To close the Phygital Fellows Gathering, Rev. Juana Jordan led a very religiously diverse group of attendees in a communion service.
The service was framed by Sue Phillips, reflecting on a time as a young seminarian with no religious background, finding a deep sense of transcendence while engaging with the “technology of communion” for the first time. Sue brought us to the altar many years ago, naming the actual transmission of grace and goodness that then provided meaning and direction for her studies and life.
It was a story that some of the Phygital Fellows had heard before. But like communion, familiar stories hold some of our greatest truths.
With that in the front of mind, Rev. Juana Jordan brought us to our own transcendent moment. These were her words:
“As we close out today, we do so around one of our oldest technologies of meaning-making: simple bread and juice, shared in community.
Long before screen interfaces, algorithms, and digital networks, Jesus introduced us to this ritual tool — this sacred hardware of bread and cup meant to download grace into our lives, store collective memory, and help us construct a world rooted in justice and peace and love.
In this act of communion, we align ourselves with a radical Jesus who bypassed every social algorithm of his day to sit and eat with everyone and anyone: strangers, skeptics, outcasts, the seeking, the curious, and friends alike. He took this simple bread and wine, the basic hardware’s of daily life and transformed them into tools of liberation.
He set a table that has always been open. In the United Methodist Church, this is what we believe and say. At this table there are no paywalls. No prerequisites and no gatekeepers. This is a table that welcomes us however we come and proclaims, “You belong here!”
Friends, You Belong Here!
Let us Pray:
Holy God, we bring these simple gifts of the earth to this open table.
Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and juice.
Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ, that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed and liberated by his love.
By your Spirit, make this bread — broken in our hands — a sacred technology of grace, grounding us in shared community and filling every empty place within us.
By your Spirit, make this cup — poured out before us — a stream of liberation, washing away our divisions and renewing our courage to build a world where all can move and breathe free and as your Word says, in you, have our being.
Use these ordinary elements to transform our ordinary lives. Anoint our minds, our hands, and our creative tools, that every story we tell and every space we build may bear witness to your boundless, non-exclusive grace.
We ask all these things, through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church, all honor and glory is yours, almighty God, now and forever.”
All: Amen.
*Note: There are adaptations of the United Methodist Communion liturgy