April 26, Easter 3, Signs and Wonders #2, The Breaking of the Bread

Acts 2:14a, 36-41, Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35

In our second lesson, Saint Peter is writing to the scattered little congregations of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. He calls them “exiles”, even though they’re all from-there, and live at home. What makes them exiles is their Christian faith, so they’re not at home anymore within their native culture, as its values and ideals are celebrated with the gods and goddesses.

Although, if they are slaves or wives, they still have to participate in the culture, which the Apostles take into consideration, and so they allow them to “obey their masters and husbands as to the Lord.” (It's a strategy, not a principle.)

Especially for slaves and wives it’s often impossible to get to whatever house it is where the church is breaking bread that week, so eventually the deacons develop the practice of delivering fragments of the broken bread to whomever is forced to stay at home.

Do you feel isolated in your own home? Even exiled? Are you a slave to the internet and your computer? Are you cut off from your relatives and friends? How do you feel about the way we have to do Communion? Does it feel less sacred when you break the bread in your own home? But that is so much closer to the experience of the Christians that St. Peter was writing to. They would have found strange the way we celebrate it in our sanctuary, although it feels more sacred to us and is more welcoming to outsiders.

We are cut off from that, our congregation is scattered, fragmented, and broken apart. So it’s fitting that the breaking of bread is a symbol of the body of Christ, who was broken on the cross. And yet it’s also our sign in which to recognize the presence of the resurrected Jesus, as at Emmaus.

So it’s a wonder that a symbol of his death is the sign of his resurrected presence. Why not expect to recognize him as something like the other gods and goddesses—his superpowers, or his being more handsome than Apollo, his splendid musculature, and to be celebrated in a classic temple. It must have been a challenge for those early Christians to believe in a God whose presence looked so unlike a god, but maybe it was a comfort to them in their own experience of social brokenness and fragmentation.

In our Gospel lesson, St. Luke is specific in his terminology for the breaking of the bread, that Jesus “took, blessed, broke, and gave.” That specific formula of those four verbs appears eleven times in the gospels and St. Paul. 

At the feeding of the 5000, he took the bread, blessed it, broke the bread, and gave it, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (with one small variation).

At the feeding of the 4000, in Matthew and Mark, he took, blessed, broke, and gave.

At the Last Supper, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he took, blessed, broke, and gave.

On Easter evening, at Emmaus, he took, blessed, broke, and gave.

In First Corinthians, St. Paul says that he got it directly from the Lord, that he took, blessed, broke, and gave.

Eleven times. It is not a coincidence, it’s an important pattern, and a sign determined by Our Lord himself.

I was teaching this in seminary once, thirty years ago. The next week one of the students raised her hand and asked to speak. She said, “Dr. Meeter, I just want to tell you that your lecture last week changed my life.” Nice! “Not actually what you taught!” Oh.

She said, “I know why Jesus did that with the bread. Because that’s what he does with all of us. He takes us, and blesses us, and then breaks us, and then gives us. I didn’t understand that but now I do. After he first took me when I got saved, I got very blessed, and it was great. But then things happened and I was broken, and where was my blessing? I thought something was wrong with my faith. But now I see that God broke me in order to give me, which is what he’s doing now. If he hadn’t blessed before he broke me I would have given up, but I guess he had to break me in order to give me.”

The best thing in teaching is to learn from your students, and what she said I recognized as true for my life too. I’ve been blessed and broken, and being broken I’ve been given. How about you? Does it help you to make some sense of your experience? Yeah, we’d all like to be blessed all the time, but it’s God’s way to give us after God has broken us.

And this is true about the Lord Jesus himself. He took our humanity in his incarnation, he blessed it by the way he lived, he broke it on the cross, and he gives himself to us in his Holy Spirit. And every Sunday he gives himself to our community in the breaking of the bread, in which we recognize him.

And we recognize our congregation too. In our own recent experience we can see the pattern of take, bless, break, and give. A year ago, on Palm Sunday, God took us from our exile in the Lower Hall, and God blessed us on Easter in the sanctuary, and for months afterward. And now we’ve been broken by the virus, fragmented and scattered. So I wonder, is God giving us?

God did not send the virus. It is simply nature, or nature out of whack. God did not send it, and yet our Heidelberg Catechism (for a number of reasons) advises us to take our health and sickness as from God’s hand. So we accept our breaking as from the hand of God. Which means that our challenge now is to wonder how God is using this to give us, to give us in greater mission.

So if our being broken is the sign, then our being given is the wonder, and we wonder how God will give us and to whom. Already these last five weeks you’ve been wonderful in giving yourselves. How long can you keep this up?

Yes, we are right to want to return to our sanctuary, not only for its sacred beauty but also because of our mission to our neighborhood, but our next great challenge is to leverage what we’ve gained by being broken into new ways of giving our church in mission beyond ourselves. It is not for me to be a part of this. But already you’ve shown I do not need to be!

How will you know what to do? Just work the signs. The more you work the signs the more you get from them. Look for the signs, don’t look for proof. A proof settles, a sign opens. Be open to wonder and imagination. Recognize the blessing and do not fear the breaking. Don’t fear feeling like exiles. It’s in the signs of a stranger that the Lord Jesus comes to you.

But even as a stranger he does keep coming to you, and in ways that are not apart from you; he always comes in human ways and human actions and relationships. Indeed, it has always been true, from Saint Peter’s day till now, that the very best sign of the resurrection of Jesus, the best sign to the larger world, is the quiet vitality of congregations, of communities of Jesus, whose binding principle is simply to share the love of God.

Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.