The Missing Ingredient--August 23, 2018
"Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord's supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you! … So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation...." [1 Corinthians 11:17-22, 33-34]
We have a rule at our house around supper time. It is simply this: you don't start eating until everybody else in the family is seated at the table, too. That's it. Not very complicated, really. There's really just a simple mental checklist is involved to follow it:
(Step 1) Look around at table.
(Step 2) See if someone in the family is missing.
(Step 3) If someone in the family isn't at the table yet, repeat Steps 1 and 2.
(Step 4) Once everyone is seated together, then we can pray and pass the biscuits and eat.
Now, just because it's a simple rule doesn't mean it's always easy to follow. After all, our lives are busy, and sometimes one person is late coming home from work, while another person has an early evening meeting to get to, and meanwhile kids are running in and out of the bathroom washing their hands (or trying to get away with just pretending to wash them), and there are plates and platters being carried out to the dining room table in a flurry, too. And sometimes, it is very, very tempting, for some members of our family (their identities shall remain undisclosed) to start putting forkfuls of macaroni and cheese into their mouths, or eating their watermelon chunks before everyone has come to the table.
And when that happens, we put a stop to it. Busyness or meetings to get to are not acceptable excuses for eating without others, neither are "But I'm really hungry!" or "I just really like watermelon." In a family, we wait for each other. We wait at the table for one another, and we hold off filling our own bellies until everyone has arrived. That's just what we do.
And the reason we do this--the reason my wife and I regularly allow ourselves to be cast as the bad guys at supper by insisting that we wait for everybody--is frankly that suppertime is about more than just consuming calories. The family meal is a chance for us to shape the kind of people we are. The dinner table is a place to practice love--and genuine love doesn't look after its own hunger first, but rather waits for everybody else who is coming to the table to join as well. That is crucial.
Sure, there are times in the course of a week when I just quickly grab a bite of lunch while standing so I can get back to work. Sure, there are days when I just skip the lunchtime ritual altogether. And sure, in the mornings, sometimes breakfast is rather scattershot with the early adult departure at 7:00am and the kids not needing to be out the door to school much later. But supper time is different. It is not really just about food. There is a missing ingredient to supper, even when all the serving platters and side dishes are already out on the table. Supper is this wonderful moment when we remind each other that we are bound to each other in love, and that love means you wait to make sure everybody else knows there is a place for them at the table. You wait for them. You make space for them. And you make it clear that "my" individual hunger is not more important than the welcome of each person to the table.
Now, that also means that we have knowingly chosen to set the pace of dinner, not according to who can wolf their meal down the fastest, but according to the needs of the slowest person to get to the table. We don't say that dinner starts as soon as the first person gets to their chair and grabs the fish sticks for themselves. We don't even say, "First come, first served" at the family dinner table. We almost do the opposite: we wait for whoever is the last one to get to the table, and we all share the serving all at the same time. That is an important piece of teaching one another--not just the kids, but reminding the grown-ups, too--what love looks like.
And love is not a first-come, first-served commodity. Love is not awarded according to who gets to the buffet line first and piles all the shrimp on their plate so there is none left for the latecomers. Love waits. And that means that love gives a certain priority, not to whoever thinks they have "earned" to get to eat first, but actually to whoever is slowest to get to the table, and whoever has the hardest time getting the corn scooped onto their plate.
So far, I hope all of this is rather straightforward and without controversy. I imagine that on this point, family dinners look much the same all across our communities, and across our country, maybe even the world. And I expect that by and large in our family meals, we can all affirm the importance of making the effort of waiting for whoever is last, providing for whoever has the least, and setting aside a place for whoever has been left behind. You wait to eat until the last person has been seated. You help make sure the people around you have had everything passed to them. You make sure to save some for whoever is going to be arriving late, or you save leftovers to bring to the person who couldn't get out to your house for dinner. This is obvious stuff, I hope.
But somehow that same logic, that same obvious almost self-evident logic of dining room love, gets confused when we consider the wider family to which we belong in the community of Jesus. And we have been getting hung upon it since the first century. There was a time, as our passage today from First Corinthians describes it, when the followers of Jesus met for worship, fellowship, and discipleship all around tables for a community meal of the family of God. And in the midst of that meal, they would not only eat their own dinners and break bread together, but they would retell the story of Jesus' meal with his disciples--the meal we now call Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, or the Lord's Supper. But just like happens with my kids prematurely scooping macaroni or shoveling watermelon into their mouths, in the early life of the church you had the same kind of me-first attitude creeping in. Some people, whether as individuals or as nuclear family units, would eat on their own first, while others had nothing. They acted as though the meal wasn't a shared common experience, but simply a race to get food into their bellies. It was Me-and-My-Group thinking at its most obvious. And the apostle Paul had to smack them all upside the head and say, "No! No! That's NOT how we do things here!"
Paul is upset, not because the Corinthians have gotten their metaphysical diagrams about the transubstantiation of the eucharistic elements slightly wrong, and not because they had forgotten to use incense or organ music during their liturgy, but because they had forgotten to treat this moment like a family dinner. And at a family dinner, you wait for everybody. You pace yourselves, not according to who can eat fastest and get to seconds, but according to who is the slowest, so that they don't get left out. At a family dinner table, you put your own needs and hunger in a lower priority than welcoming everybody else to have a place at the table. At the family meal, you take into account the needs of the last, the least, and the left behind. So Paul said, in so many words, "That's what you need to be doing when you gather with other Christ-followers! You all need to put the needs of the others before your own immediate gratification!"
This is where we often have a hard time. I don't have too much of a problem teaching my kids that they need to wait for everyone to come to the table. But I know there is this self-centered streak in me that has a hard time telling myself, on Paul's authority, to do the same in the wider circles of my life. And yet, that is just what Paul is calling us to: to put the needs of the other before our own wants. To wait until everybody has gotten the chance to sit. To put my own wish for a drumstick be put beneath the need of the person next to me so that they can have some chicken too.
Paul knew the power of sharing a table together with others. And he knew that we need the regular practice of learning to share tables with one another not just within our nuclear families but across them as well, or else we will turn our own little families and tribes into idols. And so Paul insisted that in this family, the family of God, we wait for each other, and we honor each person's contributions, and we also let others come to the table regardless of what they have to bring or offer. In this family, we wait for one another. In this family, we look out for the needs of the other. In this family, we put others before ourselves, and instead of getting huffy or bitter about it, we can rejoice that someone else got to have their needs attended to. That is radical talk these days, where it is so much more popular to talk about getting as much as you can, as quickly as you can. It is radical because it will mean that day by day, each of us will reorient our lives, not around trying to hoard treasures into piles, but around the needs of the slowest, the lowest, the least, and the last.
We wait until the slowest person coming on their way arrives. We make room for the last-minute arrivals. We hold off on filling our plates with wants and wishes until after everybody there gets enough for their needs. And maybe, just maybe, if we practice it as church together, we will be transformed to practice the same kind of love outside the walls of church, just recklessly loving people without the tired old logic of "first come, first served."
May today be such a day: may we put the needs of others before our own. May we prioritize the last, the least, and the left behind. May we wait until everyone is welcome at the table before stockpiling the fried chicken for ourselves. May we live in the fullness of sharing our treasures with one another. And may we discover that true communion sprouts up from that sharing.
Lord Jesus, lead us to your table, and bring us to welcome others as you have made a place at the table for them, too.
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