What It Means – And What It Doesn’t – To Host a Meal in Christ’s Name

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part XI of our series on Sharing Your Bread

We’re looking this week at the practice of fasting and in Monday’s post, we learned that a real fast isn’t just about not eating, but about sharing one’s bread (enjoying a meal) with the poor.    That’s what the sheep are commended for in Matthew 25, the passage we’re looking at more closely today.

There’s something very important about Matthew 25:37 and it can only be found in the Greek.  It has to do with the word that is typically translated only as “feed”; the Greek word ethrepsamen.

Ethrepsamen does not mean ladling soup into the bowls of homeless people who are shuffling through a rescue-mission meal line. It means something far more intimate than is conveyed by the English “feed.”

It means to nourish, support, nurture, and nurse like a mother breastfeeding an infant. 

One only can be said to feed the poor when one holds them to one’s own chest and shares the substance of one’s own life with them as the token-and-pledge provision of host Jesus. So a fast is not merely a transfer of food but of deep love and care. The food is always the glorious least of what is offered.

Unfortunately, this kind of nourishment isn’t always given when Christians “feed” others. Consider the following blog entry in which the writer reports on sharing a can of chili with a homeless man. Christ appears in the story not as host but as a private inspiration to the giver, who appears to believe that Christ is content with a private apartment in the writer’s heart. Apparently the writer thinks that Christ’s appearance as host of the meal would be intrusive, detracting from the romance of the chili and chitchat, which the writer regards as a particularly poignant show of his own faith and proof that “God is so big.” As big as a can of chili!

Unfortunately for the homeless man, the story concludes with empty cans of chili being the only evidence of a big God. The writer returns to law school, the homeless man returns back behind the gas station perhaps for another ten years, and the writer’s longing is for another “very scary” encounter with the homeless. It is unclear what the homeless man longs for, or what Jesus longs for either:

I have been praying for an opportunity to show my faith. That is a very scary prayer to pray. Sometimes I want to take it back because I’m so scared.

Around noon today I left my house to go to the law school. On the way I remembered what we discussed about getting some cans of soup and having it ready for homeless people if they ask. When I pulled up to the gas station, there was a guy sitting on the sidewalk. We greeted each other on my way in, but that was it. I bought two cans of chili and some spoons. On the way out, he asked if I had some spare change. I asked if he was hungry and he said yes so I gave him a can of chili. Then, I asked him if he minded if I sat with him. We talked for about 10–15 minutes.

His name is Anthony. He’s been homeless for about 10 years. He was really fun to talk to. I enjoyed his company. He seemed to enjoy mine. I can hardly describe what I felt after I left him. It was a deep joy along with a deep pain. I ended up in the law school parking lot crying my eyes out. He told me he slept behind the Phillips 66 last night.

I didn’t share my faith with him, but I showed my faith to him. God is so big. I just asked him for an opportunity and there was Anthony sitting, waiting on me.

I hope to talk with him more. (Excerpted from The Whole Life Offering, p. 72)

When Christians share a meal with the poor, they are to host in Christ’s name. They regard Christ, not the poor, as the central figure of the meal. They recognize the poor as Christ’s favored guests, honoring Christ by sharing openly that they treat the poor with the same honor as they would treat Christ because he insists on it as the gracious host he is.

But they do not equate the poor with the Christ. God does not call Christians to be Christ to the poor, nor does he call the poor to be Christ to Christians. They are means of grace to each other; that is, they are ways that we—host and guest both—can come to see and know Christ more deeply through the other.

Sometimes we act as if it’s enough for Christ to be present at the meal by just being in our hearts or our minds, not in our conversation. But that robs everybody—guest, host, and Christ himself. Christ is the friend of humanity, not just a God who wants to make sure that everyone has a friend. Excluding Christ from the feast is the same as excluding the poor from it. It excludes the fellowship between God and his creation.

The Christian is never the host, just as the poor guest is never the guest of honor; Christ is both the host and the guest, yet in his generosity he shares the hosting privileges with the host and the invitation privileges with the guest. For the Christian, the feast is Christ’s open extension of hospitality and warm friendship-love to the specific guests whom Christ hosts at table. We eat with a real person, not with a generic human container of poverty, i.e. “the homeless.”

The meal is not undertaken in an effort to better understand the problems of the poor. The meal is not an interview enabling us to evaluate whether or not the guest “deserves” more help from us, nor is it a pity party where we mourn the guest’s victimhood. The meal is token and pledge that we will not withhold from our guest any portion of the gifts Christ has entrusted us to share on Christ’s behalf.

Jesus does not say, “Eat with the poor; figure out why they are poor; react accordingly.” He says, “Eat together in my name. Here’s the food. Share fellowship with each other and build relationships with me at the center.”

So we’re called to do more than distribute food commodities to the poor. We are called to nourish, support, and nurture—in body, soul, and spirit—all those whom Christ commands us to invite to his table. Food is necessary, but so is fellowship in Christ. So the Work of Mercy of sharing our bread cannot be satisfied by service at a food bank or soup kitchen, or by eating chili on the curb with a homeless person. These things can prepare us to share our own bread, but as  we’ll see in our next post wherein we look at another story, “we must sit with them at the table.”

Have you ever eaten a meal with a homeless man or woman?  What happened?  What might you do different knowing what you know today?

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The Kind of Fasting That Gets God’s Attention

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part X of our series on Sharing Your Bread

This week we are going to talk about the Work of Mercy of sharing your bread in light of the Work of Piety of self-denial. Or, in other words, fasting.

Fasting??? That doesn’t sound fun. Did you just feel your stomach growling? Are you worried that you might be challenged to give up chocolate for a month or to only drink water for the next three days?

As it so often does, Scripture has something much more transformative in mind, and it’s always turning words we think we know—and, by extension, our lives—on their heads.

We, for example, think of fasting as “not eating.” But in Scripture, it actually means something surprisingly different.

Let’s take a look at Isaiah 58:1-9 and see if we can discern a Biblical definition:

1 “Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
2 For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
3 ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
4 Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
5 Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness[a] will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

So based on this passage, how would you say Scripture defines fasting? One thing you definitely could say would be this: Biblically, self-denial does not mean not eating.

Not eating does not impress God. For one thing, you’re still focused on yourself when you’re not eating. You’re focused on yourself not eating! And self-denial means looking beyond your own stomach, whether we’re talking about filling your stomach or keeping it empty.

To say it a little differently: An acceptable fast is something altogether different than mere personal abstinence. It’s about public engagement with those you normally don’t engage with. It means more than just denying yourself the good of bread. It means you bless the ‘fasted’ bread, break it, and share it with the recipients (the poor, the outcast, the one who is outside of the fellowship of the church and not much aware of God)  as token and pledge to withhold no good thing that Christ, the true host, intends to give.

Fasting is not disengagement from the world; it is disengagement from self for the sake of the world and of its Christ.

It is not the transferring of a food commodity, but rather the transferring of one’s affection, compassion, and interest, from self to other for the sake of Christ.

The story we’re looking at in the next few posts is the parable that Jesus tells about this very subject, in Matthew 25:31-46, when he talks about the sheep and the goats. For the sake of length, I’m not going to post the whole thing here, but you might want to take a look at it before this next part.

Now, if I asked you, “Which group fasted, the sheep or the goats?”, what would you say? Before reading the Scripture in Isaiah, we might have said, “Well, neither fasted. Jesus’ story doesn’t talk about fasting at all.” But after reading Isaiah, we could say that the goats may have gone without food in an attempt to get God’s attention…but they received God’s wrath.

What got God’s attention? What Isaiah calls real fasting: the sheep sharing their bread with the poor.

In our next post, we’ll take a look at what it really means to feed the hungry.

How might changing the way we fast impact our lives and the world?

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Our Meals Should Look Like Jesus’ Meals

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part IX of our series on Sharing Your Bread

As we continue changing the way we think about how and why we share our bread, I want to include this quote from Peter Leithart with New St. Andrews College:

“The difference between the Lord’s Supper and its perversion does not consist in any difference in the ritual actions, the elements used, or the words spoken but rather lies in the way people behave toward one another. The Lord’s death is proclaimed only when the church celebrates rightly, that is, when Christian peace, love, and unity are manifested in the meal, and when their conduct at the meal fits the way the community lives together.”

Our meals should look like his meals, and a big part of that is that our guest list should look like his guest list.

Who, then, should we expect to be around the table with us? Our friends? According to Scripture and history, we should not be surprised when our friends—and everyone else we’d be delighted in our flesh to share a table with—say no.

When we become his servants, sharing his feast invitation to the world, we should expect that carrying out his command will mean establishing new relationships we never would have ever considered having, all because we are being faithful to pass on his invitation and to feast with those whom the rest of the world would rather ignore.

In Luke 1:52-53, Mary, Jesus’ mother, says of God:

52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones 
but has lifted up the humble. 
53 He has filled the hungry with good things 
but has sent the rich away empty.

That will be the story of every faithful church congregation. Our homes and worship times and dinner tables should be populated by the humble and hungry whom God is filling with good things, while those who formerly ruled our lives—those who are rich in reputation, wealth, good looks, or the cares of this world—are sent away empty.

There’s a verse of Scripture that speaks about that: “For to him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Mark 4:25). Says Leithart:

“The person ‘who has’ is someone who receives God’s abundance…and draws upon it to deal generously with neighbors. This person will receive ‘more’ for his or her ministry of sharing. The one ‘who has not’ is blind to God’s riches and must therefore hide talents/pounds, construct barns to hoard harvests, and, in short, lay up treasures on earth. These treasures ‘will be taken away.’”

So when we feast on our own resources with our own friends in our own homes to celebrate our own celebrations, Scripture says, even those feasts will be taken away from us. But when we feast on his resources with the outcasts he calls friends, taking his roving banquet table to them to celebrate his victory over sin and death, then our feasts—and our friendships around his table—will be multiplied, just as his were.

But be prepared to be faithful in a little; sometimes this multiplication takes time.

Some years ago a girl named Maggie grew up on a small Indian reservation in which nearly everyone older than twelve drank alcohol.

Maggie used to baby-sit for Lois, who lived in a neighboring band within the tribe. Once a week she’d go the few miles to her community and take care of Lois’s children. But after a couple of months, Maggie started to wonder, ‘What could Lois possibly be doing every Tuesday night? There’s not much to do around here in these villages.’

So one evening after Lois left to go to the meeting lodge, Maggie packed up the children and went over to the lodge to find out what she was doing. They looked through a window into the lodge and saw a big circle of chairs, all neatly in place, with Lois sitting in a chair all by herself.

The chairs in the circle were empty.

All of this made Maggie even more curious.  So when Lois came home that evening, Maggie asked her, ‘Lois, what are you doing every Tuesday night?’ And Lois answered back, ‘I thought I told you weeks ago, I’ve been holding Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.’

So Maggie asked her back, ‘What do you mean you’re holding meetings? I went over there tonight with the children and looked through the window. We watched you sitting there in that circle of chairs, all alone.’

‘I wasn’t alone,’ Lois said. ‘I was there with the spirits and the ancestors; and one day, our people will come.’

‘Every week Lois set up those chairs neatly in a circle, and for two hours, she just sat there,’ Maggie recalled. ‘No one came to those meetings for a long time, and even after three years, there were only a few people in the room. But ten years later, the room was filled with people. The community began turning around. People began ridding themselves of alcohol.’

Despite your sincerest and most frequent invitations, you may be plowing hard ground.  You may be offering to feast together literally for years before anyone says yes. Those lean times will test you. You will have to ask, “For whom am I doing this? And why?”

In those times, let the Lord’s Supper sustain you. As Peter Leithart says,

“The effect [of the Lord’s Supper] is more a matter of ‘training’ than ‘teaching.’ At the Supper, we eat bread and drink wine together with thanksgiving not merely to show the way things really ought to be but to practice the way things really ought to be.”

Leithart says,

“Frequent eating and drinking at the Lord’s table will inoculate the church against the Gnosticism of modern Christianity (not to mention trendy spiritualisms) that would reduce religion to a private, inner, purely ‘spiritual’ experience… a church that celebrates the communal meal is bound into one Body and will resist the corrosive individualism of modern culture… a church that shares bread at the Lord’s table is learning the virtues of generosity and humility; a church that proclaims the Lord’s sacrificial death in the Supper is exercising itself in self-sacrifice and becoming immune to the lure of self-fulfillment.”

And remember: As Leithart says,

“The operative command in connection with the Supper is not ‘Reflect on this’ but ‘Do this.’”

Let’s do this word.  

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