Even though it’s going to take twice as long as usual, Anni and I want to personally share in serving the Sacrament of Holy Communion to everyone who is here this morning.  We feel that it’s the perfect way to share our love, and God’s love with our church family. 

       We are family, bound together by God’s love, and Paul's most famous metaphor, that the church is "The Body of Christ" expresses the truth that when we gather together we are more than simply the sum of our individual physical bodies. We are a spiritual body as well, and that makes all the difference in the world.  And, thank God, it doesn’t have to always be so darn serious!  I love the line that Woody Allen puts in his movie, Annie Hall: “I was thrown out of New York University for cheating on a metaphysics test.  The professor caught me looking deeply into the soul of the student seated next to me.” 

        We have had many, many opportunities to look deeply into one another’s souls over the past 13 years.  That’s what it means to be a spiritual family.  Whenever we break bread together, we are celebrating the power of the Holy Spirit to bind our souls together in God’s love, and we use the very ordinary, earthly symbols of bread and juice because God’s love for human beings like you and me was expressed most clearly not in some abstract, metaphysical concept, but in the flesh and blood reality of Christ’s body.

        Jesus was a teacher of spiritual truth, but what’s unique about Jesus is that he was the living embodiment of the truth he taught.  Jesus taught about God’s love by living God’s love, by becoming God’s love, and the greatest teaching is through sacred transmission.  Here’s how it works:  When divine love takes on human flesh, human flesh correspondently takes on Spirit.  Orthodox Christian theology teaches that God became flesh - in order that flesh might become Spirit.   That’s the symbolism expressed in the sacrament of communion.

        In her book, Minding The Body, Mending the Mind, Joan Borysenko, writes, "There is tremendous power in a group. People who belong to meditation or prayer groups report that when they're praying or meditating for someone else, the healing they feel within themselves is remarkable. There's a tremendous sense of love that opens the heart . . . they feel it as a flow of love deep inside."

        You and I are part of a tremendously powerful prayer group, an eternal body that is bound together by love and united in a fellowship of the Spirit, and that’s why we're here this morning. The Living God is not a metaphysical concept and we’re not busted for looking into one another’s souls. In fact, that’s our whole reason for being together. God is love - healing, comforting, challenging love, and the heart of God is expressed in not only the heart and soul, but also through the body of Jesus Christ, the body of someone who loved, comforted, challenged and healed other people and who taught us to love one another in the same way, even to the point of suffering passionately on their behalf. 

        We United Methodist pastors are often advised to not get too emotionally wrapped up in the lives of our parishioners, because as itinerate ministers we’re always going to have to move on and it just plain hurts too much.  Well, Anni and I have blown it!  We love you, we’re going to miss you, and that hurts.  But I believe that our loving, and even our hurting rests on solid theological ground.  One of my favorite poems is about the vulnerability of God’s love, and how it is expressed through human love.  I’ll close with this:

To love means to be vulnerable.
To love is to be vulnerable because
unless you love
all people are interchangeable.
Loving is investing yourself in another person
so that what happens to that person
makes a difference to you.
Loving is my investing of myself in another person
so that what happens to that person
is important to me
and then when that person hurts, I hurt.
Therefore, the more I love, the more I suffer.

To be a lover means to be vulnerable.
There is no way to love without vulnerability,
without the possibility of pain;
And the more you love,
the more loving you do,
the more loving you risk,
the greater the possibility of pain.
And that is the price that is paid for love.

Can you imagine what it is like
to be God who loves all of us?

God is a lover,
and the pain of the crucifix is a symbolic representation
of the ultimate love of God.

I used to wonder:
How could a cross be a symbol of love?

                                                                         Bruce Rahtjen

        Come now to the Open Table of our Lord.  All are welcome to feast at the banquet of God’s eternal love. Come, taste, and know that God is good.  Amen.