A few years ago a young woman came up to me after a Sunday morning Eucharist.  “I really don’t like your worship services in the Episcopal Church,” she said.  “They are very gruesome; all you talk about is death.”  I was really taken aback.  Her view of our liturgy was shocking to me.  But, you know, she was right.  For a non-Christian it may seem gruesome.  Every Eucharist is a remembrance of a death.  We frequently forget that, don’t we?  We have become so used to the words of the liturgy that we may fail to really comprehend what it is about.  It took someone for whom our worship was quite alien and strange to help me to truly hear, “On the night before he died for us he took bread.”

            On this night we especially remember “the night before he died for us.”  On that night before he was to be condemned and executed, “he took bread”.  Isn’t that amazing?

            Do you remember the movie "Dead Man Walking?"  In that wonderful and terrible story there is a condemned man about to be executed.  But this condemned man, unlike Jesus, is guilty, a convicted rapist and murderer.  He is not a likeable character.  He is most repulsive.

            As he leaves his cell for the execution chamber he is surrounded by guards.  One of his guards announces matter-of-factly, “Dead man walking.”  As the clock reaches toward midnight, the hour of he execution, the murderer has only one person to whom he can turn: Sister Helen Prejean, a nun who has become his spiritual director for this last week of his life.  She stops this macabre procession and looks into the horror-filled face of the prisoner. 

            She tells him one last thing.  She tells the “dead man walking” that when they tie him down to the table, and when they are sticking the needle into his arm, and when they pull back the curtain to the viewing room where the witnesses will be watching, she tells him, “Look at me, Matthew.  When you are on the table, I want you to look at me…I want you to look in the face of love.”  And so, when the lethal injection is given, the murder looks at only  one thing:  the face of love; the face of Sister Helen Prejean; the face of Jesus.

            If you want to look into the face of Jesus, look at him in this sacrament of his Body and Blood.  If you want to  look into the face of love, see Jesus with his disciples in the upper room sharing The Last Supper and washing their feet.  Jesus knew what was awaiting him.  He knew that the political and religious powers-that-be were finally ready to kill him.  He could see the hand of the betrayer on the table before him.  He could predict that his friend Peter would deny him before the next dawn.  He would leave that upper room and plead in prayer to his heavenly father to be spared the humiliation, the pain, the torture, and the death.  This was his last night.  This was his last meal.

            Still, Jesus took the bread and the cup of wine and identified them with his own  life that was being given up for the life of the world.  In going to his suffering and death on the cross, Jesus called on the disciples to give thanks over the bread and wine in memory of him.  And so it has been done up to this day.  In this meal Jesus was telling his followers, is telling us now, “Look at me in this supper and know that I am with you always.  Look at me in this bread and win and know that I pour myself out for you.  Look at me in this sacred meal and know that I love you.

            That young woman who was upset by our liturgy that morning was right.  We do  remember a death.  But more than that.  We see in the Body and Blood of Christ the very love of God poured out for us sinners, for you and me.  In his death we see God’s love.  In his death we discover our life.

            When we “Do this in remembrance of Him”, we are remembering with what great love we have been loved and are loved by Christ.  We remember that it wasn’t the nails that kept Jesus on the cross.  It was God’s love.

            Amen.