Every Sunday in our Eucharistic prayers, we hear Jesus' command that we remember him in body and blood, in bread and wine. This command was made while Jesus and his disciples celebrated Passover in what has become known to Christians as the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday. When we break the bread, the large round wafer, we say, "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us." And so we recall an older tradition of making meaning out of meals: the Passover and its meal of remembrance.

Both Christianity and Judaism have continued to try to make sense of the Passover. Judaism has developed the Seder and Christians the Eucharist. Our tradition has moved the remembrance to the public space of the church, and away from the intimacy of the table in a home.

This is one place where it is essential to understanding Jesus to make some attempt to understand the Judaism in which he lived and breathed and taught. And yet, we must tread very carefully when trying to learn about the religion of Jesus, so that we do not inadvertently appropriate things which belong to our sister religion of modern Judaism. For a time, Christians explored what it would mean to use the Seder as a way to try and understand what Jesus might have been doing with his disciples. But the Seder as we know it today is a gift and product of the evolution of Judaism, not related very closely to the meal Jesus and his disciples shared. To borrow the Seder, as Christians, results in the appropriation we would like to avoid.

How then can we create an experience where we try to connect with the experience of this Last Supper of Jesus, whose remembrance is so central to our faith and liturgical life? This Maundy Thursday at Trinity, we will undertake an experiment in this exploration. We will serve the foods which are referenced in the Exodus and Gospel texts: lamb, bread, and wine. But should we have unleavened bread? Should we use matzoh? Or should we bake leavened bread? In preparation for this week I sought conversation with two people who care about these issues: Sarabinh Levy-Brightman of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard, and Dean Andrew McGowan of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. If we used matzoh, we could make our borrowing from our sister religion explicit. We would use matzoh as a way to say this: since Christians have not continued emphasis on the unleavened bread aspect of the Passover, we borrow tonight from the tradition that HAS continued to explore it--Judaism.

Or we could make pitas. They are so delicious when you make them yourselves! And the round shape feels most like where Christians have ended up in the Eucharist. We could use pitas that we make and say: This bread is not the bread of the Bible, but it has become the bread of the Eucharist. Take, eat. Plus, the text says he took a "loaf"--doesn't that sound like something softer than a cracker?

Dean McGowan got the final word: "Loaf in this instance simply means a whole unbroken baked bread item which would perhaps be more like what we would call a pita or naan or matzoh, etc. There are no loaves in the modern sense in the ancient world, because there are no bread knives. Bread is broken not sliced. Assuming we do identify the last supper as a Passover and that's what you are emphasizing, then unleavened bread is appropriate. Bear in mind that unleavened bread was not so unusual and not exclusively a Jewish usage. I would be tempted in your place to bake unleavened bread." So we will.

We will be making the bread and roasting the lamb in our own Trinity kitchen, serving each table. While we eat and drink our wine or grape juice, we will rehearse the stories that complete the ingredients--the stories of the Last Supper, and the Exodus texts on which that Passover meal was built. Led by the voices of children and youth, we will try to share an experience of communion with one another that remembers God's mighty acts in history, from the freeing of God's people from bondage in the Exodus to the freeing of God's people from bondage in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

I hope you will join us for this very special Last Supper/Maundy Thursday, which will begin with this dinner at 6 p.m. It will certainly be a powerful new way to enter into the Easter Triduum together.