Bread, Wine & Tears: Holy Communion as a Funeral Meal

In January of 2020, a couple hundred people gathered under a tent on a chilly evening at the Metal Museum along the river in downtown Memphis. We gathered for a memorial celebration for the life of Kevin Gallagher, hosted by Kevin's wife Rev. Dr. Stacey Smith. We ate dinner together and listened to friends and family members share stories from throughout Kevin's life – from childhood adventures shared by his longtime best friend, to the shining moments of his professional career told by US congressman Steve Cohen. There was laughter, there were tears and there was a lot of sentimentality as all those gathered reflected on the incredible significance of Kevin's short life.

Here's what made the gathering even more special – sitting in the front of the large crowd of those gathered to remember and to celebrate, was Kevin, laughing and crying along with all of us under the tent that evening.

Having what's called a “living funeral,” or a celebration of life that happens before a person has actually died, has become increasingly popular in recent years. Spiritual and psychological professionals alike have noted the benefits of living funerals, as they allow for celebration and mourning to happen simultaneously, and happen alongside the one who is dying. These celebrations normalize grief and death and they create moments of laughter and levity even when facing hard situations. Because of this, living funerals can offer great benefits to our mental and spiritual health, and one of the most important parts of a living funeral is the food. At Kevin's celebration, on a cold and windy day in January, we warmed ourselves inside and out by eating chili together around large round tables. The act of sharing a meal while sharing our collective grief was so profoundly beautiful and an experience that I will never forget.

I started doing a little bit of research on the subject of funeral meals and found that many cultures all over the world gather for communal meals that center on sharing grief. In Iran, Turkey and Armenia, families and friends will sit around a table together on the 7th and 40th days after a death and eat halva, a super sweet dense confection. In Greece, those who arrive at orthodox funerals will come with koliva, a dish built around unprocessed kernels of wheat or wheat berries, and the process of preparing the wheat berries takes two days during which time the bereaved are to pray and think about the deceased. The Amish have their traditional Funeral Raisin pie, and in the Mormon church community in Utah everybody knows about a dish called funeral potatoes, which always shows up at a grief gathering following a death. In Kyrgyzstan, honoring the dead through a communal meal involves frying balls of dough into puffy Nuggets known as borsak, and the cooks fry the dough and as they do it's believed that the rising smoke carries up the family's prayers to appease the dead. The cooked puffs are then spread across a large table as the family recites sacred texts and prays for the dead and then they eat their funeral meal together.

Grief and food have a strong link across our human rituals and experiences, and particularly within faith communities. I was a pretty young child when I learned the role of casseroles in any church – that somewhat mysterious pan filled with a weeks worth of food that shows up on the doorstep to help a family through a hard time after suffering a loss. Feeding one another and sharing a meal together is one of the most powerful ways that we care for each other in hard times.

I want to apply this lesson to our revisiting of the Last Supper tonight. In our sacred text, Jesus gathers with his disciples to celebrate the Passover meal, and then he shares the shocking news – one of you will betray me and I will die. The disciples argue with him a little bit and then they go back to eating, perhaps sitting quietly in the shock and confusion of what they've just been told. At this point, Jesus institutes the Lord's supper or Holy Communion. He foretells his own brutal death – a broken body, his blood being poured out. We can only imagine the shock and confusion that those gathered disciples felt hearing this news. They sat together, sharing the meal, and letting the grief and confusion of what Jesus had shared start to sink in. Jesus has told them he's leaving them, he's going to die, and then he stays with them and shares a meal telling them this is the last meal I will share with you until we are reunited in my father's Kingdom.

Friends, the Last Supper was many things, but one of those things was a funeral meal. When Jesus shared the news that he would be betrayed and would die, he then feeds his disciples and sits with them in their grief. It was a funeral meal. And when Jesus told his followers, “Do this in memory of me,” he was reminding them, commissioning them, to feed one another in his name. Jesus chose a meal as the occasion to tell all 12 of the disciples together about the terrible days ahead. He chose to tell them, one final time, over a meal so that as he shared the devastating news, he would also feed them as they grieved.

The Last Supper was a funeral meal where the still-living Jesus grieved alongside his disciples as they ate the familiar foods together. My friends, recent days and months have been filled with a lot of grief. The normal occasions that bring grief into our lives have still happened, but we've experienced them all during a season filled with high profile tragedies, mass shootings, political turmoil and horrific wars overseas. Grief feels amplified as we continue to emerge from a global pandemic and amidst incredible divisiveness in our nation.

As we celebrate Holy Communion together this year, remember that while there are many ways to understand this open table and communal meal, Jesus instituted this shared meal at a funeral meal, where his disciples ate together in the midst of their grief and confusion. Celebrating this shared meal together has always served to unite us as one community, sometimes as an act of joy, but sometimes as an act of love on the midst of grief. One of the wonders of the Communion meal is that it meets us where we are. This meal we share, instituted in a room filled with shock and grief, binds us together as one family of God's children.

Regardless of our own personal state or emotions, this meal we share together connects us with one another and with all believers through space and through time. As we grieve the many hardships we endure in this profoundly broken world, allow yourself to tap into that grief as we celebrate Communion tonight. Imagine yourself as one of the disciples at that first Communion meal, feeling the heaviness of what you have just been told. And through some of that grieving together over this shared meal, we are reminded that we carry that burden of grief together, never alone. We know what will happen tomorrow on Good Friday, and together we eat and we grieve the persistence of evil this world. We eat, we grieve, and we wait expectantly for what will come next. Amen!