Bread and Juice and You and Me

Bread and Juice and You and Me

This Sunday we will gather around the bread and the cup of the Lord's Table. At that time, there will be a spoken liturgy calling us to remember what these elements represent. In a baptist prayer book (a contradiction in title), there is a liturgy meant to bring forward the deeper reality of remembering. It is more helpful to think of remembering as re-membering, or that which joins back together. It is the undoing of dismemberment. 

I thought of the image of re-membering as I thought of all of my friends and family at the Gathering Church. Because of the nature of life in the Triangle, we are all quite separated from one another. Put pins in a map for each member and the distance between some of us would be obvious. Most of you I only see on Sunday mornings. Our physical distance dismembers us. But it is not just that. 

Our hectic schedules dismember us.

Our preference in basketball team dismembers us.

Our differences–age, race, income, politics–dismember us. 

Sadly even our religion can dismember us.

For all of the ways that this life tears us apart, I am thankful for the gift of the bread and cup, where Jesus re-members us as we remember him.