Bread (4)

Maybe not everyone would admit it, but I’d be willing to bet that almost everyone has been part of making a disastrous meal at some point in their lives. These are the nights when things just don’t seem to go right for any list of reasons and we end up breaking down and ordering some takeout. Myself? I’ve been part of and responsible for quite a few of these in my time as an amateur chef…!

A few of them come to mind, but the one that sticks out the most happened to be during homemade pizza night at our house. Pizza is one of my favorite things to make and we’ve been known to do it quite often. I make my own dough, of course, and I also make my own sauce. If you don’t already know, San Marzano tomatoes make the absolute best pizza sauce, especially if you get the ones that were actually grown in the San Marzano region of Italy. The ones by Cento are the best…they come in a yellow can.

So I spent part of the day preparing for pizza night. I had my dough, my sauce, my ingredients…we make some traditional stuff–cheese and pepperoni, but we also like to mix it up a little bit and try some different stuff on there. I’ve been known to throw whole sprigs of rosemary and pistachios on a pie. And don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. It’s fantastic. And it’s become a family favorite…

Normally, I’ll make four pizzas in a night. And that sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. The pizzas we make are pretty small and the crust is really thin, so you can put away quite a bit of it on a Friday night. On this particular night, I get the first two done and everyone’s eating, watching a movie, having a great time, relaxing in the living room. And I throw a third one in the oven. We use a pizza steel, similar to a pizza stone, so that our crust comes out nice and crispy…it’s neapolitan-style pizza, for those of you who care about that sort of thing. At 550 degrees, these pizzas will cook in just a matter of minutes on that pizza steel. Really no more than 6-8 minutes and it’s ready to go. Normally, I just stand by the oven and watch the pizza and take it out when the cheese gets how I like it. I don’t set a timer or anything like that. I just pay attention.

Well, this time, I make the critical mistake of going out to the living room to catch a little bit of the movie with the girls. I lose track of time and what feels like all of a sudden I start to smell smoke. I run out to the kitchen…knowing what’s going on and open the oven. The smoke rolls out, sets off the smoke alarm…and we have the Nest alarms, this is the google system that’s all connected together through the internet. And we have six smoke detectors in house…son of a firefighter…and the way this system is set up is that when one of them goes off, they all go off…and it’s connected to my phone…so we’ve got a symphony of smoke detectors going off and I can’t reach the button to make it stop. So I just take the pizza out of the oven and get it on the back porch as soon as possible. I’m opening all the windows and turning on the fans and I finally get to the button to silence all the alarms.

The kids didn’t budge. I mean, they just sat there and watched the movie. But the dogs were interested in what was going on. And once the smoke cleared out of the kitchen and the burnt pizza cooled off a little bit, I decide to throw the remnants out into the yard and I let the dogs outside to scavenge for it. Well, that was also a mistake, because this was the only time they decided to fight with each other…over a burnt pizza. So then I have to go break that up as smoke is pouring out of my house, I’ve got six smoke detectors going off, and my dogs are fighting with each other in our back yard. I mean…it was a complete disaster…

Luckily…I didn’t burn the first two pizzas…and I still had two doughs left in the fridge. This was a messy meal, for sure…but we still ate and I have a pretty good story to tell about it. And it was a mixture of good times spent with family, and some pretty bad times with the other stuff that was going on…and that’s how it goes sometimes when we gather around the table with each other.

In this Bread series, we’ve been looking at how God feeds us—not just our bodies, but our hearts, our stories, our community. This week, we come to the most famous meal in Scripture. It’s not a nice and tidy story. It’s not peaceful. But it is sacred.

Today we’re in Luke 22 verses 14-23…the Last Supper.

Jesus and the disciples are gathered together to celebrate Passover. We’ve mentioned Passover a few times here recently, and it could use some explanation.

Passover is a Jewish festival that remembers how God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. It celebrates the night when God “passed over” the homes marked with lamb’s blood during the final plague and led his people to freedom. The holiday highlights God’s power, faithfulness, and desire to rescue the oppressed.

The meal that’s eaten during Passover is called a Seder, which retells the Exodus story using symbolic foods. Each item on the Seder plate represents a part of the journey: bitter herbs recall the bitterness of slavery, matzah (unleavened bread) represents how quickly everything happened during the escape, and there’s a lamb bone on the plate that points to the Passover sacrifice, which was a lamb and that was the blood that was used over the doorways. There’s a sweet paste called charoset (ka-row-set) which symbolizes the mortar used by slaves to build things in Egypt, and parsley dipped in saltwater recalls tears shed in bondage. The meal is structured around storytelling, questions, and blessings to help each generation remember and give thanks.

This is the meal Jesus is having with the disciples in the Upper Room. And it’s important to just have a baseline understanding of what this meal is because it’s got a lot of old covenant symbolism associated with it. And what Jesus is about to do is use this meal for His own purposes to set forth a new covenant with God’s people….

So they’re all sitting around the table and Jesus is talking about how eager he’s been to share this meal with everyone as He’s about to enter the time of His greatest suffering. And he lets everyone know that this is the last time he’ll eat this meal until His second coming. Then he takes a cup of wine, blesses it, and invites everyone there to share it with him, because again, this is also the last time He’ll partake of this cup until his second coming.

Then he takes some bread, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it with the disciples, saying, “This is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” After the meal, he takes a cup of wine and speaks of a new covenant—one that, like all of God’s covenants, is confirmed with blood. Jesus connects the wine to his own sacrifice, offering himself as the foundation of this new relationship between God and his people.

I don’t know how often we really get into the symbolism of Jesus choosing this particular time in the calendar for all this to go down. In a lot of churches, this is a story that’s told right before Easter. We did something a little different this year and that’s okay. But the thing about it is that Jesus is being very intentional about everything that’s going on. He’s connecting His Messianic purposes to well-known stories in the Hebrew bible. Stories that everyone would’ve known, at least among the Jewish people around Him. And these are sacred stories. Stories that have deep meaning and that are celebrated with festivals, meals, rituals, and special readings. Through his teachings, miracles, and just in the way He lived his daily life, Jesus has primed everyone to be able to make these connections. But when everything really starts to unfold, you can only imagine the feelings that would’ve arisen from hearing Him start to tie this all together.

It needs to be pointed out that this is a pretty tense situation. The disciples can feel that something is different, there’s a weight to the air and it’s pretty apparent they aren’t just celebrating the Passover with their traditional meal. This is supposed to be a joyous occasion remembering being delivered from slavery and what they’re starting to see is the shadow of death draping itself over Jesus. And just when it seems like the pressure can’t get any heavier, Jesus drops this little number on everyone… “But at this table, sitting among us as a friend, is the man who will betray me.”

And Jesus detonates a bomb that produces a mushroom cloud the size of a small planet. He tries to explain himself, but the disciples immediately try to save face in this situation asking, “well, who would do such a thing?” Then it turns into an argument about which of them will be considered the greatest among His followers. Jesus ends up shutting it down, of course…

All this to say…if you’ve ever had family drama at the dinner table, or if you’ve had to put out a few fires in the process of making dinner, you’re in good company with Jesus and the disciples, because they dealt with the same thing…

Despite how charged up this situation starts to get, the thing that continues to stick out is the reality that Jesus continues to make gathering around the table a personal experience. It’s important to know that during this time, sharing the table with people is an act of intimacy, belonging, and peace. It’s why some people got so worked up when Jesus decided to eat with the people thought of as sinners, or people who were considered ritually unclean. By gathering everyone in this way, including the one who betrays him, Jesus is showing us that His grace is what allows us to keep coming to His table. While he’s teaching them and bringing forth this new covenant, he looks his friends right in the eyes and says “this is for you.”

We take communion at our church every single week as a way to remember the things that are going on in this story. In my opinion, it’s the most important thing we do every week. I mean, we have this table here behind me with the words do this in remembrance of me inscribed right on the front of it.

Another thing that stands out in this story is the imperfect nature of the people who are gathered around sharing this meal. Our communion meditation is meant to be a thing that helps people clear their minds, and prepare their hearts to accept the bread and the juice that we pass out here every week. With that being said it’s not meant to be this thing that’s set aside for any so-called perfect people.

This line of thinking translates to us living here today. Communion isn’t a prize for the spiritual elite. It’s for tired dads, mothers who wrestle with kids all day, it’s for worn out and worn thin believers all over our congregation who just need a moment of rest to be reminded that Jesus is who he says he is. It’s for those of us who have accepted Jesus and have chosen to follow him, but are still battling with what that looks like in our daily lives. It’s a thing that brings us together in spite of our differences with the hope that we can get on the same page about some things.

Which is really the point of the entire thing if you really think about it, you don’t need to be an English major to understand that the words communion and community have the same root to them. It’s not just about a quiet moment between you and God. It’s about the larger implications of millions of believers coming together at this table in unison in church services all over the world.

The bread is broken. This serves as a reminder to us that Jesus takes broken things, blesses them, and makes them whole again. This includes us. But it’s also a reimagined passover, one that replaces the sacrificial passover lamb with Jesus. This is where the table becomes the place where a new kind of deliverance is announced—not just from Egypt, but from sin and death. It also serves as a covenant meal for Jesus’ followers. Not one that’s written on stone tablets where the emblems are kept inside an ark, but rather one that is written on our hearts, with Jesus' body and blood serving as our reminder.

This is an important meal. It’d be tough to argue against the idea that it’s the most important meal in history. And if this meal really is that meaningful—if it's a covenant written on our hearts, a new kind of deliverance, and a table of grace—then it might be a good idea to approach it with the reverence and respect it deserves so it doesn’t just become another church habit. Maybe there’s a way to live all week long with the table in view. Maybe communion isn’t just something we do, but something we walk toward. What would it look like to prepare our hearts before we ever take the bread or the cup? What are the things that lead us to the table in the first place?

So what I have for us today is three simple, but meaningful ways we can prepare for communion during the week…

This one is called “Friday Reset.” One thing I will do, and really I’ve been doing this a lot more than just on Friday here lately, but I will sit in the living room by myself with just a reading lamp on and reflect on my week. Or my day. Depends on the day, right? But I just try to process everything going on in my mind that I feel like might be out of control. I might even ask myself, “Where did I feel broken this week or today?” And one of the things this does is it helps me get a hold of things that might sneak up on my brain that are going to ruin my weekend or the next day.

And sometimes I’ll do this sort of processing with Michelle, but here lately I’ve tried to make this more of a routine between myself and God for two reasons, 1) It strengthens my relationship with the Lord. This is an easy way for me to enter into a time of meditation with God at my side and then offer up my prayers to Him in a really easy way. Doing this in this way centers me and humbles me and places God in the correct position of authority in my life 2) Michelle’s got her own stuff going on and everytime I talk to her about some of this stuff, she gives me the great advice of just giving it to God anyway. So why not just start there in the first place.

But you don’t have to do this by yourself. Again…communion/community. Feel free to invite your family into this with you. Or whoever you live with. Invite each other to share just one word or moment that might have made your week hard. And resist the urge to fix others’ problems. This is a time just to explore the stuff we found challenging. There’s no reason to complicate it by giving advice…unless we’re specifically asked to.

Doing this helps us keep communion from becoming just a “Sunday-only” routine. It creates space to approach the table with a clearer mind and a heart that’s been gently prepared to remember the sacrifice and suffering of Jesus. It’s a way to stay mindful of the table throughout the week, so that by the time we arrive on Sunday, our hearts are already leaning in.

Here’s another one–this one is called “Set the Table”…and full disclosure, I have not tried this and I didn’t come up with it on my own. It’s something I read about it and I thought it sounded a little different…and I like different, so here you go. The idea is to physically set your dinner table on Saturday night as a spiritual practice of anticipation. Just like you might do for a Sunday night family meal, you’re gonna put everything out on Saturday night. The tablecloth, the plates, the silverware, the napkins, glasses, whatever it is. And I don’t know if I would get out the good plates, but maybe just your regular dinner stuff, you know?

Then while this is happening, we’re gonna do two things. The first thing is to use the time to reflect in such a way that you consider what needs to be on the table tomorrow. And it’s not necessarily in the physical sense, but hopefully what this does is cause us to think metaphorically about how to prepare ourselves for the next day. The second thing is just to say a quick prayer for God to prepare your heart. That’s easy.

So…here’s the deal. I present this idea to you knowing that I’m probably not going to do this. However, there are things I already do in a nightly routine that could become a time for me to reflect on these same questions anyway. How many of you prep your coffee maker the night before? Michelle does this on most nights for us. Do you pack a lunch for the next day and keep it in the fridge overnight? Do you set out clothes to make your morning go a little smoother? Maybe you set something by the door, or put it in your car so you don’t forget it in the morning…there are all kinds of things that we do to prepare ourselves for a less stressful morning. We can use these times to reflect on what we might need spiritually as well as physically. And if you have kids in the house doing these things with you, this is a perfect time to connect with them, express the intention of your soul, and guide your family in a really meaningful way. Just imagine the impact that could have.

The last one…Keep a journal. And I really like this. There are some of us who keep an active prayer journal. This is a great idea because it has a tendency to help us remember the things we said we were going to pray about and helps keep us focused during our prayer times. I know there are some of you who happen to keep multiple prayer journals, organized by category, which is an extra step that’s honestly pretty impressive, although I know that’s not necessarily your goal. It just dawned on me that it might be a good idea to do something like keep a communion journal.

How helpful might it be to have something to look at as a reminder of how you felt during the week? Every time you felt weak, weary, blessed, or grateful…and then to be able to recount those feelings in the moment as you were preparing for communion. You might write down moments when you saw God’s faithfulness in the middle of stress, or when you felt like you were running on empty and needed grace. Then, when you approach the table on Sunday to take communion, you’re not starting cold—you’re coming with a story in hand. It doesn’t have to be long. Just a sentence or two here and there. But over time, it becomes a living testimony that grows week by week—a quiet rhythm that draws your heart to the table with deeper meaning.

As we wrap up today, my hope is that we respond to this simple invitation not to wait until Sunday morning to process our communion meditation. Yeah, it’s gonna take a little bit of work, but I really think it could be valuable for us to approach Sunday morning with the anticipation throughout the week of meeting Jesus at the table. You know, like I said, this is a celebration of the most important meal in history. And it’s not going to be perfect. It wasn’t perfect for Jesus and the disciples. It’s going to be less like a five-star experience and more like burning the food on family pizza night. But when we gather together on Sunday we can know, despite everything that might’ve gone wrong that week, Jesus is still inviting us to sit down and eat. When grace is the main course…that’s when the meal tastes best. And even when we don’t get it quite right, Jesus still meets us there.

Let’s pray.