Table Talk

Rethinking Communion and Community

Graves

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498244572
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

For nearly two thousand years followers of Jesus have gathered in churches to eat a meal called Communion in his memory. In Table Talk, Mike Graves claims if we could travel back to those earliest Christian gatherings, we would realize we are not just two thousand years removed; we are light-years removed from how they ate when gathered because eating was why they gathered in the first place, a kind of first-century dinner party.Four characteristics of their Communion practices would leap out at us, traits that are scattered throughout the New Testament, but that often go unnoticed: how the meal was part of a full evening together, promoting intimacy; how it was a mostly inclusive affair, everyone welcome at the table; how it was typically festive, more like a dinner party; and how afterwards they enjoyed a lively conversation on a host of topics. But Table Talk explores more than just Communion practices, because a new way of doing church is happening around the world, gatherings more horizontal than vertical. For two thousand years Christians have oriented themselves toward God in the presence of others; now a growing number of congregations, part of the dinner church movement, are orienting themselves toward each other in the presence of God. This book tells their story and helps us rethink our own.

chapter 1

The Meal

“Whatever the Lord’s Supper is, it is everything that eating is.”

—Hoyt Hickman

Companions

One of the ways people get to know each other is over a meal, becoming companions (literally, those who break bread together). But since this is a book about meals and not a conversation over an actual meal, I thought I’d share what brought me to this place of fascination with how we eat in Jesus’ name, long before I started reading those scholarly Greco-Roman banqueting books. If you’re reading this book with others, this might be the place for each of you to share your own journeys with this meal.

In many ways my journey begins at St. Christopher Catholic Church in Houston, Texas, where I was baptized the fifteenth day of my life and where we attended sporadically at best until I was about nine years old. St. Christopher is considered the patron saint of travelers, so I guess it makes sense that my journey began there, although looking back the road becomes much clearer when I reflect on something that took place more recently, in Oklahoma City.

It was late fall, 1998. At the time, I was teaching at an American Baptist seminary in Kansas City, and had received a flyer promoting one of Robert Webber’s workshops on worship. My good friend Ronnie was serving as pastor of a church in Wichita Falls, Texas, and since we had been through PhD work together a few years earlier, Oklahoma City seemed like a good place to meet up for a reunion at Webber’s workshop, especially since Ronnie had grown up in one of the suburbs there. A little golf outing, some Mexican food at a place he knew, and a workshop on worship. What more could a person ask for?

I was familiar with Webber’s many volumes on worship, including his slim book Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, and had used some of them in my classes at the seminary. Still, I honestly didn’t have high expectations for the day. I certainly didn’t expect it to change my life. Unlike so many scholars in the study of worship, Webber, who has since passed away, could gather up a whole host of denominational traditions to think about worship together. Catholics, Episcopalians, all sorts of mainliners, Evangelicals, they all met to learn from a very gifted and gentle teacher.

The handouts and notes from that day are still around my study somewhere. Webber briefly rehearsed the history of Christian worship, noting how during the Protestant Reformation the church tossed out the Eucharistic baby with the bath water, so to speak. He noted that in reaction to the abuses and even superstitions associated with Holy Communion leading up to that time, instead of repairing the abuses of the Catholic Church, many traditions were born that simply chose not to eat the meal on a regular basis.

Many Christians today are surprised to learn that one of the reasons some denominations only take Communion once a month or so isn’t because that makes it more special (a rule never applied to sermons and the offering) but because of an over-reaction to Roman Catholic practice way back in the sixteenth century. Lutherans and Episcopalians, of course, still ate every week, as did Roman Catholics, but for so many traditions, occasional observance ruled the day. A generation later John Calvin may have desired weekly Eucharist, but he was overruled by the Council of Geneva, and so the Church of Scotland and, here in the States, the Presbyterians were out of luck. Something similar would be true for Methodists and John Wesley hundreds of years later.

I listened to Webber and took notes. Like every other person who ever went to seminary, I had studied church history. I didn’t remember all the names and dates, although Luther and 1517 stuck out clearly. That Wednesday (I Googled it), October 31, the day Luther supposedly nailed his theses to the door, was the beginning of a new era in the history of the church, even if it wasn’t entirely different the next Sunday.

Webber’s rehearsal of history was nothing new to me, except somehow it was this particular day. The idea that the church (capital C), or at least a sizable portion of it, had moved away from celebrating the Jesus meal every week hit me hard. It was as if someone had just explained gravity, and suddenly it made sense why what goes up must come down. Only what I felt was the opposite, as if I were no longer tethered to the planet but floating in a new world. How, I wondered, did a large part of Christ’s church move from weekly Eucharist to occasional? What were we thinking? I concluded that we weren’t thinking, at least not clearly.

Ronnie could tell something was up. He looked at me, eyebrows raised. I looked at him and mouthed, “We’re supposed to eat this meal every week.” He whispered, “Easy for a seminary professor to say. Not so much for the pastor of a Baptist church.” Score one for Ronnie. He was right of course; seminary professors work in ivory towers.

“I’m serious,” I told Ronnie. “We’re supposed to eat this meal every week. That was the pattern all along.”

Still, he was right. Sure, at the time I was preaching every week at Rolling Hills Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but that was as interim minister, not permanent pastor. Ronnie knew he couldn’t just announce that from now on the church there in Wichita Falls was returning to that early pattern of weekly Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper, as Baptists were fond of calling it. They likely would have associated weekly observance with what Catholics did. And if there is anything true about Baptists and their Anabaptist ancestors, it is that if the Catholics do it, they don’t.

Only it wasn’t the end of discussion for me because what I knew as an interim minister is that short-timers can get away with most anything. What’s a church going to do, fire me for suggesting we have the Lord’s Supper every Sunday? They might roll their eyes, mumble behind my back. A minister would come along and rescue them. Besides, my suggestion was more modest. I proposed that after the first of the year we celebrate the meal every Sunday for one month, latter part of January into February. The basic idea of the worship series was that I would preach on different aspects of the meal each week and we would observe it in different ways. As you may know, to this day various traditions eat the meal in a variety of ways: staying seated and passing the trays or coming forward to eat it by intinction. (Intinction is Latin for dipping, as in dipping a piece of bread in the cup. Theologians love Latin. And Hebrew and Greek. And German.)

The folks in that church loved the idea for such a series. I suggested we begin with a Saturday night soup and salad meal at a home, watching the classic movie Babette’s Feast, then partake of the bread and wine. And that’s what we did, except with grape juice. What a lovely, quiet, and elegant time together, that Saturday evening in the home of this physician and his wife. The movie and meal moved many of us deeply. The same was true for the first Sunday of the series the next day, although I don’t remember a thing about that service.

Then came the Sunday after that, February 7, 1999. Some dates you never forget. I preached from Revelation 3:20, that verse about Jesus knocking on the door of the church, wanting to come in and sup with us, a eucharistic reference if ever there was one. I hadn’t always read it that way. Many of the Baptists I knew preferred to interpret the passage as Jesus wanting to be invited into our hearts, so that we might be saved. As far as I recall, no one ever wondered why it was a church’s door he was knocking on, or that maybe instead of our hearts, the food reference there was literal.

My sermon was called “Table for Two,” and while I emphasized the personal nature of communing with God, I didn’t do justice to the corporate nature of worship at all. (The New Testament is almost always more interested in the plural form of you; the singular not so much. “Y’all” is the Texas form of Greek.) I would probably give my sermon that day a B, maybe B+ if grading on the curve. But what the Spirit of God did with that sermon, and with that meal, deserved an A+. It was almost beyond words.

But only “almost,” because I have tried for years to describe what unfolded, except the problem with epiphanies is that words rarely do them justice. “You had to be there” describes most visions. But here goes: Since worshipers were to come forward and receive by intinction, and since we had four servers at two stations up front, after saying the words of institution (“On the night in which he was betrayed, Jesus took bread . . .”) and inviting the people to the feast, all that remained for me to do that day was stand there looking ministerial, whatever that means.

I stood behind the table inscribed with those words about remembering Jesus, and the people started filing forward. As they did, I had a vision. Not the blurry eyes kind; more the clear eyes kind that probably had everything to do with my knowing what many of them were going through. There was Bill, the retired minister on the left side in the back pew whose wife had passed away recently. This might have even been his first Communion since her passing, and so Bill limped forward on his bad knee. There was the single mother with two kids whose husband had repeatedly cheated on her and they had divorced. She was back in church, she and her children. On and on the list went, people facing the prospects of a job loss, a malignant diagnosis, all manner of little hells. There in that little church in Arkansas, I saw broken people coming to eat broken bread and be made whole again.

“Go in peace,” I said as the service concluded. Only instead of going, more people than usual flocked forward to say how moving the service had been, beyond anything they had experienced in church in a long time. Normally I might have said, “Well, thank you. The worship team puts a lot of effort into our services. I’m glad you found it meaningful.” After all, my mom taught me to be gracious when someone pays you a compliment. But this was not my doing—and of course it never is—so instead I just mumbled, “I know. That was amazing, wasn’t it?” So many of us had been stirred by something beyond us.

As I drove away, I thought, This is what we are supposed to do every week. Now when I use the word this, I mean the eating of the Jesus meal, not necessarily the emotional fireworks. I wasn’t so naïve as to imagine that every Sunday would produce goose bumps as I dipped bread in the cup, even if I longed for such an experience. I knew then, and realize more so all these years later, meals feed us even when we aren’t all that stirred by them. That’s true for lasagna and salad, as well as bread and wine. Do you remember what you had for lunch two weeks ago last Tuesday? Do you remember anything special about the last time you had Communion, or the one before that? But meals feed us even when we go through the motions, because in many ways the motions go through us.

What I did know back then, and have pondered ever since, is that those earliest followers of Jesus ate this meal not only every Lord’s day, but perhaps most every evening as they gathered in homes, or what we like to romanticize with the term an “upper room.” I also realized I wanted to know more about those earliest followers and their meal practices.

Gathered Together

Everything you need to know about what some people call “the early church” and their upper room meal practices is tucked away in the twentieth chapter of Acts. Okay, maybe not everything; that’s ministerial exaggeration. But the story we find there overflows with insights into early Christian meals, and since you could go to church your whole life and never hear this story, before you read it, a warning: it features some unusual elements. What I’m trying to say is some people think it’s weird.

On the first day of the week, when we had met to break bread, Paul was holding a discussion with them; since he intended to leave the next day, he continued speaking until midnight. There were many lamps in the room upstairs where we were meeting. A young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer. Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead. But Paul went down, and bending over him took him in his arms, and said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” Then Paul went upstairs, and after he had broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse with them until dawn; then he left. Meanwhile they had taken the boy away alive and were not a little comforted (Acts 20:7–12).

It’s different, right? But what a great story once you look at it closely. A number of scholars have done just that, taking a closer look at this story and the many meal narratives in the New Testament in recent years, although primarily in volumes not all that accessible to most readers. I think of Dennis Smith’s From Symposium to Eucharist, a scholarly volume if ever there was one, a book that impacted me greatly. I want to break down this story in Acts 20, filling in some of the gaps with the help of Dennis and other scholars.1 In attempting to translate their technical scholarship, I have tried to be faithful to them even as I hope to spark you the reader’s own interest. So here are some highlights from the story in Acts 20:

“On the first day of the week . . . .” We don’t usually read the books of the Bible from “cover to cover,” or the book of Acts in one sitting. Of course the books of the Bible were intended to be read that way, and if we did, we might recognize this phrase, “on the first day of the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Food for Thought
• Introduction: An Invitation
• Chapter 1: The Meal
• Chapter 2: The Guest List
• Chapter 3: The Ambiance
• Chapter 4: The Conversation
• Conclusion: RSVP
• Appendix: Different Words of Institution
• Recommended Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography