The Meal that Makes Us Family and Friends

This morning before leaving the house, I set out bread and wine, trying to get our table ready for our small group to gather after worship. Against my inner prodding, I didn't take the time to reset the table with placemats and cloth napkins. I felt alright about it at the time. It's early, and I wanted to have some time to pray in silence this morning before going to a meeting with my leadership and finalizing some things for this morning's class. After reading this quote from Nouwen, I think I made the wrong decision.

We all need to eat and drink to stay alive. But having a meal is more than eating and drinking. It is celebrating the gifts of life we share. A meal together is one of the most intimate and sacred human events. Around the table we become vulnerable, filling one another's plates and cups and encouraging one another to eat and drink. Much more happens at a meal than satisfying hunger and quenching thirst. Around the table we become family, friends, community, yes, a body.

That is why it is so important to "set" the table. Flowers, candles, colorful napkins all help us to say to one another, "This is a very special time for us, let's enjoy it!"

I'm also thinking about the Eucharistic table, the table of the Lord. In a little while I will gather with a group of people for worship, which, against our Protestant focus on the sermon, is centered and grounded at Table. This morning, as every Sunday, we will be welcomed to the Table of the Lord, to come and feast from the overflowing abundance of God's creative goodness and life-giving hospitality.

Yet, the table that sits front and center in our midst is cold and sterile. The focus is not bread and wine, but metal trays that conceal the sacred, rather than drawing us into the welcome of God. The small, lifeless crackers and the plastic, individual shots of juice seem to turn us inward, disconnecting us from one another more than drawing us more fully into a shared life, a body. In many ways, our table changes Nouwen's final line to something a bit different. The stacked trays do remind us that this is a special time, but I'm not sure that they invite us to "enjoy it!"

So, I'm struck this morning by the messages that are at times latent and others explicit in our our worship. As we gather at the table of the Lord this morning, are we becoming friends of God? Around the table are we becoming family, friends, community, a body with one another? How is our experience shaping our life together with the Triune God and with one another?

Hospitality is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others. Hospitality is not optional to a well-balanced and health life. It meets the most basic need of the human being to be known and to know others (Homan and Pratt, Radical Hospitality, 9).

Continuing Communion...

In light of the post on commun(ion/al) yesterday, I thought that this latest essay by Sara Miles in NPR's This I Believe series was amazing. The essay, called "Strangers Bring Us Closer to God" is about the power of the Eucharistic experience to transform her worldview and mode of living in the world. (Interesting when praxis/experience leads and transforms our belief which then transforms our praxis experience....)

A few excerpts:

That first communion knocked me upside-down. Faith turned out not to be abstract at all, but material and physical. I’d thought Christianity meant angels and trinities and being good. Instead, I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored.


But I learned that hunger can lead to more life—that by sharing real food I’d find communion with the most unlikely people; that by eating a piece of bread I’d experience myself as part of one body. This I believe: that by opening ourselves to strangers, we will taste God.

Commun(ion/al) Experience

At the end of a brief reflection on a conversation he led at the state gathering of Disciples of Christ in Tulsa, OK recently, Alan Roxburgh made this observation about his communion experience:

One final observation of a personal nature - it’s a bit of a strange one. For the past several years I’ve been part of an Anglican church. We go forward together at communion to receive the bread and wine (a real chunk of bread and real wine). I sometimes find my self standing in this little line as we move toward the altar with my little grandchildren beside me - it’s one of those moments when you are rooted in the ordinary and everyday in the midst of the mystery of God. Today, as we had communion I was aware of sitting in a pew as the plastic cups of grape juice were passed along followed by little pellets of hard bread. I suddenly felt quite alone and isolated in this moment of the body of Christ.

Roxburgh's important observation should cause those of us in the Churches of Christ, as those who share Stone-Campbell DNA with our brothers and sisters in the Disciples, about our own practice of the Lord's Supper.

How does our practice of the Supper impact our theology of the Lord's Supper?

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? In other words, how do our exegesis/theology of the Eucharist and our experience dialogue with, interact with, and transform one another?

Does our practice of the supper actually reinforce the idea that faith is a private experience and interaction between and individual and God or does it connect us to the greater Body of those "in Christ"? Are we "alone and isolated" or "together and unified" when receiving and experiencing the Supper?

How does our LS practice shape us to be the people of God in the world?

Do we receive the hospitality of God in our experience? Do we truly receive the O/other?

Alright, just a few questions that popped into my mind while reading Roxburgh when taking a break from reading student exams this morning.