I think that a lot of us are a bit unsure what to do with communion these days. We know that it's important, somehow, and we want to take it seriously. At Cityside we have decided that it's important enough as a church practice to include our children in the ritual, even though that's not common in the wider Christian church.

And yet, my sense is that for many of us, when it comes to the moment itself, we can be at a bit of loss to know what we should be thinking about, or what is supposed to happen, or how we are meant to feel, when taking communion. It's an event that often promises more than it delivers in terms of feelings of connection with God and an experience of intimacy with the Christ who is at the centre of the symbolism. And maybe we feel a little...faithless, or inadequate, when we take our seats and realise that once again, as we took the bread and the cup our minds were wandering or we engaged in a fairly mechanical manner, and weren't as present to the significance of the moment as we want to be.

For some of us, the slightly wriggly, noisy environment, or the challenge of shepherding small children into a line, can be impediments to a truly reflective experience of communion. For others of us, changing faith perspectives, and some uncertainty about quite what Jesus' death means for us, can make us wonder about the purpose of engaging with the bread and wine – and this wondering gets in the way of an experience of communion that touches our spiritual depths.

So today, I'd like to offer us a range of different ways of thinking about this important ritual in our community life – a few different keys to the seemingly locked door of meaningful communion experience. First up, I'll put my stake in the ground and say that in my opinion, participation in communion in some form is absolutely central to being a practicing Christian. As a sacrament, I believe it has power to heal and transform and unite. Its symbolism returns us again and again to the centre of our faith – the self-giving love of Jesus Christ, and the presence of Christ in his community on earth. As a symbol, it has many meanings, and ultimately, cannot be fully determined or defined. If we could sum it up in words, we'd just say a liturgy each month and be done with it. But communion takes us beyond words, into the visual, and the kinaesthetic, and into the mysterious realm where the unseen dwells in the seen. We can't entirely pin down what it means, and what we are to take from it.

But, here are five ways of thinking about communion that you might find helpful in your own journey of relating to it. They are:

• Memorial and thanksgiving
• Re-member-ing Community
• Celebration feast
• Feeding on Christ
• Encounter with the Living One

The first, 'memorial and thanksgiving', is the angle on communion that I suspect most of us are familiar with. It's where we see the bread and wine as predominantly images of Jesus' broken body and spilled blood, and reflect on the way in which his death is redemptive for us. We remember the death of Jesus, and proclaim that his death brought about a 'new covenant' with God. Whatever your particular view of just how, and by what mechanism, Jesus' death 'saved us', the Christian faith affirms through this ritual, that by dying, Christ achieved life for others.

As we break the bread and pour out the wine, we reflect on the emptying, the loss, the brokenness, and the disintegration of Jesus' experience...the fact that this man who had taught and modelled a life of healing and abundance and joy was subjected to cruelty and to profound physical and emotional suffering. This communion meal tells us again and again how Jesus gave of himself, poured himself out for his followers, for us. And it invites us onto the path, to walk in the Way of dying – to self and to all our deluded and grandiose ideas about our selves – in order to live God's life.

When we see communion through this lens – as a memorial, a reminder, of the death of Christ, a natural response is both confession and thanksgiving. We acknowledge that it was human darkness – a darkness in which we participate, darkness that is in us – that killed Jesus. And we delight in the fact that darkness could not overcome the light. We give thanks that therefore our personal darkness can be redeemed, and new life can be ours. When we eat the bread and drink the wine, we taste the bitterness of what our sin cost – and continues to cost – and we also receive Jesus' assurance that he drank fully of that bitter cup and it is now empty - we don't have to bear the fullness of that cost in ourselves.

The second 'way in' to communion focuses on us as the community of faith, as individual 'members' of the body of Christ, who are re-united, put back together, re-integrated, into a whole, through this shared event. In the communion ritual, the body of Christ is 're-membered.' In the wording of the Anglican communion liturgy, 'We who are many are one body, for we all share the one bread.' The bread and wine are symbols of a deep unity. We are all separate people, living our individual lives in the world. We are not a family grouping held together by blood or genetic ties. But we are not just a club or a cluster of friends either. The mystery of the Church is a deep and profound one – that is admittedly not always obvious in our experience of particular churches.

We are the body of Christ. We are bonded to one another not only by our love and care and common goals, but by the reality of Christ's presence, Christ's Spirit, holding us together as a body. By all eating together of the one meal, drinking from the same cup, eating from the same loaf, we say symbolically that we belong together. And, more mysteriously than that, because we invite Jesus to 'inhabit' the communion elements, when we eat and drink them we invite Christ to come and dwell in us and among us and become present in our midst in a real, if invisible, way. And this is more than a set of individual, personal experiences or realisations, but is in fact the glue that bonds the community – the invisible connective tissue that holds our organism together.

When Christ rose from the dead, it wasn't just to some disembodied floaty state in the ether. Jesus was raised into a group of people, who identified with each other by sharing in this symbolic meal. We are now Christ's body in the world, and when we share this meal with other Christians...whether in this church, or in a Catholic Mass, or in our parents' church, or with fellow travellers outside the church, wherever in the world we happen to be, we are expressing something of unity, of a shared centre, of a shared Spirit.

When I say that the 'Church' is a body, I am referring to all Christian people, everywhere. Personally, I think that communion doesn't have to happen within the walls of a church building, and doesn't need to be offered as an institutional ritual by a priest or other specially called person. But I think it does need the participation of a group of people who are willing to be joined to one another at a level beneath what they can easily perceive. When one part of the body suffers, or behaves badly – we all bear the consequences. And if we accept that 'we who are many are one body, for we all share in the one bread', we also have to accept that all other Christians are our brothers and sisters, much as that might sometimes pain us.

When we eat and drink the bread and wine through this perspective, we offer ourselves to be part of community, and to be deeply connected to a group of people through Christ's Spirit.

Related to this 're-membering community' is this idea of the celebration feast of God. The Centre for Progressive Christianity lists among its eight definition points this description of communion: 'the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus's name as a representation of an ancient vision of God's feast for all peoples'. While this definition might be critiqued for what it leaves out, it does pinpoint a very important and often neglected aspect of communion – the inclusive, celebratory, bringing together of diverse people into a shared meal where the host is God. Throughout scripture, salvation is depicted as a feast – a banquet, that God has prepared, and to which multitudes will come, and eat and share in peace and harmony. In the Gospels, Jesus is often observed eating and drinking in people's homes – and is also criticised at times over his eating companions. He sits at the table with tax collectors and sinners. While he is still with them, his disciples do not fast and mourn, but eat and drink and enjoy themselves. We should keep these meals in mind when we read the accounts of the last supper.

In particular, we remember the inclusiveness of Jesus' eating and drinking. He didn't separate out those who could eat with him from those who could not. When challenged, he simply said, 'I came for the sick, not those who think they are well.' We in the church should be very cautious whenever we are tempted to put boundaries around who may and may not come and eat at our special table. This is a table for those who are small, or, hurting, broken, lost, on the margins, and struggling for faith, as much as for those who are joyful and successful and strong in their convictions.

The communion meal can be seen as a prefiguring of the great final banquet, the longed for coming together at the end of all things, where God has prepared a table and all sorts of people gather round it without envy or conflict or fear, and rejoice together. The early Christians celebrated the communion ritual in the context of a full meal, a 'love feast', where followers of Jesus gathered to eat and drink and relax together, sharing in God's good provision, culminating in this ceremony that placed Jesus' self-giving, sacrificial love, at the heart of their community dynamic and re-inscribed their commitment to following in his Way.

Eating and drinking to celebrate the riches of this earth, and human company, is still part of how we do friendship and hospitality in our culture. By eating and drinking the communion meal we enact the wider, inclusive bonds of belonging and invitation and hospitality that come from God, and we look forward to a time where the whole of humanity can eat together without fear or rancour, in the house of God.

When we take communion in reflection on these themes, there is less need to be quiet, sombre, and reflective. It's a celebration of life, an inclusive welcome party, and an enactment of hope for the future.

Feeding on Christ. I have often mentioned how John's gospel has no account of the breaking of bread in the same way as the other gospels. In John, Jesus and his disciples gather for a meal and Jesus washes their feet and shares with them about his betrayal and coming death, but there is no ritual of 'this is my body, this is my blood.' Instead, in the passage we heard read earlier this morning, from John 6, we have the account of Jesus saying, 'I am the bread of life...those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day...Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.' There is a lot that can be said about this passage and I invite you some time to dwell in it by way of lectio divina or some other meditation, and see what emerges.

At this point it is enough to notice that Jesus is the food and drink of our ongoing spiritual life. Just as we need to eat and drink to sustain the life of our bodies, so we need to eat and drink to sustain the life of our souls. This communion meal makes physical what is actually a spiritual process, of filling our hearts and minds with Jesus Christ, as the centre of our world, and the Spirit that animates our being and our choices and actions in the world. Jesus is a gift, given to us to take into our core, so that we can be increasingly transformed into his likeness. You are what you eat. When we, as the prayer book says, 'feed on him in our hearts through faith', we become like him.

I don't know the extent to which this bread and wine here have any real, measurable affect on us. Again, at this point we touch mystery, and things unseen and unquantifiable. At the very least, though, this communion meal recalls us to our true food and drink, our true priority, the one necessity for life in the Spirit. And beyond that, when we participate in it, we participate in Christ...we take more of Christ into ourselves. In this way we come to 'abide in him, as he abides in us.' If your soul is hungry, here is bread.

And finally, encounter with the Living One. This way of seeing communion is becoming increasingly emphasised in contemplative circles, in contemplative eucharist. It emphasises that far from being a memorial for someone who has died, this meal is a place of encounter with someone who is alive, and present. While we affirm that Jesus is risen into the midst of his body, the community of faith, we know that Jesus is also a living, knowable spiritual presence who sometimes meets us in a direct way – seen and heard and felt with our inner eyes and ears and hearts. Cynthia Bourgeault, teacher of Centering Prayer, tells the story of how she first stepped onto the Christian path, through randomly attending a service of holy communion and suddenly, unexpectedly encountering the presence of Jesus.

I don't know if this kind of experience can be looked for, or expected – especially in the slightly less than contemplative environment we have for communion in this season of our community's life. But there are ways that we can prepare our minds and hearts to receive. Possibly one of the main ways is simply to remind ourselves that Jesus Christ is alive. He is not a physical reality in our everyday time/space world. But he is real, he is gloriously vast and personal and loving, and has ways of becoming present to us. Just as he gave and gave of himself, becoming human, sharing life with us, and submitting to death, so he goes on giving to us in his risen state. As we are faithful to encounter this sacrament of the bread and wine as symbols not just of a past event but of a present reality, we can open our hearts to the possibility that Christ will meet us, and impart life to us, in these symbols of his self-giving.

So. Five different ways in. It's not possible, or even desirable to hold all these meanings in our minds at once, while taking communion. But I offer them to you as threads that you might hold as you reflect on what communion means to you, and also to say that there are different modes in which we can take communion. It can be sombre and reflective – particularly if you are carrying a burden, and in need of forgiveness or comfort through this ritual. It can be outward looking, as you reflect on your place in the midst of this group of people, as a member in the community of faith. It can be celebratory and fun, as we affirm our trust in God's provision, and welcome for all. It can be inward and questing, as we reach out to Christ, seeking more of his life, and opening our hearts to receive new insight, or the warmth of his presence.

Any given first Sunday of the month will have a theme that either does or doesn't resonate with you, and an environment or atmosphere that either does or doesn't match with whatever communion means to you at this time. I don't think it's that important to have a highly emotional, or significant experience of communion every month. Possibly there will only be a few experiences in a lifetime when we are really knocked off our feet by this sacrament in a way that fits with the profound theological meanings that underpin it. That's okay. What's important is the act of turning up, of being faithful and intentional, and using this time to re-focus ourselves around Jesus. My hope is that God, who is greater than our human attempts to worship, will meet us all here, regardless of how we feel, if we trust that this ancient ritual still has something to offer us today.