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“Table Manners”
First Congregational United Church of Christ
Rev. Dr. Janet L. Parker
August 2, 2015
Matthew 14:13-21
Today we will have the privilege to participate in a great mystery. After I finish
my sermon, and we sing a hymn together, we will gather at this table (indicating
communion table) and participate in one of the two sacraments of the Christian church—
Holy Communion. When we partake together of the bread and the cup, and we re-enact
the last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, we are entering into what the Greeks called a
mysterion, and the Romans translated as sacramentum—sacrament. We do this regularly,
once a month, but how much thought do we really give to it? Do we approach this table
with a sense of mystery, with an understanding that some rare and precious thing is about
to happen to us, or have we so domesticated this sacrament that we give it little thought,
and simply go through the motions that are expected of us? Or is the truth somewhere in
between? What is behind this ritual that we do once a month, that resides close to the
core of what it means to be a Christian church, as opposed to a Unitarian church, or a
Jewish synagogue or a Muslim mosque? And what does it really mean, after all, for us
today?
Children often get it that there is something special and mysterious about this
particular symbolic meal. Sometimes they get it in a good way, and sometimes not so
much. It all depends on where they’re coming from. Take me, for example. When I was
growing up in a Disciples of Christ church, we took communion every Sunday.
Now, as
you may know, Disciples of Christ churches practice believers’ baptism, and you can’t
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take communion until you’re baptized. So as a child, before I was baptized, I vividly
remember sitting in the pews with my parents and watching all the adults take
communion. I loved watching the gleaming silver trays go by with their little cups of
grape juice and little wafers of bread. I wanted that bread and that juice! It felt special,
even holy, to me, and I wanted to be a part of it. And even though I couldn’t yet take
communion, I knew that one day soon I would be baptized, and so the whole experience
carried a quality of anticipation for me, kind of like looking forward to Christmas several
months early. I felt that way because I knew I was part of the family; I belonged there.
But I once heard another story, of another child, who had a very different
experience of communion. It all started with Girl Scout Sunday. When she was a little
girl, her Brownie troop participated in a Girl Scout Sunday at the church where her troop
regularly met. During communion, they were given the honor of passing around the
silver trays of what she called “shot glasses” to the congregation. What would have been,
for me at that age, an absolute delight, was for her a terrifying experience. You see, she
was a Unitarian. Not being Christian, she was afraid that she would be struck by
lightning by a God who was angry that she, an imposter, was serving at this meal….or
that a parishioner would “out” her as someone who didn’t belong there. She experienced
communion as an outsider, and it was anything but a holy and comforting experience.
Is that what Christ’s holy meal has become? A marker of who’s inside and who’s
outside, of who belongs in the community and who doesn’t? Sadly, for many churches, it
has become just that. I find it tragic that Christians have taken a ritual that is rooted in
the radically inclusive generosity of Jesus of Nazareth, and turned it into a weapon that
can be used to literally “ex-communicate” people. Is that really what Jesus had in mind?
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Not according to John Dominic Crossan, one of the scholars in the Jesus Seminar.
Crossan makes the rather controversial claim that the origins of the Eucharist lie not in a
final Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples, in which he identified bread and
wine with his body and blood, but in the other feedings that we read about in the gospels,
like the feeding of the 5,000 that was read from Matthew’s gospel earlier (According to
many scholars, this count didn’t even include women and children, so there were
probably more like 20,000 people there!).1 Well, I believe that Jesus did share a final
Passover meal with his disciples that became the basis for Holy Communion, but it’s
clear in any case that the gospels strongly connect the Eucharistic meal to the other meals
that came before it, meals in which Jesus reached out to feed hungry, hurting and poor
people, without discrimination as to their social status or religious condition. In our
Matthew passage today, we find four verbs that also appear in the story of the Last
Supper: In both texts, we are told that Jesus “took, blessed, broke, and gave.” And so,
these feeding stories from Jesus’ ministry both foreshadow and interpret Jesus’ Last
Supper with his disciples; they put flesh on the bones of this ritual which we participate
in every month.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, as in cultures around the world today, eating
together carried great meaning. Who you ate with, and how you were placed around the
table, and who played host, and who served, all demonstrated your social status. Sharing
food together was serious business because it created a set of obligations, in Jesus’ statusconscious society. Anthropologists talk about this with the term commensality, which
means the rules of table and of eating as a miniature model of the rules of association in
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John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco: 1989), 179-180.
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society.2 Even in our own culture, think of how we feel when we’ve been invited to
someone’s home for dinner. We usually feel some sense of being indebted to them,
which we either try to forestall by bringing a gift of food or wine with us, or deal with
later by returning the invitation or sending a thank you card. And we don’t invite just
anyone to our homes for dinner, do we? We are generally very selective about our
guests. Now imagine our cultural context magnified by a power of ten or twenty. In
Jesus’ time, mingling all sexes, classes and ranks of people together at the same table was
a social nightmare; it was taboo. And so, because Jesus practiced what Crossan calls a
radical form of “open commensality,” or open table fellowship, just a few chapters earlier
in Matthew, he was accused of being “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors
and sinners.” You might say that for his day and time, Jesus had exceedingly poor table
manners!
But none of this was Jesus’ concern. The religious leaders may have been
scandalized, and even his disciples tried to shield Jesus from children, women and other
marginalized folks that pressed upon him, but Jesus had one operative principle that he
consistently acted out of—and it’s right here in our text today: compassion. Over and
over again, we hear about the crowds of needy people that came out seeking Jesus, and
his response is always the same. He feels compassion for them, and he meets them where
they are. If they are sick, he heals them. If they are hungry, he feeds them. And he calls
upon his disciples to do the same. “You give them something to eat” Jesus tells the
disciples in today’s passage, and later, in the book of John, he tells Peter after his
resurrection, “feed my sheep” three times, for emphasis.
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Ibid., 68.
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With all this in mind, what can we say about Communion today that is actually
rooted in the practice, the table manners, of Jesus? First of all, this table belongs to
Jesus. It doesn’t belong to any one denomination; its authority is not rooted in the power
of the clergy, and its reach extends far beyond the walls of this sanctuary. This table
represents the radically inclusive love, compassion and generosity of Jesus Christ for all
people. That is why we practice open communion, and invite everyone to Christ’s table
regardless of their beliefs or membership status. One commentator says of today’s
passage that the disciples urge Jesus to send the extra people away, but Jesus responds
that there are no extras. Instead, at the end of the story, we find that there are no extra
people, but only extra blessings, because there is more than enough to go around.3 When
we eat at this table, we are connected to all those whom Christ loves, which is all of
humanity-- indeed all of creation.
Secondly, this meal represents food for the body and food for the soul; it
represents Jesus’ fervent desire to minister to human beings as whole persons--embodied
souls and enspirited bodies. As commentator Brian McGowan writes, “Jesus never draws
too firm a line between soul and stomach. True religion always feeds both…to feed the
hungry is to do theology.”4
Finally, I would suggest that we think of the sacraments, both communion and
baptism, as a hinge between heaven and earth. Augustine wrote that a sacrament is “a
visible form of an invisible grace.” The mystery of the sacraments is that they remind us
of the connection between the spiritual and the physical. Real bread and real juice, or
Wesley White, “Sermon Preparation Thoughts and Questions,” available at textweek.com.
Brian McGowan, ‘Matthew on the Margins,” available at textweek.com,
http://www.textweek.com/mtlk/matt14a.htm.
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wine, when taken in faith, actually do enable us to participate spiritually in the life of
Christ. Because we are creatures of flesh, we need the things of the flesh to connect us to
the things of the spirit. Holy Communion reminds us that, in the words of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, “Earth is crammed with Heaven.” At this table and in this meal,
heaven and earth meet.
And so, Holy Communion is not only a sacrament in which we are spiritually fed,
but it’s also a symbol of our commitment to continue Jesus’ ministry of feeding hungry
bodies, and caring for the disenfranchised. Nourished by Christ’s spiritual body at this
table, we go forth to nourish the world as Christ’s body on earth, to bring this table
outside these four walls—to serve as we have been served. May it be so. Amen.