Today as a church community, we're going to take a moment to receive communion together.

Different faith traditions would call this the Eucharist. Some would say the Lord's table. Many would say holy communion.

But this is a sacred event within the church that was initiated by Jesus on the night of his death.

The sacred event involves eating a cracker or a piece of bread and drinking some juice or a glass of wine.

And that bread symbolizes the broken body of Jesus.

And the wine symbolizes the shed blood of Jesus.

So if you need to take a moment, pause this prayer right now,

grab anything that you can find that would be similar to those items.

And let's take a moment together as a community to practice this sacred event.

Isaiah chapter 53, verses 5 and 6 tells us, but he was pierced for our rebellion, and he was crushed for our sins. He was beaten so that we could be whole, and he was whipped so that we could be healed.

All of us like sheep, we have strayed away.

We have left God's path to follow our own.

Yet the Lord laid on Him the sins of us all.

This verse that I just read was prophesied by a prophet named Isaiah, and he lived

almost 700 years before Jesus. He would never have seen a Roman crucifixion. He would not have

known the agony that Jesus went through. But God

inspired him to speak these words so that we would know without a doubt that what Jesus did

on the cross was supernatural, and so that we would know what it was for.

So let's take a moment together.

Let's take our bread and let's eat it.

God, we thank you that this bread represents the body of Jesus.

Jesus, we thank you that you were beaten so we could be whole.

...