We undervalue the importance of hospitality for the Christian life: it’s a central feature of who we are and how we should be behaving because Christianity is practiced at the table.
That aphorism is a deliberate double entendre, in fact, it contains two of them.
Firstly, when talking about the table, I have two different realities in view. I mean both your dining table in your home that maybe seats four others if you’ve managed to squeeze a medium sized one in somewhere, and I mean ‘The Table,’ the place that the gathered church comes to eat and drink Jesus in the Lord’s Supper. In churches like mine that may not be a literal slab of wood you approach, but when we take Communion together we approach the Lord’s Table in as real a way as when you come around to my place and I get you a drink and we sit down at a rectangular piece of oak in my kitchen diner.
In fact, I sit you down at my table because Jesus’ table is as real as that. The Gospel is an invitation to come and sit and eat with God. That changes the way I view my own table and my dining companions; God’s table changes every table. In the Lord’s Supper I encounter a story that renarrates my own story, from that I learn a new set of table manners to apply everywhere I go. Funnily enough, while the way of the Kingdom applies everywhere, it’s simplest to apply that way to our own tables.
When you have a couple of people back for some roasted meat or a vat of chilli after church on a Sunday, you’re living in accordance with everything you’ve just said and sung and prayed in your gathered worship that morning.
Secondly, Christianity is practiced at the table in two senses. Both tables I’ve referred to provide an opportunity to practice the faith. By that I mean that this is the place that we practice like someone practises any religion, it’s at both the Lord’s Supper and the dinner table that we demonstrate that we are Christians. I also mean that we practice our faith, in the sense that we learn how to be Christians together: we have a go and over time gain mastery.
The Table is where we find life
What I’m really arguing underneath this is that the Lord’s Supper teaches us that hospitality is the core of the Christian life, your faith should be visible around your dining table.
Since God has chosen to sit and eat with us, we chose to sit and eat with others. The gospel reframes our table manners. This should have simple applications where we deliberately chose to have people around our own tables—or, if we aren’t in a position to do that, creatively find ways to be hospitable anyway—that are then extended as we practice the practice to inviting those who aren’t like us and those who desperately need our tables to be an ark for them.
It has bigger applications too, from what you eat, to the affections you chose to cultivate at the table, but spelling that out might be stealing my thunder from elsewhere. There are also church applications, about who you invite to the Lord’s Supper, yes, but wider: it is a good thing for a church to eat together. When you do that, does the hospitality you can see people giving each other reflect their faith, or not? It’s a good way to find out if people have really understood the gospel: how do they behave over dinner?
I don’t necessarily mean that if your church potluck has segregated tables along one or another cultural or national fault line that everyone hasn’t understood the gospel. I do mean that it’s a warning sign that should be paid attention to. We’re the people who are meant to be able to eat with those we think are our enemies—at the Lord’s table at least, not at the table of demons (1 Corinthians 10)—and then discover that we’ve been reconciled at the cross.
Cultivate table manners
The way we behave when others are in our home and at our table is meant to be a demonstration of our Christianity. Not the classic British evangelical refusal to eat the last biscuit from the plate, but the way we host, the way we welcome, and the way we demonstrate the nature of the place we’re welcomed into, are all signs of how much the gospel has got under our skin. Jesus has welcomed us, he hosts us every Sunday as we come to his house for tea, and he is clear about what’s required to enter in and sit with him.
We should do likewise.
Photo by Huden Harui on Unsplash
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