had children. As he said, the Schmidt line ends with them.  His parents sacrificed the dream of how they wanted their life to be to accept the life that was offered to them — and they were and are grateful for that life.

Russ went on to talk about all the people — including many here — that gave so generously of their time and wisdom when he was lost in drinking, in addiction. All of these people, he said, helped him come alive when his spirit was dead.  Russ mentioned the gift of your listening presence to him over the years when he was so burned out in his nursing career. He said: “All those times, I whined and complained (his words). And people never said, ‘Oh, Russ, we’ve heard that story before — or, ‘Don’t come near us because you are just too depressing to be with.’ This community gave of themselves to listen to me and just let me be who I am. And through that acceptance and tolerance and listening ear, they helped me live through some very difficult times.”

I think of all the times we make sacred sacrifice for each other. We’re tired, but we cook the meal for the new parent, whom we know is more tired than us. We’d rather sleep in or read the paper on a Sunday morning, but we get up and we show up in this space or on zoom because we know our presence matters. (And it really does, I  want to say. It really matters. I feel it — we feel it — when any one of you are not here.)  We don’t feel like going out on a Thursday evening over the dinner hour to attend a community meeting but we do because unhoused immigrant families need us to.

Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.

I want to say more about the “dying and living” part of that phrase.  It is Easter after all.  In a little bit, we are going to do another embodied ritual — we are going to sign our covenant. I’ve heard from some of you that you feel okay enough about most of this covenant but the confession of faith gives you pause.  To me, the confession of faith is a distillation of how members of this community have understood the Christian story, the Christian myth, in a way that gives meaning to their life. And so signing the covenant is agreeing to enter into the dialogue about that story and how or whether it is meaningful to you.

Here’s the thing: We have got to live by some story.  Bob Dylan once famously sang, “You’ve got to serve somebody. It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you’re going to have to serve somebody.”  You’re going to serve some story, some myth.  It might be Christianity or Islam or an Indigenous cosmology, or it might be the individualistic consumerism of our dominant culture. But you are going to act out of some myth, out of some story, because we humans are meaning-making creatures and myths and stories give us meaning.

As writer Karen Armstrong says, “Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonize about the canine condition, worry about the plight of other dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories (myths) that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that reveled an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that — against all.. evidence to the contrary — life had meaning and value.” (From her book A Short History of Myth.)

I believe in the Christian pattern, the metaphor at the heart of our story: the dying and living. By belief, I don’t mean that I am giving an intellectual assent to it —  I mean that I have experienced this dying and living pattern in my own life. I have watched so many of you experiencing this dying and living pattern. I have watched over 24 years as you have gone through your Good Friday experiences of death, loss, betrayal, confusion, shame — everything we heard in that Passion story on Friday. And I have watched others — including, especially, people in this covenanted community — sacrifice so that you could live again, so that you could be brought back to life.

When we follow Jesus, the Christ, in laying down our self in love for others, we incarnate Divine love in the world. That word, incarnate, is wild. It means, literally, to make into flesh. When we follow Jesus, Yeshua, the Christ, in laying down our self in love for others, when we make that sacred sacrifice, we become each other’s bread and wine, we incarnate (motion) God’s love in our broken yet beautiful world.  We put it out there (motion) for people to feel, to be touched by it, to be nourished by it.  This “sacrifice” — done voluntary, for love — is what creates the conditions for what was dead to come alive again, is what allows resurrection to happen. 

Christ is risen, indeed — but, more to the point, Christ is risen in us, indeed.

(motions only) Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.

Amen.