It is Sunday morning. I am getting ready to host live zoomchurch online. The doorbell rings at the front door of our house.  Not entirely over-joyed to be interrupted in my preparations for “church”, I answer the door.

On the front step stands our neighbour from across the street. He is holding a large platter with a beautiful half loaf of bread still warm from the oven. “This is for you”, he says. He has been using these COVID days of isolation to learn the art of baking and wanted to share half of this morning’s production with us. Judging by his offering, he is close to being a master baker already.

At the beginning of zoomchurch this morning, after forty-five minutes of faces popping on to the screen for warm friendly gathering chatter, and following a shared opening prayer, and a sing-along “Gloria”, we play a video for the children prepared by Shannon. In the video, Shannon is baking bread. She walks us through the steps, fast forwards the waiting process for letting it rise and bake, then taking the perfectly baked loaves from the oven explains that, Jesus is the bread of life who nourishes us in our hearts.

What the viewers don’t know about this video is that, as things sometimes go in the ways of technology, in the last two minutes of the original production, the picture suddenly became fragmented and garbled. I discovered the flaw when I viewed Shannon’s video on Friday. Feeling a little sheepish, I emailed her husband who did the filming and let him know about the technical trouble. I assured him the audio was fine and that I realized it was probably too late to fix the picture flaw.

Allan responded saying they would redo the last two minutes, then edit it onto the earlier part of the video to make one film. No problem!… for him. What he neglected to mention of course was that this also meant Shannon had to bake two new loaves for the filming. The original bread had long since been devoured… these things happen with teenagers in the house.

We show the new version of the film Sunday morning; it is perfect.

But, there is one other piece of this story of which no one is aware. After having baked extra bread Saturday morning, Shannon rescued one of the loaves from the eating machine at her house and, like our neighbour, delivered it down the street to a young family from the church. They are present at zoomchurch Sunday morning and, when the video ends, they go on to the chat line and announce, “And we can attest that the bread was delicious!”

I wonder if this bread might have been Eucharist.

Might Shannon have been taking Eucharist to a young family? Could our neighbour, who to my knowledge has never darkened the door of a church, possibly have been bringing Eucharist to our door when he delivered the half loaf broken off from the whole?

Eucharist is about giving, receiving and thanksgiving. When we celebrate Eucharist we acknowledge the bountiful provision of God; we give thanks for the grace of Christ, and we receive our commission to go out into the world to be bread for those who are hungry. Eucharist invites us to enter the ever-flowing cycle of the Spirit pouring forth, being received and giving back in return. Sounds to me pretty much like what happened around zoomchurch this past Sunday, even if a priest did not actually consecrate the bread.

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Here is a link to Shannon’s Bread video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNpo00qrPug