August 17, 2003
"The Most Memorable Meal"

What was the most memorable meal you ever ate?

Everybody has one, and usually quite a few, a meal where everything just came together perfectly—the food, the setting, the company. Maybe you can think back to a meal in a restaurant where you and your spouse were dating. Maybe it was a picnic where you and the kids had such a great time that you never wanted the day to end. Have you got one fixed in your mind? Now, show of hands, please—how many of you are thinking of a meal where your loved ones were involved? There are lots of special occasions involving food, but the most memorable meals invariably are eaten with our loved ones.

If Robin were here this morning she could tell you about her favorite meal right down to the color of the flowers on the table. She has an amazing memory for food, and, since we’ve been fortunate to have traveled a good bit, her favorite meals have all occurred on vacation. Her all-time favorite, though, would have to be in Quebec, Canada. She would tell you that the French cuisine in Quebec is much superior to that in France.

The restaurant was called “Aux Ancient Canadiens,” a toast to the French who settled that part of Canada, and Robin rhapsodizes to this day about the creamy potato and leek soup served in a tureen, and the mushroom duxelles wrapped in puff pastry.

But if I were to tell you about my most memorable meals, they would deal not with the excellent food, but with the people I was with. Most of the stories, to be sure, were in Robin’s company—such as the time we ate in a fancy Pittsburgh restaurant where the waiter insisted on taking my crutches and putting them in the kitchen. And then they lost them. That story wasn’t very funny, but the train trip we took to Florida was hilarious, as Robin tried to learn to pour coffee in a bouncing dining car. There was the night that we ate on Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh, with the lights of the city reflecting in the rivers below. That was pretty magical.

What do you think the disciples of Jesus would say, looking back at the end of their lives, was their most memorable meal? I’d like you to assist me with your imagination as we try to answer their question. Certainly they had memorable meals before they became disciples. Can you imagine a man like Philip recalling the dinner he had enjoyed with a certain dark-eyed girl, the sweet tender fish and wheat cakes with honey?

Or how about James and John dining one last time with their father before they followed Jesus into ministry, sharing cheese and bread and new wine.

Maybe Matthew would recall the time Jesus sent him out to preach the gospel, and a family invited him into their home to share their dinner of roast lamb with all the trimmings? In each case the food was great, but the company even better.

But surely in the months and years of their lives that followed Christ’s ascension into heaven, they would think back in amazement at the meal we heard about from the Gospel of Luke this morning. In this story we have a role reversal of sorts. Instead of Christ doing the feeding, as he did in the Last Supper, this time he is fed.

He appears in the room where the eleven have hidden themselves and asks if they have anything to eat. Luke makes a point of saying “Jesus took a piece of cooked fish and ate it in their presence.”

This was Luke’s way of refuting those who doubted that Jesus rose from the dead in his body, but was only a ghost.

Jesus returns to the disciples after 48 hours that have been the most miserable of their lives. The facts were that for the last three years their lives had taken on meaning. They weren’t just fishermen any more.. When they had broken bread with Jesus it usually was the most primitive meal possible, but they were happy. They were with the one they loved, the one who loved them. Then came 48 hours of despair, wondering what life would be like without their friend, their teacher.

   And when he returned, they couldn’t believe their eyes, not even when he showed them the holes in his hands and feet. You know how people say if something seems too good to be true, it isn’t? That was their attitude. Luke says they were too overcome with joy to believe. So Jesus took the ultimate step in proving that he was still very human: he asked for a bite to eat. Can a ghost chew? Have you ever seen a ghost swallow?

 That was his way of invoking their memory: He stood before him, a living, breathing human restored from the dead, with all the needs that any human has—including the need for the joy of dining with his loved ones.

It wasn’t so much that Jesus needed to eat as much as he needed to satisfy the hunger of the disciples to believe. Jesus feeds us where we need to be fed. He sees our needs, and is compassionate to meet them, just as God was compassionate with the Israelites wandering in the desert. He sent them manna, bread from heaven.

That’s what we’re about to partake of together, bread from heaven, and when we do we remember the compassionate Jesus, the one who fed the 5,000, the one who ate with outcasts and sinners when nobody else would do it.

He sees our situation today and he is just as compassionate with us. He knows that we are wandering in a spiritual wilderness. He knows that we are weak, spiritually malnourished.

In a very real sense, all bread is bread from heaven. We have no control over the sun and the rain, and we take no thought about whether the farmer has what he needs to raise his crops, we just assume the bread will be on the shelves when we are ready to buy. We enter the store, we head for the bread aisle, usually in the far corner of the store so we are forced to walk past the goodies and perhaps make some impulse buys.

A vast array of bread choices awaits us, white and wheat and rye and raisin, and we make a selection, hardly aware or caring that the plastic wrapping on the bread costs more than the wheat in the loaf itself. We take it all for granted, but at the communion table our memories are stirred into action.

Here we are, sitting in this beautiful little church in Vanderbilt, Pa., yet when we take communion together all our memories, all our senses, are invoked. We find ourselves transported to a tiny upper room in Jerusalem, half a world and two thousand years away, where Jesus and his 12 closest friends first shared this meal together.

That was a Passover meal, a special celebration, and probably on the menu that night they dined on lamb and bread and wine and herbs, maybe some cheese and fruit and nuts. But it was the bread and wine that the disciples would remember. They would remember Jesus blessing the bread and breaking it and then walking to each man in turn, saying gently, a little sadly, “Take and eat,  this is my body, which will be broken for you.”

He knew the events that would follow, he could see that he truly would be broken for those he loved. And he passed the cup and said “Drink of the blood of the new covenant,” marking the unbelievable devotion of the creator dying for the created..”

Certainly the disciples would remember what Jesus added, “As often as you repeat this meal, do it in memory of me.” Remember me! As if they could ever forget.

And we feel we are right there with him, hearing his sweet voice and wondering why he sounds so melancholy as he says “This is my body, broken for you.” We can taste the grapes, we can touch the rough crust of the bread, we can smell the smoke from the oil lamps, we can even sense the uneasiness in the room after Judas departed. We feel as if we’re there, a feeling that defies what is logical and rational in life.

The logical and rational things of life don’t always translate well into what is miraculous, but there’s no getting around it—what happens at this table is a miracle, a miracle as overwhelming as any that Christ performed during his time on earth, as great as curing lepers or restoring sight to the blind. It is Christ who breaks bread with us and shares the cup with us. And we feed on him, feed on his grace. The Last Supper was his last full meal with his disciples, yet it is a meal that never ends. The problem with great meals is that they end, but this one doesn’t.

This meal comes back every time we gather at the table and remember. It is never finished, and won’t be until we gather for Christ’s banquet in heaven.

There are certain things that we are never to forget, and foremost among them is the love of Jesus for all of us. Communion is to remind us of his promise made that night: “I tell you that I will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until that day when I drink it anew with you in my father’s kingdom.” The Cup not only represents our forgiveness by Christ’s death, it stands for the second coming of Jesus when we will all be taken to our eternal home. The two tie together: because of his death, we can look forward to his second coming. In that lies our hope, and that hope was carried forward by the disciples from that room, for the rest of their lives.

Memory is a funny thing—it comes and goes, blinks on and off. Have you ever had a moment when an old song will suddenly take you back to your high school days? Sensory input will do that. The Hebrew people fervently believed in this phenomenon.

Memory had the power not just to launch a daydream, but to totally recreate the moment. For the disciples who carried the story of Jesus to the ends of the earth, the communal meal brought him very much back in their midst. When they remembered, he was there.

And so it is with us. When we take the bread and the cup, Christ is here in our midst, offering himself to us all over again.

C.S. Lewis, one of my very favorite Christian authors, once told the story of a woman who was thrown into a dungeon with no light to break its gloom but a single small barred window high above the floor. While she was thus imprisoned she gave birth to a son, and as the boy grew she told him stories of the world she had left behind, the world he had never seen. She told him stories about emerald-green forests, of wheat fields and mountain streams, about blue oceans crashing onto golden shores, about the insistent song of a hungry bird before the first reddish rays of the sun proclaimed the dawn.

But she didn’t think he understood, so she drew pictures with the only tools she had, a pencil and a few scraps of paper, and she thought the sketches would help with his understanding. But one day as they talked she realized they had not helped—in fact, they hindered his understanding. He thought the outside world was made up of charcoal-gray lines on faded white paper, and decided that the outside world was even less than the one he occupied.

This story is a metaphor, which Lewis meant to show us that the things we see in the world before us are mere pencil sketches compared to the world beyond us, the world that awaits us. Every person, although made in the image of God, is just a stick figure of God.

Every forest or waterfall is a charcoal gray image of the beauty that awaits us in Heaven. Every pleasure is a flat and faded image of the joy that will be ours when we are reunited with God in the next world.

That poor boy could not imagine the beauty that lay beyond, because he could not be boosted up to the window to see out.

But what Christ did when he instituted this meal is to boost us up far enough that we can glimpse our past and our future. Every time we come to this table we can just barely peek out through the bars of this existence and see for the first time what red and blue and green and gold are all about. We can see all the way into our future when we will be eating this meal in joy, and we can see all the way into our past, to the day God created our souls, each one perfect and indestructible.

This, where we are, this is just a way station on our journey through the desert, and communion is a reminder that our destiny lies in the next world, not in this one.

It’s a memorable meal indeed. Amen.