"The blood of Christ, shed for you."

This is what I told about two hundred people this afternoon. And maybe fifty of them had that figured out. I can't blame them, it's taken me quite a long time to get that figured out.

So here's the story of communion --at His last Passover meal, Jesus passed around a loaf of bread to His buddies and told them "This is my body, broken for you." So they were like "Mkay, this is weird, but He must know what He's talking about..."
And then He busts out the wine. "This is my blood, shed for you."
In short, Jesus died. Yup. He did. And He did it so that we wouldn't have to go to hell. Communion is one of the ways we Christians take time out of our lives to remember or ponder or whatever we do that Jesus suffered immeasurable pain so that we can go about complaining about how badly our lives suck knowing that there's something out there better than this.