Breaking Bread Together

We are doing gratitude experiments this month, getting ourselves acclimated to be on the lookout for opportunities we have to be the hands and feet of Christ. When we can be Jesus to someone, we should be grateful. Over the course of the year, one of the things I want us to do is to be on the lookout for opportunities to say thank you. Really, what I want us to look for are eyewitness reports of people acting selflessly and sacrificially and then figure out a way to say I saw you. Thank you! We had a church member just recently share with me something she saw. She was at Dollar General store and as she was coming in she saw an encounter with a woman who was upset that she had locked her keys in her car. She was anxious and concerned. Plus it seemed obvious that the cost of getting someone to come unlock her car was weighing on her. Across the parking lot from Dollar General is Harrison’s locksmiths. She asked them to come do it and asked them to bring her keys to her in the Dollar General when they got it open. The church member was in dollar general when he did and she asked him how much she owed, he simply said there was no charge. You were right here in our parking lot basically and it only took a couple of minutes. You could see the relief in her eyes. Her countenance changed. She gave the guy a big hug. As I heard the retelling of this story, the church member said she would like to do something to express gratitude for such a selfless act. She ended up getting some goodies from one of the local bakeshops and took it over to Harrisons lock and key and she told them she saw what they did and saw the impact it made on the woman and the relief on her face. Then she gave them the goodies and said THANK YOU. Isn’t that cool. Gratitude! We are going to be building toward showing gratitude to people in our community who are constantly serving and sacrificing on behalf of others, and we are going to need your help. But in the meantime, if you observe something like what I described, then let’s find a way to say thank you for making our world better. These are the things that move our world in the right direction and we need to say thank you to those who are working to do that. Our finance committee and church council have allocated some money in this year's budget for us to show gratitude to our community. THis will allow us to really show thank you over the course of the year to our community. I want you to be thinking about ways we can do that. We all need to be looking for ways to say thank you to others who are making a positive impact in our community. Last week, as our first experiment, we asked everyone to take two bottles of water and give them to someone who looked thirsty. Now, that can be literally thirsty or it can be thirsty for companionship or thirsty for hope or any other type of spiritual or metaphorical thirst. If you did not get your water last week or if you would like to take more water with you then please feel free. I want all of those 1000 bottles to end up in the hands of people in our community or beyond. And as we talked about, in Jesus’ culture, when you offer a drink of water to someone who is thirsty, then you owe them a year’s worth of friendship as a thank you for the privilege of serving them. In our text for today, it is important to note that this is just after Jesus’ resurrection, on the same day in fact. Word is getting out of what happened. Jesus comes and begins walking alongside a couple of people who had been following Jesus though they didn’t recognize him. He plays dumb and asks them what they are talking about and they say you must be the only person here who hasn’t heard about Jesus being crucified and now being raised from the dead. As they got to the village of Emmaus, the followers reached their destination and as Jesus looked to be continuing on, they invited him in with them to stop and eat. While at the table, Jesus took bread, gave thanks to God, broke the bread, and gave it to them. It was in that moment in the breaking of the bread that their eyes were opened and they realized that it was in fact Jesus who had been with them all along. Did you hear the words used - Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke the bread. Sounds like our communion liturgy doesn’t it? I told you last week that the Greek word for gratitude is eucharista. At the root of that word is charis, the Greek word for grace. Eucharista may have sounded familiar to you. Another name for Holy Communion or The Lord’s Supper is the Eucharist. If you look at the communion liturgy in the back of our hymnal, the heading is The Great Thanksgiving. That is what it means - EUCHARISTA - gratitude to God for Jesus and for Jesus’ sacrifice. This meal is a meal of thanksgiving for Jesus’ sacrifice. There is more to this first century middle eastern understanding though, beyond offering someone a drink of water and a year’s worth of friendship. In addition, in the first century middle eastern culture, if you offered someone who was hungry something to eat then you owed them a lifetime of friendship. Think about this for a minute. A lifetime of friendship. It should be considered a sacred privilege to be able to sit down with someone and break bread with them. And when we come to this meal we are intentional to say that this is not our meal, it is our Lord’s supper and Jesus invites you to come and eat with him. And what we know is that with this invitation to come, Jesus is offering you a lifetime of friendship. Isn’t that what this meal stands for really? Jesus’ body broken and blood shed in order to clear the path for humanity to eternity - so that we can spend eternity in relationship with God - an eternal lifetime of friendship. Which brings us to our gratitude experiment of the week. YOu can imagine where it's going can’t you. Remember I want to hear your gratitude testimonies at With this experiment, I want you to invite someone to eat with you. Now, it can take many different forms. I would think optimally it would be an invitation to your home for a meal, but I get that may not be doable for some so an invitation to dinner or breakfast or lunch or for an ice cream cone or an appetizer or really any type of food for that matter. But I do have a couple of caveats. First of all, I don’t want it to be a person or people that you normally would invite to a meal or that you normally get together and hang out with. I want it to be someone you aren’t familiar with. I’ll be honest, when I was first planning out this experiment I wanted to say if you voted for Donald Trump you had to invite someone who voted for Kamala Harris and if you voted for Kamala then it had to be someone who voted for Trump, but I nixed that because I felt it might be too far out of our comfort zones. But just like in our text, when we sit down and share a meal with someone and spend time talking getting to know them then our eyes are opened. We realize we have more in common than we thought. We realize that just because we think differently, vote differently, live differently, that we do not have things in common. Now, it can be someone in the church that you are looking to get to know. It can be someone you see out in town who looks hungry, but instead of giving them money or a bag of fast food, go and buy their meal and sit and talk with them. They may not be able to remember the last time they have had a meaningful conversation with someone. We all crave friendship. It can be someone new to your neighborhood or work or school. It can be someone you don’t understand at all and use it to seek to get to know them. It is the getting to know them that helps break down the walls between us. It is offering a lifetime of friendship. I’ll tell you who my Heather wants to invite to dinner - our mail man and his family. If you live in our neighborhood then you know Greg. He is the friendliest, kindest, most caring person in the world. I was walking one day and he stopped his route to say hi and when he left he waved and told me he loved me. We are going to try and make that happen. Second, I don’t want it to be with a member of the staff of the church. I worry that we could be a crutch. If you do need a suggestion, though, then the staff will be prepared to offer recommendations - just call the office or let one of us know. Our church used to have a supper club. I believe it was called GUESS WHO IS COMING TO DINNER. We can recreate that for you! I think especially during and after Covid, we have become so isolated and that isolation has taken its toll on us. This is about relationship. Sharing food together is offering relationship. And church, most importantly remember that as we come together for Holy Communion - the great thanksgiving, that in the midst of this, it is a meal that Jesus prepared through his sacrifice, and HE INVITES YOU TO come and eat with him. And he also offers a lifetime of friendship to you. ANd when we eat of it, may our eyes be open to the power of that relationship and may we share it with someone else in this challenge. Thanks be to God AMEN