Martin Luther said two things were required for a worship service: that the Gospel is proclaimed and the Sacraments administered. Therefore, Sunday, November 29, the first Sunday of our new liturgical year, Advent 1, fifth Sunday of the month, we are trying a different setting for worship by gathering at 4pm in the fellowship hall for a potluck supper with guided conversation, prayers, simple singing, and Eucharist.
For many years the first Christians gathered around home dinner tables, and in secret basements, to devote themselves to the apostles' teaching, the prayers, the care of the poor, the meal. We gather around the Meal Jesus shared with his disciples on the night we handed him over, a meal he had grown up with every year, a meal which told the Story of God's deliverance and faithfulness to a stiff-necked people, a meal in the home which formed the faith of multitudes across generations.
So how do you teach and support and question faith in the home? With your kids, parents, spouse, cats? It's not only the place of Sunday School to shape the faith of our children, since they pay more attention to what we do than to what we say anyhow, and they watch and learn everything we do regardless of whether we want them to. They learn if we think they are important and worthwhile by how we pay attention to them. They learn how to treat other people by the way we treat other people. They learn how to talk about other people by the way we do, how to feel about their bodies by the way we talk about and treat our own bodies, how to take care of the world around them by the way we do, even when we're not paying attention.
There are so many reasons why gathering around the meal is key to faith formation. Our relationship with food, with the world, the hungry, the earth, is borne out in our approach to meals, and Jesus shared mealtime with people from all walks of life (which got him into lots of trouble with the purists). When we eat we acknowledge that we need something outside of ourselves in order to keep going, and it can be a vulnerable time especially in time of drought or lost harvest when food is scarce. How many times have we walked past somebody sitting with a cardboard sign who is claiming to be hungry, because we have the power to do so and don't trust they'll make 'good use' of what we might consider giving them? Or spend mealtime on our phone rather than with each other at the table because we've got too many 'important' things to pay attention to? According to John's account of the Gospel, Jesus took on the servant's form and washed his students' feet at the dinner table. He paid attention to them. He knew they would all fall away, and he loved them to the end.
Potlucks are common in the Lutheran cultural tradition. Not only in our culture, certainly, but it's one of those cultural jokes we make about being Lutheran, and it's a blessing to behold when food comes out of so many homes to be shared at a common table. When winter sets in for the season here, there will be weekly community meals at St Luke's in Valaite, always hosted in that space with food provided by different communities (we will cook and serve in early February), and at those meals there are so many people from so many walks of life we have frequently spoken of the Kingdom of God with illustrations from that gathering.
How does your mealtime offer space for the hungry, welcome for the strange and uncertain questions in your own life and heart? What absolutely 'normal' places in your life have been touched by holiness or suddenly surprised with a moment of grace? It is Advent, after all. Keep an eye out and an ear alert: Jesus is coming.
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