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(Yes, this was a homework assignment. If you aren’t interested in seders and Brethren Love Feasts, skip this post now.)

In learning about the communion practices of mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, I feel a certain Brethren smugness that my tradition’s practice of contextualizing the communion in a Love Feast, with an agape meal and foot washing, is much more in keeping with the way Jesus practiced his first Eucharist. But after attending the Center for Jewish Studies’ Sephardic Passover seder this year, I was shamed into a different feeling, that even my church’s communion practice widely misses the mark on recreating the scene and spirit Jesus might have experienced. I recognize value in the ritual of communion and what it means for current practitioners, separate from whether the ritual ‘does likewise’ enough to Jesus’ institution of the practice, but for my own ritual practice, I value how closely it imitates Jesus. I pose myself, then, this question: is the Brethren Love Feast a ritual true enough to Jesus’ intended teachings (as far as we can possibly know)?

The Brethren Love Feast is one of the most distinctive practices of the Church of the Brethren, and one we are most proud of. In reading about the Love Feast in Brethren history, I am struck by the Brethren authors’ sense that we, so often overlooked as Christians, have really gotten it right on this ritual, by keeping communion closer to the way Jesus instituted it so long ago. In an introductory pamphlet, Who Are These Brethren?, Joan Deeter expresses this quaint sentiment: “Several times a year most Brethren congregations join Christians around the world in celebrating communion as a part of Sunday morning worship. But for Brethren there is more. A love feast or agape meal, which includes the communion of bread and cup, is held at least once a year and often twice.”

For us Brethren, who don’t even know what the high church term “Eucharist” means (it had to be explained in an article for Brethren about communion practices!), communion means Love Feast. In the early Brethren church in the US, the Love Feast was a two-day weekend event for members coming from disparate regions to celebrate together, but today it is a briefer affair. On Maundy Thursday, and often in the fall during harvest time or World Communion Day, congregations gather in the evening to sing, pray, hear Scripture, share the kiss of peace, wash one another’s feet in a round, eat and drink together, and prepare our hearts for the responsibility of partaking in communion with Christ. We also take the time to clean up together, as an important part of the fellowship meal. By including the foot-washing and the communion with a shared meal, we are reenacting the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples (especially John 13, on the foot-washing).

We use the whole evening as a chance to remember the setting of the rituals on that crucial night, when Jesus instituted not only our reenactment of gestures with bread and cup and wash basin, but the spirit of mutual service he commanded his followers to adopt, as a continuation of his ministry after he was gone. We may never know exactly what Jesus did that night, but we can construct important rituals to remind us of what we think that night meant. The Brethren Love Feast gets closer than the Eucharist alone to recreating the experience for Jesus’ followers today, helping us understand just how the ritual came to be. But the Love Feast still remains worrisomely distant from its parent, the Jewish seder.

The Passover seder is a festive Jewish meal, to commemorate the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, and has been practiced for millennia, though the exact form of the meal has been debated and changed over time and across sects. The meal consists of ritual eating, drinking, washing, and recitations, in up to 14 steps in the Sephardic tradition. The steps of the process that struck me in the seder I attended this Passover were the hand-washing before the meal, the breaking of bread (matzah), and the blessings over the cups of wine. Each step and each food is infused with multiple layers of meaning, to explain why it is part of the service and how it recalls the exodus experience. The layers of meaning are not fixed, and vary from gathering to gathering. For example, in our meal, the rabbi was explaining how the lamb shank on the seder plate was to remember the animal sacrifice of Temple worship, when one of the other participants interjected, “I thought the lamb shank was for remembering the lamb’s blood shed over the doorways of the homes of the Jews in Egypt.” The rabbi replied, “Well, yes, it also means that.” Her message was that the exact elements of the meal and the precise significance of each step were not the important part of the feast, since each element had many meanings to different celebrants; the point was to remember the journey, in community, and the elements are tools to aid that remembrance, but not the end in themselves. (She summed up the meaning of the whole feast of remembrance: “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.”)

Thus, when Jesus picked up the wine and said a special blessing over it, that his disciples do the same in remembrance of him, what he was doing was adding another layer of meaning, another midrash, on top of the already multi-layered traditional feast. He was not inventing a new ritual when he broke bread before his friends; he was adding a new spin on the old ritual by making it also something for them to do to remember him and his death. He expected them, as Jews, to continue to celebrate the Passover traditions, and he asked his friends to remember to invite him into their ritual of remembrance whenever they would do so. Jesus wove his own life story into the traditional memory of Salvation History, deepening the meanings his disciples would read into the same practices the other Jews would celebrate.

Yet, many Christians today don’t even know what a seder is. We have been cut off from our faith’s Jewish roots. Is it now possible for a ritual steeped in the context of a Jewish holiday to have the meaning it was ‘supposed’ to have, when it has been isolated and contorted into wholly different settings in churches on Sunday mornings - or even in Brethren churches in evening Love Feasts, when we talk only about Jesus’ Salvation History, as if he invented the idea, and not the wider scope of that story that encompasses the origins of the Jewish people?

I believe that two rather opposite possible responses to this dilemma may exist. First, we can recognize the original context of the ritual in the Passover seder, and restrict the meaning of the communion/Love Feast to celebrations of Passover. We as Christians can seek to resurrect our Jewish roots and celebrate ‘communion’ only as Jesus instituted it, as another layer of midrash within our celebration of a Passover seder. This would follow the philosophy of my church’s founders, in keeping the communion contextualized, though it would take it further than even they had gone: “Earlier Brethren insisted that members receive the bread and cup only in this setting of the love feast. They argued that anything else fractured the wholeness Christ intended when he set the example at the last supper.” I would hope that any Christians who attempt to recreate a seder experience, however, do so with the utmost reverence for their Jewish peers, so as to avoid co-opting and contorting an important tradition from another faith. Ideally, the seder could be practiced by two communities, Brethren/Christian and Jewish, together commemorating their shared past and their harmonious future, even while recognizing the different levels of meaning each element in the service now holds in their distinct belief systems. If done right, this could be a powerful reconciliation meal and ritual of foot or hand-washing, emphasizing commitment to mutual service as a recognition of the interconnectedness that links our histories of pain, struggle, survival, and bodies broken by slavery, by Holocaust, by torture, and by crucifixion.

As a second response to the dilemma of keeping the communion/Love Feast true to its origins, we can expand its meaning to infuse every meal we partake in. Jesus’ midrash on the seder expanded the meal to be about remembering his crucifixion, every day, and expanded the foot washing to be an example of the service his disciples were to perform, every day. Through Jesus’ martyrdom, he made every moment of our lives different, so we must see him present in every moment, and at least in every meal we partake in. As Luther observed in 1526, Jesus “is present in all creatures, and I might find him in stone, in fire, in water, or even in a rope.” Luther concluded that Jesus’ omnipresence did not preclude Christians from focusing on his presence in Scripture, but to take a rather Quaker interpretation of it, perhaps we might be wiser to recognize Jesus constantly, in every creature and every element and every food. Jesus is certainly present in every bite we consume, his tissue and his spirit nourishing us not only on Sunday mornings with a quick nibble and sip. The prayer of grace or thanksgiving before a meal serves that purpose of hallowing the food being put into our bodies, commissioning it for Christian service through us, and recognizing, through thanks, the interconnected web that brings food to our tables. We could see that prayer of grace as the ‘remembrance’ of Jesus’ body being broken for our sinfully violent society’s way of life, and the many other bodies broken for our society’s violent way of procuring food, through the meat industry, unfair labor practices, diet culture, pesticide pollution, and concentrations of wealth that leave much of the worldwide Body of God hungry.

At the root of either of these new/renewed practices, though, is simply a revolutionized relationship with food and fellowship. If our Christian rituals are to be of any use to our congregants they must be ways to prepare them for life in the world, ways to orient their relationships to the world, and not simply set-apart acts for set-apart times, irrelevant to the world outside the sanctuary. Our foot washing rituals must be ways to conceive of ourselves as both servant and recipient of service, and thus to live responsibly and in thanks for the interconnecting tie that binds. Our communion rituals must be ways to take our meals seriously, to think about where our food came from, and to trace what effects our food choices have on ourselves and our world, and thus to remember how present Jesus is within the natural elements and between us in relationships. Our Love Feast must be not a sacred time, but an ordinary time, that is also sacred in calling attention to what is always ‘sacred’ within what is ‘ordinary.’ To be true to the experience Jesus called us to remember him through, we must be open to multiple layers of meaning within each element of the service, beyond his own story, and even meanings created today in our ongoing interactions with our ancient traditions.