The Garden of Eden is presented to us like God is the Host at a dinner. We’re explicitly told of the food that’s laid out for Adam and Eve. In fact, what Adam does in his sin is, in essence, a rejection of hospitality.
Rejecting hospitality is a big deal in the ancient world. To be told ‘you can eat whatever you like, but not that,’ and then not only not pass that on to your wife but also go and eat that is the height of bad manners. Wars have been started over less. We don’t often pitch the events that we tend to call the ‘fall’ in this manner, not least because failures of hospitality don’t make as much sense to modern readers as they did to the original readers, but it’s in the mix.
There’s a small trend among biblical scholars and particularly among biblical theologians to read the Old Testament as a story of the hospitality of Yahweh; it needs much amplification in my opinion. Not least because we live in a world that is dying for the kind of community that is found around tables. God invites us to a meal, and our meals can become extensions of his hospitality.
When we start to read like this, we might even see the whole world as a table that God the Host has laid for us, in the presence of our enemies (Psalm 23). The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, and he’s chosen to give it to us for our joy. The world is a table.
The future city of God is a table laid too, its bounty in food with the two-trunked tree that feeds the nations is part of the story we’re told. God loves you and invites you to dinner. That’s the story of the church. God is the feast at the heart of the world, all goodness points towards him for our delight, and it’s Jesus that truly satisfies the cravings of our hearts.
Sunday worship
This is true for Sunday worship too. I mean two complimentary things by this. The first, perhaps the more obvious, is that the natural climax of worship is to eat together. The Lord’s table of bread and wine is a gift from God to us and reminds us week-by-week that he is there to feed us. More than that, it is him, by the Spirit, feeding us on himself. We delight in God; we taste and see that he is good (Psalm 34).
This should lead to church members eating together too. I’m sure that this will sometimes be an organised bring and share affair, but most of the time it’s that the reaction to eating ‘with God and one another’ in the Lord’s Supper is to then eat with one another. Sunday lunch is a solid application of Communion. Because we’re hosted by God, we host others. We learn at his table how to behave at ours.
The second, perhaps less obvious, is that all of Sunday worship is being hosted by God. He’s the initiator. He welcomes us into his ‘house.’ Worship is about God coming to us. I think this is counter-intuitive because worship seems to be a series of things that we do: we sing, we pray, we eat. Perhaps listening to the sermon is the only thing that fits in that category for most of us, and I don’t think we receive it as though God was talking.
In my charismatic circles we’re perhaps more comfortable with the idea that we come to church to ‘receive’ from God, though we often manage to make this all about ourselves. We don’t come to church to receive from him, primarily, we come to worship him. God is the one who invites us to do this. We find in the economy of heaven that whenever we step towards God in worship, he has already stepped towards us in grace.
Nevertheless, it’s true that as we come with hearts to worship, we will receive: God will speak through his word and his people by his Spirit, and God will feed us at his table. Charismatics can get a bit unstuck here though, I think, and remembering that God is the host of church as much as of the world might be helpful to us.
We, rightly, prize the presence of God in our meetings. We aren’t always attentive to where the presence is. When the Spirit lays across a room with thick power and we’re somewhere on the spectrum between ‘tinglies’ and ‘pressed to the floor and might die,’ we tend to be aware of God’s presence. We are often less aware that God is present at his table as we feast on bread and wine together. We are definitely less aware that God is present when his word is preached, and when his people gather. God does the inviting here; he is already present.
Sometimes we speak of ‘hosting his presence,’ even. The intent here is not always bad, people want to talk about how to lead worship in a way that helps people to encounter God. But, as I always argue, we’ll get what the words we chose lead us towards. We don’t host God. God hosts us. We don’t ask for him to come as though he wasn’t present already, we ask for us to become aware of his presence.
Why does that matter? It helps us stop being magicians. We don’t need the right technique for ‘God to turn up.’ I must admit I talk like this myself, as though the Lord almighty wasn’t already there. We don’t have to do a serious of actions for God to be present, God hosts us and wants to meet with us. God isn’t longing to meet with us but unable to do so because we haven’t said the right words. God acts. God hosts. God welcomes. God intervenes.
He invites us to participate in prayer. Sometimes he even withholds his action to teach us to pray and to teach us to long. Sometimes he withholds his action for inscrutable reasons we cannot fathom. Sometimes he wants us to repent of our sin.
We don’t have techniques to make God rock up. We are welcomed to become the sort of people who encounter God’s presence. My personal experience, limited though it is, is that it isn’t difficult to enter the felt and experienced presence of God. You talk to him and there he is. What’s changed is my attention. That didn’t use to be the case, we have to become the sort of people who pay attention to the Lord. That isn’t quick and it isn’t technique; it is about maturity and mastery. It is about a journey into becoming a follower of Jesus.
But that can sound like you need to ‘improve’ yourself for God to meet with you. That’s not true, he’s the host, he welcomes all who would cross the threshold of trust in Jesus. Then he wants us to become like his son, it shouldn’t surprise us that as he slowly moulds us into the image of Jesus that we find we are more aware of our Father.
Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash
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