We are here to praise and enjoy God with body and soul, mind and heart, with song and word, with hands and feet. We are here to give because of the abundance God has given us, to share with each other, and to receive, because God has created us to depend on each other. We are here to celebrate the differences that otherwise might divide us: differences of age, of body, of culture, of opinion, of ability, of religious conviction. We are here to put things in perspective: to celebrate what matters, to laugh about things we take too seriously, to cry about things that truly touch our hearts. So may it be this morning: Amen!

From grains, bread connects us to soil and a three billion year old process. Photosynthesis, first begun when ocean organisms, earth's first populations, with neither brains or bibles, learned how to create a chlorophyll molecule. Since then all biological life is able to trap, store, and convert sun's energy into food that sustains both the plant and that specie's place in the food chain. Like the elements connect Christians to the nourishing ways of Jesus, food unites us to our ecology and the life-sustaining ways of nature itself. Communion, it is not only a rite of Christianity, it is the evolutionary levan in the Earth story itself.