Bring Back the Buffalo (VII): Sharing the Table

Galatians 2:11-21 is one of those obscure passages in the New Testament that does not get nearly as much attention in popular-level, evangelical Christianity as it probably deserves. I doubt, for instance, that anyone has ever made “When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face” their life verse, but even so, in Paul’s vivid recounting of the dust-up he and Peter (Cephas) had over the issue of shared table fellowship in the Antiochian church may be one of the most poignant depictions of the Gospel—how it was understood and how it functioned in the life of the early church—as any we might come across in the early church.

The issue at stake in this passage is the question of whether Jewish believers can, or should, share table with Gentile believers. Can circumcised and uncircumcised Christians eat together? Initially, Peter and Paul both answered this question with an unequivocal “yes.” One of the most fundamental implications of the Gospel—they believed—was that because all are saved equally through faith and Jesus, and because we are emphatically not saved through our adherence to the Mosaic law, *because,* in other words, it’s by grace we are saved through faith, and this not of works, lest anyone should boast, both Jews and Gentiles are free to eat together at the same table. Not only can they, they actually signal the Gospel in its purest, most fundamental form, every time they sit down together and break bread together.

This is why, Paul goes on to explain, when some “Judaizers” from Jerusalem came and started criticizing the Jews for eating with the uncircumcised in Antioch, and Peter bowed to the peer pressure and withdrew from their shared table—when Peter declined to eat together with the Gentiles, to appease the Judaizing element in the church—Paul “confronted him to his face.” His refusal to share table with the Gentiles, after all, was a betrayal of the Gospel at its deepest level.

From a biblical scholarship perspective, this passage is vital to our understanding of the origins and early life of the Christian church, because it shows us the first Christians, wrestling with the implications of their message, in real time.

From a ministry perspective more generally, this passage is crucial to our understanding of Christian community, and what reconciliation in the Gospel really looks like, because here we see two distinct groups in the church—the circumcised Jews and the uncircumcised Gentiles—two groups who historically were alienated from each other and at enmity with each other. And yet, they had all come to believe in the same Jesus for salvation, and had all received the same baptism as the mark of their belonging in the same family of God. How do they bury the spiritual hatchet, and come together, and live together as followers of the One Way? How do they signal they have done so, and how do they keep the hatchet buried, even when the wear and tear of community life threatens to resurface it from time to time.

For Paul the answer was simple: the shared meal.

A deep dive into the cultural context of the ancient world would point out how the shared meal functioned culturally as a profound symbol of one’s identification and unity with those at the table; it’s why the early Church was so scandalized in Acts 11:3, to learn that Peter had eaten at the house of Cornelius, the Roman (i.e. Gentile) Centurion. A deep dive into the theological background would point out how, throughout the New Testament, we see the “shared meal” functioning as a spiritual sign of Jesus’s open welcome to receive his grace and enter the Kingdom of God; it’s why Jesus was notoriously known as the man who “eats with sinners,” why he gave us the communion meal as our primary act of worship, and why the early church continually “broke bread together” in one another’s homes. A deep dive into the psychological significance might point out that there is, it seems, a profound psychological bond that forms when we actively and intentionally eat together with others; it’s why studies show that the kids of families that share a daily family meal are more thrive socially, have better grades, stay out of trouble, and have higher self-esteem.

I have been thinking a lot about the spiritual significance and the theological meaning of the shared meal, from a Christian perspective, since returning from a trip our church took out to Pelican Lake First Nations Reserve in Saskatchewan this summer. We went there both to witness and to celebrate the establishment of a self-sustaining herd of buffalo as a gesture of friendship and reconciliation, through the work of Loko Koa, a non-profit organization that supports Indigenous communities and establishes connections across Canada. Our church had been one of the donors for this project, and we were invited to visit the community in June, as part of a cross-cultural encounter.

I’ve shared a variety of thoughts on this trip, looking at it from a number of theological angles, but today, I want to wrap this series up by reflecting on the role that the shared meal plays in genuine reconciliation. Our church’s delegation at the home of chief Peter Bill, the chief of the Pelican Lake band, where he and his family hosted us graciously and generously. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we were invited to participate in a number of cultural experiences—the water ceremony, the sweat lodge, the healing circle—each of which opened our hearts and minds to our hosts in powerful ways.

As powerful as these things were, however, it was during the times we ate together that we formed the kind of understanding that is necessary, I think, for reconciliation to happen. When our defenses were down and conversation was given full space to breathe, because we had nowhere else to be and no other agenda than simply to attend to our basic biological needs for food and drink and safety—this is when we really began to think about our hosts, not just in terms of a culture to understand, but in terms of friends to honor.

Perhaps this is why eating together—such a common-place activity that probably does not get nearly the spiritual attention it deserves—why it played such a central role in the life of the early Church, why it holds such a crucial place in the biblical narrative, why it is so vital to the life of a church community. Because when strangers sit down and attend to their creaturely needs together, something deeply spiritual happens. They cease, at some point, to be simply hosts and guests, and become, in some intangible but very real way, reconciled friends.

At least, if we share our tables with a full sense of the Gospel, in all its significance: that when we were turned away from God and living as strangers in the world, God graciously invited us to his table, a table set with his own broken body and poured out blood. Consummate host that he is, he welcomed us to the feast and feed us with his very life, and now he asks us to extend the same hospitality to others as we have tasted in him.

What better way to show that we truly understand this message, I wonder? What better way to signal our willingness to live out the Gospel? What better way, actually, to enact our desire for reconciliation, than to share table with those we long to be reconciled to?

Whatever else truth and reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous people will look like, I think it will take many more genuine moments like the ones we experienced in Pelican Lake, of strangers sitting down together around the table, and getting up a few hours later, closer together because of the time they took to break bread together and come to a common understanding.

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Eating, Praying, Loving (Part VIII): The Open Commensality of Christ

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It's easy to underestimate the role that food played in the ministry of Jesus. We like to dwell on his healing ministry, his teaching ministry, his parables, his miracles, but we seldom stop to notice the fact that eating with others was central to his proclamation of the Kingdom of God.

The people in his day noticed this fact loud and clear. “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” the Pharisees wondered self-righteously (Mark 2:16), and they were asking out of more than just curiosity. He was so renowned for his habit of eating with social outcasts, in fact, that the religious elite of his day called him a “glutton and a drunkard,” because he (in his own words) “came eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34) with the kind people that everyone else had rejected.

The various points we’ve raised about the spirituality of food so far helps to explain the reason why Jesus made the shared meal so central to his ministry, but there is something deeper going on here. In ancient Jewish thought, hospitality was a profoundly moral act, something that revealed what a person was really made of, spiritually speaking. They held up the hospitality of Abraham as their ideal, who welcomed three strangers into his home, fed them, and discovered in doing so that he was sharing table with the Lord himself (Genesis 18:2). Throughout the Old Testament story, in fact, table-fellowship around a shared meal was one of the primary means by which the Jewish people experienced and expressed their fellowship with God. It’s the logic that underlies the sacrificial system of the Book of Leviticus, where most of the sacrifices functioned as a shared meal with the Lord. It’s there in the covenantal theology of the Old Testament, where the shared meal was the means by which Ancient Near Eastern covenants were sealed.  And it’s present, of course, in the formative event of the nation, where God liberated the people from Egypt and gave them a shared meal—the Passover supper—to distinguish them as his own.

In ancient Jewish thought, then, there was something profoundly spiritual going on whenever you invited someone to your table. Sharing a meal together was a sign of mutual welcome and acceptance, reciprocal respect and embrace, a way of spiritually identifying with someone else in the strongest possible terms. This explains, incidentally, why the idea of Jews and Gentiles eating together in the community of the early church was such a challenge.  When Peter (a Jew) visits Cornelius (a Gentile) in Acts 10, the scandalized Jewish Christians in Jerusalem criticize Peter specifically because he “went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them” (Acts 11:3). In Galatians, there is a fascinating passage where Paul describes the work he had been doing to try to integrate the Jewish and Gentile believers together in the church, and how the shared meal together was the stumbling block. He recounts how Peter (a Jew) was willing to eat together with the Gentiles at first, but when a group of Jewish Christians from Jerusalem raised their eyebrows, he “began to draw back [from the shared meal] and to separate himself from the Gentiles” (Galatians 2:12). Finally we note Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth about an unrepentantly immoral believer. In 1 Corinthians 5 he tells them to expel the immoral brother, and instructs them “not even to eat with such a one” (1 Corinthians 5:11).

In each of these passages we see how the shared meal functioned in life of the early church, forming the identity of the community, signaling who was included, and requiring the early Christians to spiritually identify with their fellow Christians in the strongest possible terms.

If food is truly spiritual, sharing a meal with another, in the minds of the first Christians, was one of the most spiritual acts of all.

This brings us back to Jesus, from whom, no doubt, the early church got the idea of using a shared meal to shape their life together. Paul’s direction about refusing to eat with the unrepentant sinner notwithstanding, what stands out in sharp relief when we look at the life of Jesus in light of all this, is that he was willing to eat with anyone who would have him, and he welcomed to the table anyone who would come.

We see Jesus eating with synagogue leaders and high-ranking Pharisees; we see Jesus eating with the so-called scum of the earth, the “sinners” and the tax collectors. We see Jesus eating private meals with his disciples; we see Jesus eating with the masses in public demonstrations of the miraculous power of God. Some scholars refer to this dynamic in Jesus’s ministry as his “open commensality.” Commensality is the fancy word for “table fellowship,” and Jesus’s commensality was truly “open,” in the sense that he was willing to eat with literally anyone.

There is a challenge here for the church, I think, especially in this new era we find ourselves in. On the one hand, we are living through a time when pandemic lockdowns have restricted our life-together, and made human contact harder to come by than ever. On the other hand, we are living at a moment in history when marginalized voices and oppressed people groups are speaking up, insisting (rightly) that their lives matter.  These realities have created a long to-do list for the church, a full docket of issues that need careful attention, and spiritual needs that need addressing.

It can be hard to know where to start.

This isn’t the only thing that needs doing, of course, and if it’s all we do we probably will have failed in our calling for this moment, but as we’re trying to figure out how to respond to the world we find ourselves in at such a time as this, perhaps the best place to start is where Jesus himself started: by opening his table to any and all who wanted to share bread with him. If we did so, on the one hand, the voices of the marginalized would have to be invited and included and affirmed, just as much as any other voice; this was certainly part of the scandal of Jesus’s open commensality in his day.  On the other hand, we would be feeding the need for authentic human connection that we’re all aching with; this was certainly part of the beauty of Jesus’s shared meals, that everyday human beings like us, got to connect physically with him.

But more than that, if we truly practiced the kind of open table fellowship that Jesus modeled for us—taking seriously its significance and implications—I think we would discover that we are becoming the church he has called us to be, and that his Kingdom really is breaking in upon us.

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Eating, Praying, Loving: A Biblical Spirituality of Food (Part 1)

Last summer I went through a season where I was constantly struggling with this low-grade fatigue that I couldn’t seem to shake. It might have been my ramped-up hours at work, or subtle changes in my bedtime routines; it might have been the fact that I had just celebrated my 46th birthday, or possibly a combination of all three, but after a month or two of seeing me drag myself around, my wife had had enough and sent me off to see her naturopath.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I was willing to try pretty much anything if it would get me back to feeling normal. To my surprise, Dr. Laura spend a great deal of time talking to me simply about my diet. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t an in-depth exploration of what kinds of food I was using to fuel my body. She even asked me to spend the next two weeks tracking it, writing down in a food diary every morsel that entered my mouth.

I have always assumed that I was a relatively healthy eater. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. I do the majority of my shopping on the outside aisles of the grocery store. I eat vegetarian a lot of the time. I mean, I wasn’t no health-food guru or nothing, but I did okay.

And then, two weeks later, I handed in my homework to Dr. Laura and received the painful truth. Turns out I have a tendency to skip meals (mostly breakfast and lunch), power through with coffee, and compensate with all kinds of empty carbs late in the day; then I over do it at dinnertime and go to bed feeling gross.

And I wondered why I was always out of vim and vinegar. You could get away with a diet like that when you were 25 and your metabolism could handle it, but at 46? Man: grow up, right?

But this post is not meant to be the true-confessions of a reformed carb-binger. And it’s not even a promo for the value of naturopathy (although, the modified Keto diet Dr. Laura recommended to me did wonders for my energy levels and general sense of well-being). But this post is not about that.

It’s about the spirituality of food.

Because the three or four months I spent paying close attention to everything I ate opened my eyes in a way they had never been opened before to the fact that our diets actually have a profound impact on our spiritual well-being.

We are, after all, holistic creatures. Our spirits and our bodies are intricately connected and interrelated. This is why Jesus enjoined us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, souls, minds, and strength. Because your physical eating, sleeping, breathing, sweating life is lived before the Lord as much as your praying, thinking, yearning, introspective life is.

To put it very simply: you don’t “have” a body; you “are” a body. And the Scriptures consistently assume this, and affirm this, and appreciate this fact. The same God of peace who will sanctify our “spirits” and our “souls," also intends to sanctify our “bodies”  in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.  These are each part and parcel with the other.

Even on a very concrete level, it should be obvious that what I eat affects me spiritually. If I feel like garbage physically, because I’ve been treating my digestive tract like a garburator for the worst kind of junk food, it’s not that likely that I’ll have much motivation for extended prayer, Bible study, or works of mercy. If I have no physical energy because I’ve been skipping meals and carb-ing up late in the day, it’s not too likely I’ll have much spiritual energy either.

The more I meditated on this, during my weeks of diet-journaling for Dr. Laura, the more I noticed how often and how profoundly the Scriptures actually address food as a significant concern in the spiritual life: from Torah’s dietary laws to Jesus’ teaching about fasting, the Bible makes no bones about it that there is some mysterious connection between our diets and our spirits.

Just exactly what that connection is remains to be seen.  Over the next little while I hope to spend some time exploring this topic here at terra incognita, in a series on the spirituality of food that I’m calling, “Eating, Praying, Loving.” So if this post piqued your appetite for more (pun intended), let me invite you to check back in over the coming days.

If you’re still scratching your head skeptically, wondering if I’m not biting off more than I can chew on this one (pun still intended), let me just suggest this, as a starting place for building a “biblical spirituality of food.”

Simply put: it is no accident that the central act of Christian worship (the most famousest Hillsong ditty not withstanding) is, and has always been a shared meal. The Eucharist, Holy Communion, our glorious supper with Jesus, is not merely a metaphorical act. Even if you’re not sacramental in your theology on this point, all but the most ardent of Zwinglians would agree, I hope, that our symbolic meal with the Lord is no mere symbol. (As if it could just as easily have been a bungee jump for the Lord, or something, and it still would have accomplished the same purpose.)

As the primary sign of his presence among us and our spiritual fellowship with each other, as his way of strengthening us and encouraging us in the spiritual life, as an opportunity to encounter him and the mysterious means of our communion with him, he gave—wonder of wonders—food for us to eat together.

Of course Jesus is not only our host at the table, he is also the feast itself (this bread is his body), but in making that spiritual leap to the sacramental meaning of the meal, the bread and cup do not cease to be—all but  the most ardent of transubstantiationalists would agree, I hope—it does not cease to be food for us. Literal, real, life-sustaining bread and wine.

Because the Word of God knew all along what I am just beginning really to appreciate, that there is in fact something mysteriously spiritual about the act of eating, and so, when it reached for a symbol that could mysteriously express our union with Him, it reached, of all places, into the cupboard, and pulled out a loaf of fresh-baked bread.

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The Girl Queen, the Captive Conqueror: A Devotional Commentary on the Book of Esther (9:21-32)

About 5 weeks ago (March 24), the Jewish community around the world celebrated the Feast of Purim, the very feast that the Book of Esther culminates with, and whose origins it commemorates to this day.  Some 2500 years later, they still set aside a holy day to do what Esther 9:22 says they did that first Purim so long ago: observe a day of feasting and joy, giving presents to each other and gifts to the poor.  They will also, from what I understand, read the Book of Esther in its entirety, shaking rattles whenever Haman’s name is mentioned (and in some traditions, they’ll dress in colorful costumes, as a remembrance of the ‘disguised’ activity of God in this story).  In this way the community actually relives today in the saga of God’s deliverance back then, remembering in a way that invites active participation in the on-going story.

And I’m thinking about Holy Communion.  Because just like the Book of Esther is the story of God’s unforeseen deliverance when all hope was lost, a story which transforms despair and fasting into festival joy and culminates with a Sacred Feast that commemorates God’s salvation in a way that binds the community together through that act of commemoration, so too the Christian Faith.  Ours is a story of God’s unexpected deliverance, which transforms crucifixion grief into resurrection joy, and is celebrated through a Sacred Feast of bread and cup that binds us together as his people. “Take and eat, this is my body; this is my blood of the covenant, poured out for the forgiveness of sins,” is how He said it.  Inasmuch as it is about a feast that celebrates God’s deliverance, the Book of Esther is re-enacted for Christians, every time we come to the communion table and remember the Ultimate Deliverance of God’s people in Jesus Christ.

But the Book of Esther has something to teach us here about communion, I think.  Because the kind of “remembering” that happens through the Purim Festival is more than just a vague, “Oh, yeah, remember when ...”  It is actually a dramatic entering into and re-living the story, the kind remembering that brings the past to life in this present moment, and allows us to take our place in the events.  Purim celebrants are not passive recipients; they are active participants.  And what if we came to the Communion Table in this kind of spirit, awake and alive and receptive to the possibility that what happened then is still, in a unique and mysterious way, playing out here, now, in this simple feast of bread and cup?  If we did, I think, we’d be much more likely to recognize the Communion Feast for what it really is whether we realize it or not: a real encounter with the living Jesus.

taken/blessed/broken/given, a song

In Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen uses the communion table as the central image for the Christian life. In the same way that the Communion Bread-- which is the Body of Christ-- is taken and blessed by the minister, then broken and given to feed the faithful, so too Christians-- who are the Body of Christ--are taken and blessed by God, then broken and given to feed the world. I have always loved this image and it has become a central theme for my understanding of Holy Communion.

I wrote this song a number of years ago, but re-recorded last fall. It sort of riffs on this idea from Nouwen. I hope it takes you and blesses you this morning.


Taken/Blessed/Broken/Given

[listen]

Song for the road, give us a song for the pilgrimage
A song of healing and hope
Fill our mouths with a song for the journey
And we’ll sing it wherever we go

Chorus:
Let our lives be taken and blessed and broken and given
Like the bread that came from heaven above
Taken and blessed and broken and given, Lord
Teach these clumsy hands how to love

Dream for the road, give us a dream for the pilgrimage
A dream of healing and hope
Be our guide and our destination
And we’ll follow where ever you go

Bridge:
This bread is my Body, broken for you
This cup which I pour out is poured out
To make your lives new
Now you are my Body, alive with my grace
Go now, I'm sending you out there
To show the World my face

Chorus:
Let our lives be taken and blessed and broken and given
Like the bread that came from heaven above
Taken and blessed and broken and given, Lord
Teach these clumsy hands how to love

The Feast of Purim and the Redemption of Saul

A few months ago I posted these thoughts on King Saul's infamous battle against the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15.  I argued then that, in seizing on the prophetic word and capitalizing on the Amalekite plunder, Saul shows us the ignoble failure of all our efforts at self-Messiahship; but also that YHWH's rejection of Saul (and us in Saul) as Messiah is really a redemptive act, inasmuch as it paves the way for the true Messiah--our reyah--to take up the mantle on our behalf. 

In light of these thoughts (and also of these much earlier thoughts on the tragic end of Saul's dynasty) I thought I might share these insights into Saul's story I recently got from the Book of Esther.

Yes, Esther.  The connection between these two stories are not immediately obvious, but profoundly significant.

Five times the Book of Esther points out that Haman is an Agagite (3:1, 3:10, 8:3: 8:10, 9:24), that is, a descendant of King Agag,the very Amalekite whose house Saul failed to destroy as per his prophetic mission back in 1 Samuel 15.  His failure to destroy Agag's line was why YHWH rejected Saul in the first place, and now we see the ominous result of his disobedience:  centuries after Saul, the People of God face utter annihilation at the hands of Agag's descendant. 

This might seem like a minor detail, that the "enemy of the Jews" in Esther is a descendant of Agag the Amalakite.  But then in Esther 2:5, we discover that Mordecai (Haman's arch nemesis) is a Benjaminite from the line of Kish. 

Anyone remember whose son King Saul was?

Kish, the Benjamite. It turns out that an ancestor of  Saul, the failed Messiah, has risen up to oppose the ancestor of Agag, the source of Saul's failure.

With this in mind, I doubt it's a coincidence that, even though King Xerxes clearly gave the Jews permission to pounce on the plunder of their enemies (8:11), the story stresses three times that under Mordecai's leadership they did not (9:10, 9:15, 9:16).  Mordecai and Esther have succeeded where Saul failed, and what we're witnessing in their success is actually the redemption of Saul's story through their faithfulness. 

This is more than an interesting intertextual connection, it is a profound word of hope to any whose story--in ministry or life or Christian discipleship--has brought them seemingly to the point Saul's story was at in 2 Samuel 21:1-14, with lament echoing in the air and carrion birds picking at the remains. 

There is no failure so final that God cannot redeem.

Jesus said that we'd discover eternal life in the Scriptures if and when we look for him there, so as the Jews of Susa celebrate the Feast of Purim at the end of the Book of Esther, I've got my eyes peeled.  And I can't help but notice that when God finally does redeem our failed efforts at self-Messiahship, this is what it looks like:  a faithful community of God's people, delivered from death and celebrating life together around a sacred meal.

Salvation belongs to our God.

House of Bread: a Christmas poem

O little humble House of Bread
how still we see thee
rise--
where once they buried
long ago his father's father's father's
father's one true love,
whose ancient tears his coming will
unwittingly awake--
(Rachel, weeping, because her innocents are no more)


O little simple house of bread:
in whose heart of mystery
is born today
the Christ child's hidden presence:
stolen away by dreams and night
and brought back to us the same--
(that out of Egypt Rachel's innocents might find their way back home)


O little broken house of bread,
soaked that day, and now today,
in wine-red blood
(that she, at last, might find God's solace for her tears)--
at your table we discover it again:
the hopes and fears of all the years
are truly met in thee
tonight.