2026.09.06 | Sacred Rest: The Power of Ritual
“Sacred Rest: The Power of Ritual”
Mark 14:22-25
1 Corinthians 10:16-17
Preached by
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Eden United Church of Christ
Cherryland, CA
6 September 2026
I first moved away from my home town in my early twenties. I had been a commuter student at college, and had lived in a few different student apartments, but was never more than a 20 minute drive from my family home. So my first real encounter with homesickness, besides being away at summer camp as a kid, was when I moved half a state away to pursue a Master’s degree.
I remember that one of the routines that became an important part of my day was my morning coffee ritual. I was an early adopter of the pour-over method, and each day I would put the kettle on, set up the coffee dripper and filter over the cup, add a scoop of grounds and then slowly pour the hot water, inhaling the delicious smell as the coffee brewed.
This ritual of morning coffee had an interesting psychological effect on me. On the one hand, performing these actions that I associated with being home made me feel the pangs of homesickness keenly. But, strangely, it also seemed to help me ground myself in this new place, this new home. It let me feel the grief of missing home and the life I had left, while at the same time helped me mark the transition of settling into a new home and into a new phase of my life. Without intending to, I had experienced the power that a ritual can have in our lives.
Ritual can be defined in many ways, but essentially, a ritual is a fixed set of actions or words that people repeat in the same way every time. (1) Rituals are most often associated with religious ceremonies, but they don’t have to be religious to be a ritual.
Scientists tell us that rituals have deep origins in human history. Archeological evidence shows that we’ve been creating rituals before we were actually anatomically human. For example, one of the oldest burial sites excavated is a site in Mt. Carmel in Israel, where a Neanderthal woman was laid to rest some 130,000 years ago. Burial of loved ones is one of the strongest indications of ritual practice.
No one can definitively say why and how we started creating rituals. Ritual behavior may have begun as a way for early humans to avoid danger; humans created behaviors that they thought would keep them safe. Ritual ceremonies could also have been a way to transmit and remember important cultural knowledge in a time before written language. However it began, ritual seems to have developed in tandem with human evolution, and is a core characteristic of our humanity. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Although we may associate rituals with religious ceremonies today, our lives are actually filled with rituals. Whether they are individual—like my coffee ritual—or communal, like waiting for everyone to be served before eating, giving presents for birthdays and holidays, clapping at the end of a performance—all of these ordinary sorts of rituals are woven throughout our days. And rituals can be powerful tools that serve psychological and social functions beyond mere habit or tradition.
The Neuroscientist Ann-Laure Le Cunff talks about the function of rituals in this way:
When people face stress, danger, or major life changes, rituals provide a sense of stability through structured actions. Having something concrete to do when everything appears uncertain reduces anxiety and feelings of helplessness.
This sense of agency extends to rituals’ broader social function: Shared routines make cooperation easier in times of stress. When a team huddles before a game, the action signals membership and commitment to the group.
Rituals also help us make sense of life’s most challenging moments. They mark transitions — such as birth, puberty, marriage, and death — and help us navigate events that feel overwhelming. They also support us as we forge a new identity through rites of passage. That’s why graduation ceremonies don’t just celebrate achievement; they help transform a person’s identity from “student” to “graduate.”
Lastly, rituals transmit culture across generations. Children learn gratitude from family dinner traditions, not from lectures about being thankful. Repeatedly doing something together works better than just talking about it. (2)
Le Cunff goes on to say that basically, our brains are wired to respond to rituals. Rituals help calm down the brain’s threat system and make challenging tasks seem more manageable. When rituals are done in a group, they release bonding chemicals in the brain that make us feel closer together. (3)
I loved learning about the neuroscience behind what rituals do and why they work for us. But for me, there’s a component missing from this information that a neuroscientist wouldn’t necessarily try to explain. Yes, rituals help us connect to ourselves and connect us to each other and create a sense of belonging. But rituals also connect us more deeply to the Divine, and are a way that we can find the sacred rest we crave.
Throughout this Sacred Rest series, we’ve shared different practices that are, essentially rituals—or they can become rituals, if we practice them regularly with intention. Intentionality is the way an ordinary ritual—say, my morning coffee— becomes a ritual of sacred rest designed to make room for connection with God. When we are intentional, the ordinary actions and materials in a ritual take on something called “sacramental permeability.” That's a fancy academic term that just means that the physical matters and actions we can touch and do become vehicles that help make the Holy visible and real to us.
If I perform my morning coffee ritual with intention and with an eye toward noticing the sacredness in it, it can become a way for me to rest in God’s presence. As I measure the water, I offer a prayer of thanks and remember that this water is the same element that God hovered over at the beginning of creation. As I measure and grind the beans, I give thanks for the labor that went into growing and processing it halfway across the world, and I allow myself to feel connected to other people and cultures and praise our shared humanity and work. Before that first sip, I pause in deep gratitude to God for the new day. Thinking this way, any ordinary ritual becomes an opportunity for resting in the sacred.
Each week, our worship service is offered with intentionality, a practice—or a series of practices—designed to invite the presence of the Divine into our midst and encourage us to rest in that presence. At the center of our worship today, and every month, is the ritual of Holy Communion. There is perhaps no other ritual of the church so infused with intentionality and sacramental permeability than communion.
As our scripture readings today show, the New Testament offers us glimpses of the origins of communion and the beginnings of how early Christians practiced and understood it. In Mark and the other two synoptic gospels, we see Jesus at the table with the disciples, saying the words that have become familiar to us and repeated by Christians of all paths for millennia. Because of the solemnity of the occasion of the Last Supper, many may assume that Jesus was doing something unusual that night, but he likely wasn’t. The actions that the text describes—that he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them and that he blessed the cup and shared it with them—were words and actions that he likely said at every meal that he shared throughout his ministry, whenever he was at table with his disciples and with the others he ate with. The words and actions are rooted in the prayers and rituals of Jewish table fellowship and something similar would have been said by the head of household at every meal. They are similar to the words and actions we witness at other meals in the gospels, especially the miracle stories of Jesus feeding the multitudes.
Today we share a bit of bread and a drop of juice, but in the beginning years of the Christian faith, the communion ritual was a meal. Small communities of the faith would gather to worship and remember Jesus, and each person or family would bring what they had to share, so there would be bread and wine, which were table staples in the first century, but there would also be a little fish and lentils and vegetables and fruits and cheese and nuts and milk sweetened with honey. For some in the community, living in great poverty and constant hunger, it might be the most elaborate and satisfying meal they ate all week.
By the time the Apostle Paul is writing, the meal had already begun to take on special significance and meaning, as he suggests in his first letter to the Corinthian church. It is a meal that serves not just to feed individual bodies, but to make us one body, one community united in Christ, whose broken body is remembered in the broken bread.
Even though we are no longer celebrating a full meal, as Jesus and the first Christians did, the elements of bread and wine and the actions of eating and drinking take on that sacramental permeability, reminding us of the bread and wine that Jesus blessed and broke at every meal, reminding us of the meals shared by the multitudes, reminding us of every meal we have shared in community of others, reminding us of the very elements of the earth that go into making bread and wine possible, and reminding us of creation and our Creator. The table is long, and it stretches back into history, and into the future, gathering all who have celebrated communion and all who will celebrate, until we are all truly one body.
Friends, as we share communion today, may we each experience the presence of God . And I hope that, as you go through your days in this coming week, may you view your daily rituals as opportunities to rest in the Sacred. Amen.
Notes:
Cambridge Dictionary <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ritual> Accessed September 5, 2026
Ann-Laure Le Cunff, “Why Your Brain Needs Everyday Rituals,” Big Think Newsletter, December 10, 2025. <https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/why-your-brain-needs-everyday-rituals/> Accessed September 5, 2026.
Ibid.