| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"No One" |
| Date: |
30 Jun 2007 09:21:53 AM |
| Object: |
Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please? |
Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please?
Communion, Company, and the Church
This article is from the April 2006 BreakPoint WorldView magazine. Sign
up today to receive the free online edition ten times a year!
Before you read this article, I'd like you to do something. Take a few
moments to think of three or four memorable meals you've enjoyed . . .
welcome back. What came to mind? Perhaps an anniversary dinner at an
elegant four-star restaurant that was a culinary triumph. Maybe a
Thanksgiving feast with an eye-popping bounty placed on a fully extended
dining room table. Possibly a picnic on a warm summer afternoon with
baskets full of every kind of picnic delight. At this point I'm willing to take
a risk and say that none of your memorable meals were eaten alone. And
if you think a little more, part of the delight of each meal was the company
you kept around the table.
That's the nature of eating. It is most wonderfully done with others. Meals
are communal, social acts. We eat and drink and laugh and talk together.
Leon Kass, in his wonderful book The Hungry Soul, reminds us that a
little basic Latin gives us a clue to what is at the heart of our meals. Our
word company comes from the Latin ***** panis, which literally means
"with bread." There are still many cultures around the world where having
company in one's home without food (without bread) is utterly
unthinkable. The two are inseparable.
It's hard for us in our fast-food culture to grasp the meaning of meals,
food, and eating. Quite frankly, "fast food" is a bastardization of the
meaning of food. How often do we go to the fast-food restaurant only to
get food that we eat in the car or alone at our desks (while multi-tasking)?
Talk to single men and women. One of the hardest parts of being single is
eating alone. Ask them about the difficulty of cooking for one. It seems
that there is something about the very nature of food that says bread
should naturally be ***** panis, with company.
THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL
How then should we think about the Lord's Supper, the meal that is at the
heart of Christian worship and is central to any discussion of Christian
identity? For those of us in the evangelical community, this presents
something of a challenge. The sacrament of the Lord's Supper has really
evolved into an aid to personal piety. It is a private, individual, inner
experience largely focused on how it is a means of grace or blessing to
me. Think of a typical evangelical communion service where worshipers sit
quietly (perhaps with muted organ music floating in the background), more
often than not with eyes closed, engaged in reflection and self-examination
as the bread and wine are distributed.
Ask yourself when it was that you last experienced a meal outside of
church where everyone sat around the table in silence, with heads bowed
while meditating and reflecting as if no one else was at the table. Author
and seminary professor Richard Lovelace's comic (and convicting) image
comes to mind here. He describes our sacramental piety as a lonely
individualism in which we are like spiritual deep-sea divers, each of us
with our own airline up to God through the "means of grace." Cut off from
other divers around us, we pursue private spiritual goals, while viewing
others only dimly through clouded faceplates.
It seems that the Lord's Supper has been ritualized (and theologized) in
such a way that it has largely become a gathering of individuals who all
happen to be doing the same thing together. One writer has asked
whether our theology of the Eucharist is such that we could just as easily
have a chapel with little communion kits at the door where each person
comes when they please to get grace from God. Our meals at church
hardly seem like meals in any normal sense, and the corporate and social
dimensions of the meal have largely been eclipsed by the privatizing and
individualizing assumptions of Enlightenment culture.
But let's think for a few moments about Jesus' meals and the meals of the
early Church. Have you ever thought about how important eating was to
the ministry of Jesus? Look at the Gospels. Meals were so central to His
announcing-the-kingdom-ministry that He was called a glutton (Matthew
11:19). And worse, His meals were scandalous (Luke 15:1-2). The worst
kinds of people were invited to the party (Matthew 9:9-13; 11:19).
These gatherings were not dainty, ritualized affairs, but meals, real meals.
And consider the early Church. Luke says it was devoted to the breaking
of bread together (Acts 2:42-47). Christians came to be known for their
love feasts where Jesus' death was remembered with their elbows amid
the chicken bones (so to speak). These were real meals where the poor,
coming hungry, could anticipate going home full (or at least they were
supposed to, cf. 1 Corinthians 11:20-22).
FIRST TASTE OF THE KINGDOM
What was the significance of all this eating? The gracious rule of God is
the framework for understanding the "meal ministry" of Jesus and the
communal meals of the early Church. Jesus and the early Christians lived
with one eye on the end of history when the purposes of God for all
creation will be fully realized. Jesus calls it "the feast with Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 8:10ff; Luke 14:15;
22:28-30). John calls it the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation
19:1-10).
But we dare not stop there. Jesus and His early followers also lived with
another eye on the present. Blessed are those who will eat at the feast in
the kingdom of God, Jesus said (Luke 14:15). So, for three years, Jesus
spent His life announcing the Good News, "The time has come. The
kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark
1:15). The message of Jesus was that the kingdom has come and the feast
has begun; you are invited to the table.
And so Jesus hosts His crazy upside-down meals, and the Church holds
her regular love feasts-not simply as a sign of something else but as the
first taste of a new order of things that dawned in the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus. The meals were, we might say, performative acts.
They created what they signified. The kingdom was revealed in these
meals, and in them the arrival of a new age took visible form.
Think of what Jesus did when His meal partners arrived and the religious
leaders were scandalized. A new kind of community took shape in the
very act of eating together. Jesus presented to His contemporaries a new
vision of human life that could only be found in table fellowship with
Himself. Imagine what it was like for these gatherings of the last, the least,
and the lost to find themselves at table with Jesus. It was nothing less than
the possibility of a transformation of their identities through induction into a
new kind of human community.
Consider for a few moments about how this radical (when you really think
about it) Christian meal shapes and forms a new kind of community. It is a
meal of bread, the most basic and ordinary (though wonderful) of all
foods. Pastor Peter Leithart puts it so well when he says, "Renewed
humanity does not consume ambrosia. Mundane though it may be, the
kingdom of God is populated with bread eaters." So we learn at the table
that the whole of our lives matters to God (not just the "spiritual" part);
every aspect of our ordinary, embodied concreteness is what God uses to
build His kingdom.
It is also a meal of wine because we are a community of celebration and
joy. I have a friend whose childhood pastor would say at the supper, "On
the night He was betrayed . . . Jesus took the beverage." No surprise that
the church inculcated a joyless legalism into him that twenty-five years
later still affects him. The bread-eaters are privileged to dine with the
Source of all joy who turned the water into wine. I love the words of
Samuel Rutherford who spoke of communion as the time when Jesus
rejoices and makes merry with His friends.
From this meal we also learn to be a people of generosity and sharing
because we sit at a table of abundance. The imagery is interesting, isn't it?
A meal of bread and water is fit for prisoners. But shift the imagery to
bread and wine, and suddenly we think of abundance and feasting. So the
Lord of the feast took the bread, blessed it, broke and shared it with His
disciples. We pass bread and learn to share out of a sense of abundance.
And as we pass bread, we remember those who are not at the table and
who have no bread. As a result we are shaped into a people passionate
about mercy and justice.
Remember, too, that as He offered both the bread and the wine to His
disciples, Jesus gave thanks. Jesus' meal is the place where we are
shaped into a thankful and grateful community as we are again reminded
of the abundance of God's gifts.
Bart Simpson once prayed this over his Thanksgiving meal, "We worked
for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing, God." Paul, analyzing the
human heart, teaches that the two chief sins of humankind are that while
we know God, we do not glorify Him, and we do not give Him thanks
(Romans 1:21). Apart from grace, he says, we are all Bart Simpson. The
Church's meal shapes a thankful people in a thankless culture.
WELCOMING ALL
Again, eating is something we do together. Inviting someone to eat with us
is an act of hospitality. Central to the life of the Church is a meal that
announces "welcome" in Jesus' name and offers an invitation to the
kingdom, reminding us that we are a community that welcomes all. At the
meals of the community of the New Covenant the excluded are included;
the outsider becomes an insider; the unwelcome are invited. But we
cannot miss an implication of this for ourselves.
I recall talking with a Turkish brother in Christ in Istanbul whose
relationship with another brother was in disarray; he felt hurt and
estranged. I still remember the way he measured the extent of the
estrangement. With hurt and some anger he said, "He does not eat with
us." That we come together to feast also means that we are a community
of reconciliation and forgiveness. Few things tear down walls of hurt and
alienation like a meal together.
Lastly, as we pass the food around the table we hear the words, "This is
my body broken for you . . . this is my blood shed for you." Yes, they are
words of cleansing and renewal for weary souls. But they are also words
that remind us that we are a people who are broken and whose lives
ought to be poured out in suffering love for the sake of one another and
for the sake of the world. At this table, we are taught the length and
breadth and depth and height of being a servant community that follows
Jesus.
The bottom line is this: Our meals should be like Jesus' meals and the
meals of the early Christian community. Gathered around Jesus, we should
look like a new humanity raised up in the second Adam, Jesus our Lord.
And why? For a profoundly missional reason: that we might point the
world to the way of life found only in Him.
Our feasting as a community around the Lord's Table should always be an
indictment of all attempts at human community apart from Christ. Jesus'
meals were an indictment of Israel's false way of being the people of God.
The early Church's meals were an indictment of the false community of
ancient Roman culture epitomized in the patronage meals of the wealthy
and powerful. We eat that the world might see a new way of being human
and catch a glimpse of the redeemed community that will come to full
expression at the end of the age because of the death and resurrection of
Jesus.
The Rev. Robert Lynn, a Wilberforce Forum seminary fellow, is associate
pastor at Knox Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a
lecturer at Istanbul Reformed Seminary in Istanbul, Turkey.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Articles on the BreakPoint website are the responsibility of the authors
and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Chuck Colson or Prison
Fellowship. Links to outside articles or websites are for informational
purposes only and do not necessarily imply endorsement of their content.
.
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| User: "Al Klein" |
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| Title: Re: Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please? |
17 Jun 2007 10:08:37 PM |
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On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:21:53 -0400, "No One" <N0_K019@shotmail.com>
wrote:
Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please?
Four minutes and you have to post again, John? Your attention spam is
really short for an anthropoid.
.
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| User: "Michael Gray" |
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| Title: Re: Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please? |
18 Jun 2007 01:02:11 AM |
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On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:08:37 -0400, Al Klein <rukbat@pern.invalid>
wrote:
- Refer: <hotb731no3jk82jm3hpgmk31n9s3h581gc@4ax.com>
On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:21:53 -0400, "No One" <N0_K019@shotmail.com>
wrote:
Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please?
Four minutes and you have to post again, John? Your attention spam is
really short for an anthropoid.
"attention spam"!! :D
--
.
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| User: "Al Klein" |
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| Title: Re: Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please? |
18 Jun 2007 08:13:05 PM |
|
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On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:32:11 +0930, Michael Gray
<mikegray@newsguy.com> wrote:
On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:08:37 -0400, Al Klein <rukbat@pern.invalid>
wrote:
- Refer: <hotb731no3jk82jm3hpgmk31n9s3h581gc@4ax.com>
On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:21:53 -0400, "No One" <N0_K019@shotmail.com>
wrote:
Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please?
Four minutes and you have to post again, John? Your attention spam is
really short for an anthropoid.
"attention spam"!! :D
His spam span?
.
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| User: "Michael Gray" |
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| Title: Re: Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please? |
19 Jun 2007 01:31:16 AM |
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On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:13:05 -0400, Al Klein <rukbat@pern.invalid>
wrote:
- Refer: <pcbe73h274otf4s7hvkth3hna7m6o5rb1i@4ax.com>
On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:32:11 +0930, Michael Gray
<mikegray@newsguy.com> wrote:
On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:08:37 -0400, Al Klein <rukbat@pern.invalid>
wrote:
- Refer: <hotb731no3jk82jm3hpgmk31n9s3h581gc@4ax.com>
On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:21:53 -0400, "No One" <N0_K019@shotmail.com>
wrote:
Jesus, Would You Pass the Mashed Potatoes, Please?
Four minutes and you have to post again, John? Your attention spam is
really short for an anthropoid.
"attention spam"!! :D
His spam span?
.... is infinite.
--
.
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