Pastor Sean Palmer takes a look at Communion. What does this tradition mean in our lives and the life of our community? Pastor Sean introduces us to a journalist named Sarah Miles, the founder and director of The Food Pantry. Her story leads us into a deeper understanding of Communion.
Live Teaching Audio
Scripture & Quotations
“One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans—except that up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.
Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all but actual food—indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.”
- Sara Miles, Take This Bread
19 Jesus enters Jericho and seems only to be passing through. 2 Living in Jericho is a man named Zaccheus. He’s the head tax collector and is very rich. 3 He is also very short. He wants to see Jesus as He passes through the center of town, but he can’t get a glimpse because the crowd blocks his view. 4 So he runs ahead of the crowd and climbs up into a sycamore tree so he can see Jesus when He passes beneath him.
5 Jesus comes along and looks up into the tree, and there He sees Zaccheus].
Jesus: Zaccheus, hurry down from that tree because I need to stay at your house tonight.
6 Zaccheus scrambles down and joyfully brings Jesus back to his house. 7 Now the crowd sees this, and they’re upset.
Crowd (grumbling): Jesus has become the houseguest of this fellow who is a notorious sinner.
Zaccheus: 8 Lord, I am giving half of my goods to the poor, and whomever I have cheated I will pay back four times what I took.
Jesus: 9 Today liberation has come to this house, since even Zaccheus is living as a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to liberate the lost.
Luke 19:1-10
“But this is my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us. As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me: not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering, blaming hellfire of the religious right. What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.”
― Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion