Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? – I Corinthians 10:16

What is the kingdom of God like? Maybe it is like a young couple, Tommy and Karina, twenty years old and in college at the University of Nevada, Reno, and they wanted to take a weekend trip together. Tommy was fascinated by railroads, and he wanted to go see the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento, which had opened the previous year, in 1981. Since he loved trains so much, Karina suggested they ought to go there by train. But as they talked about it, they decided that the train tickets were a little too expensive, and they figured they would want a car to go places when they got to Sacramento. So they drove: it was an easy trip, a little more than two hours. They stayed in a nice hotel, they loved the museum, they ate at some fine restaurants. And they conceived a child.

Like many other young unmarried couples, they were not sure they were ready for a baby. But maybe they were. In any case, there was a baby on the way, ready or not. They discovered they couldn’t talk about the baby as “it.” They couldn’t say, “This baby, what are we going to do about it?” Or “How are we going to take care of it?” So Tommy and Karina somehow took to calling the baby Sacramento. They talked about getting married, and they weren’t sure if that’s what they should do: but they went ahead and moved in together. There was a storage room in the apartment – it was not a lot larger than an oversized closet – and they turned that into a nursery for Sacramento. They went to Lamaze classes together, getting ready for natural childbirth for Sacramento.

They said things like, “So, if Sacramento is a boy, do you think he’ll be a baseball player or a football player?”

And, “Do you think our Sacramento will grow up to be an athletic girl, or a frilly girl?”

And, “What do you think we should name Sacramento?”

“Why, Sacramento, of course!”

“No, I mean for real.”

They looked at all kinds of lists of baby names. They considered names of grandparents, names of aunts and uncles. And with this question still unresolved, on the evening of March 31st, 1983, they headed to Saint Mary’s hospital, and a little after 1:00 in the morning the child was born: a beautiful baby girl.

And when the nurses had cleaned and wrapped the baby, and set her in her mother’s arms, her mother said, “Well, sweet little Sacramento, here you are at last.” It was the first day of April, 1983, and later that morning a very businesslike nurse, probably in her mid-fifties, came in to fill out the birth certificate, and what was the baby’s name? Karina almost said, “Gladys,” her grandmother’s name, but this baby just didn’t look like a Gladys. Karina looked at the nurse, and felt something like panic rising up inside her. What was her baby’s name? She didn’t know what to say.

The nurse said, “I can leave it blank for now. I’ll come and check back with you in a couple of hours.”

And Karina blurted out, “Sacramento. Her name is Sacramento.”

The nurse looked at Karina. Because the date was April 1, the nurse suspected that this was an April Fools joke. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t scoff. But she did raise an eyebrow.

But Karina felt such a sense of peace, of rightness: and so she nodded and said, “It’s unusual, I know. But that’s her name.” And to Karina, it felt like she had not decided on what to name her baby. As she would later explain to anyone who asked, she had not picked the name. She had simply recognized that that name was her baby’s name: Sacramento.

Karina and Tommy never did get married, but they stayed together till the summer of 1988, when Sacramento was 5. By then Sacramento was old enough that she would later have memories of her father, and some of those memories were good: playing in the park, saying bedtime prayers, stories about trains. But many of the memories were painful: so much angry shouting.

After Tommy moved out, he would come back around, looking for money. Karina’s mother had died, and she didn’t have much in her estate except a house. It wasn’t a very big house, but it was a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and it was worth about $160,000, and Tommy was sure that half of that money should go to him. He had no legal claim: he had never been married to Karina, and his name was never mentioned in her mother’s will. But Tommy kept coming to the apartment, shouting that he was going to get his fair share of the money, until Karina got a restraining order that kept him away. Or it should have. But although Tommy kept away from the apartment, he would slowly cruise by the parking lot as Karina was getting in her car after work. Or he would be parked on the street, leaning out his window, as Karina came to pick up Sacramento at day care. He would just glare at her, and point his finger at her, and gesture with his hands that half was for Karina and half was for him.

Karina had finished her time at UNR with a bachelor’s degree in nursing, and had gotten a job at St Mary’s hospital: and now that she had worked there almost four years, she knew that she could get a job as a nurse almost anywhere. She saw an article in the American Journal of Nursing that talked about how there was a shortage of nurses in quite a number of locations across America. One of those places was Nebraska. She didn’t know anyone in Nebraska. So on the day of the closing on the house, Karina deposited the check in the bank, picked up the rental van she had reserved, loaded it with about a dozen midsized boxes and a picnic hamper, and Karina and Sacramento drove out of town. She had quit her job at St Mary’s the previous week, and cashed her last paycheck, and she left everything else behind: the stuff in the apartment, the old car, the mail in the mailbox. And Karina and Sacramento disappeared.

When they got to Nebraska, Karina quickly found a nursing job at Methodist Hospital in Omaha, and she enrolled Sacramento in the Omaha school system.

The first Sunday in October is World Communion Sunday. All around the globe people are gathering today to celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. In all kinds of places, in all kinds of languages, in cathedrals and in cellars, people will eat the bread and drink the cup, in the name of Jesus.

What happens, when we eat the bread and drink the cup? In American Christianity there are two basic answers, both of which are partly right and partly wrong.

The traditional Roman Catholic view is this: when the priest says the words over the wine and the wafers, the substance of the elements is changed: instead of bread and wine, you now have the body and blood of Jesus. When you change the substance, that’s called trans substantiation. So now, when you eat the wafer and drink from the cup, you are receiving Christ into your inmost being. Jesus said, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” and so by a modern-day miracle, here’s what is happening: you are receiving Jesus’ actual body and blood.

The opposite view from this is called, for historical reasons, the Anabaptist view, and it says this: nothing happens to the elements, as anyone can see and taste. The bread is still bread, the wine or juice is still wine or juice. So the bread and the cup serve as symbols or reminders: they help us remember that Jesus died for us. You are remembering that his body was broken and his blood was poured out. Jesus said, “Do this, remembering me,” and so there is no sudden miracle happening on the communion table. Instead, here’s what is happening: you are remembering that Jesus died for you.

The traditional Roman Catholic insight is right about something: it correctly recognizes that something deep and powerful and real is happening: we are genuinely receiving Jesus into ourselves. But the Roman Catholic position is also partly wrong when it thinks that in order for Jesus to be genuinely present, he must be physically present, and that must mean that the substance of bread and wine has been changed into the substance of human flesh and blood. The Catholic Church of the 1500s did not use the language of very small things the way we do today; they didn’t use the word molecules. But I’m going to use that word, because that’s how we talk today. The essence of the Roman Catholic position is that molecules from the bread have been changed into molecules from the human flesh of Jesus, and molecules from grapes have been turned into molecules of blood.

And the Anabaptist position is also right about something: it correctly recognizes that the Catholic explanation is wrong, when it declares that the substance of bread and wine has been transformed into flesh and blood: the Anabaptists are right when they declare that the substance does not change. But the Anabaptist view is wrong when it thinks that if we don’t have molecules and cells from Jesus’ body here, then nothing miraculous is happening.

Where the Catholic and Anabaptist positions go wrong, it seems to me, is that both of them assume that for something to be real, it must be physically real. In other words, both sides have inadvertently agreed that the only reality is physical reality, molecular reality. I think that if you asked them directly whether all things that are real must be made out of molecules, I think they would reflect on that and say No. Yet that materialist notion is the foundation of this debate. And on that basis, at the Eucharist the Catholics say that Jesus is here, because the substance – the molecules – of his actual flesh are here. And the Anabaptists shake their heads and say, “No, the substance – the molecules – of the flesh and blood of Jesus are not actually here, and so Jesus is not actually here.”

But this underlying presupposition – namely, that if something is real, it has to be made out of molecules – that assumption is not correct. It is not the case that only physical things are real.

The triune God is real, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: but God is not made out of molecules. God invented molecules: God exists throughout eternity, but if the physicists are correct, molecules only came into existence after the Big Bang.

The grace of God is real: but it is not made out of molecules.

We don’t know enough about angels to say. As part of creation, they may be physical beings. Then again, it’s quite possible that they are purely spiritual beings: that is, that they are not made out of molecules. Still, our knowledge about angels is quite limited; I will not press the point, with regard to angels.

But I will press the point with regard to the presence of Jesus in the Lord’s supper: that’s real. The Presbyterian doctrine – you knew I was going to get to the Presbyterian doctrine, didn’t you? – the Presbyterian doctrine, which is (ahem) the correct doctrine, is called the doctrine of the Real Presence. It asserts that when we share in communion, we genuinely receive Jesus into our inmost being. Not because we are dealing with molecules of Jesus, but because Jesus promised to be with us, and through the power of the Holy Spirit he fulfills that promise, and he himself comes to us – spiritually, not physically – but for real, not just for pretend – when we partake of the bread and the cup.

Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, south of Athens, Greece, deals with a number of questions that the church members had sent him about what to believe, and especially about how to live as followers of Jesus. One of their issues was about how to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Our text verse for today is part of that discussion: “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?”

Depending on what translation you use, it can read that the cup is a cup of blessing or a cup of thanksgiving, and that it is a participation in the blood of Christ, or a communion in the blood of Christ, or a sharing in the blood of Christ. And similarly with the bread: it is a participation in the body of Christ, or a communion in the body of Christ, or a sharing in the body of Christ. All of them are a way of indicating that there is this thing that happens when we break the bread and drink the cup: we are sharing in the body and blood of Jesus. We are really taking part, and Jesus is really taking part, and he is with us as we share in communion together.

As Sacramento grew up, she knew that she was called by God. She thought maybe it had something to do with her name: Sacramento is the Spanish word for sacrament, so maybe her calling was to be in service to the sacrament. As a young girl, and then as a teenager, she had been an active Catholic, going to Mass and receiving the Eucharist every week: and she knew that the presence of Jesus is real. She tried to be a nun for a while; but she discovered that that was not where her calling was. She took some courses at Creighton University in Omaha, run by the Jesuits, and some courses at Saint Paul’s seminary in Kansas City, which is Methodist, and a couple courses at Midwestern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, which is Baptist, and some online courses at Dubuque Seminary, which is Presbyterian, and somehow she cobbled all of that together into a Masters degree, and got herself ordained by the Congregationalists.

And she was able to talk a couple of the nursing homes in Omaha into hiring her as part-time chaplain: between the two it almost added up to a full time salary, and she provided pastoral care and prayer for the residents at both institutions, and led Sunday and weekday services in both places.

Sacramento loved to visit with the residents of those two care homes, chatting, sometimes singing, sometimes reading scripture, most always praying with people, but she especially loved to ask questions about each person. Some of them could not talk well any more, but she would ask questions that she knew the answer to, like “Tell me about your family.” And then she would look in their eyes and nod her head as if she were hearing their answer for the very first time, and then she would repeat it back to them: “Oh, you have a son named Bill who lives in Chicago, and he has three children; and you have a daughter named Suzanne who lives in Denver, and her daughter Pamela just had a baby girl? That’s so great. I know they all must love you very much.”

And Sacramento loved to preach and lead worship, at the chapel services each week. She became a pretty good preacher, even though some of the residents were not sure whether a woman could actually be a preacher. But she would read the scripture and talk about what it meant, for people who live in a nursing home and can’t get around too well any more. And because she loved these people very much, they loved to listen to her preaching about how the message of the Bible really did apply in the lives of people who can’t get around too well any more.

And what Sacramento loved most of all was to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with her people. Because she knew that Jesus was really present right then. She knew that many of her people couldn’t understand even the simplest Bible story any more: they just couldn’t take it in. But she knew that they could still take in that little square of bread, and that little sip of grape juice. And when they did that, they were taking in Jesus. Not pretend Jesus: real Jesus.

Maybe it was because of her experience, as a young child of a single mother, going to Mass every Sunday, and receiving the Eucharist, and recognizing as a schoolchild and then realizing even more clearly as a teen that the presence of Jesus really was happening when she received the sacrament. Maybe it was because she had seen, in the eyes of the residents of these homes where she served, that when so many things no longer connected with them, this communion in the body and blood of Jesus still did connect for them: it connected them with the reality of Jesus. Not pretend Jesus: real Jesus.

Or maybe it was because of her name. Maybe it was because her name helped her pay attention to what was happening.

Sacramento knew that it was her calling to be a sacrament, a representative or token of the body of Christ, a marker of the presence of the Lord, for the residents of these two nursing homes. She knew that would still have been true, even if her mother had gone ahead and named her Gladys, after her great-grandmother, back when she was born at St Mary’s hospital in Reno. Or if she had been named anything else at all. But because she had been named Sacramento, that had helped her pay attention.

That helped her know that it wasn’t about her. Like John the Baptist pointing to Jesus; like the apostles preaching about Jesus; like the bread and wine, bringing us Jesus: Sacramento knew that the power of her ministry came from living in Jesus. Real Jesus, really present, really strengthening and sustaining our lives, as we receive him into our inmost being. Amen.