Thousand Acre Church

I’ve been ingesting a stimulating book on the meal practices of the early church titled Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts.  I’m getting close to the end of the book, and I keep getting smacked around by these questions:

• If sharing meals was important to Jesus, then why isn’t it as important to the church as I know it. 
• Why isn’t meal practice more important to my family as followers of Jesus?
• If koinonia (having things in common, sharing) was important to the early church, then why don’t we practice it more often?

This book makes the case that these things WERE important (and when I have time, I’ll try to blog summaries of the authors big ideas), and I assume that they ARE important based on her presentation.  I don’t assume you will agree, so I’d be happy to engage in that discussion later.  For now, I’d like to share a paragraph that I think sums up her understanding of the Eucharist.

“If theology is communicated through meals, what kind of theology is the church communicating today?  Through two thousand years the church has retained a meal of sorts — a ritual or ceremony we’ve called Mass, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion.  It is a sacrament, an ordinance, a means of grace for the believer.  It is typically interpreted as a time to privately confess one’s individual sins and to reflect on Jesus’ (substitutionary) death for their forgiveness.  A vertical element remains, but for most the horizontal element is missing.  We do not usually confess our sins to each other and reflect together on “the death of the Lord” as a self-giving act that we are to emulate.  The relational aspect of a communal meal is gone, along with any attempt to eat together across social boundaries.  This meal has nothing to do with feeding the poor and the less poor alike so that no one is hungry.  Instead, our real meals take place (when we don’t grab something on the run or at a fast-food restaurant) with family or friends or co-workers who are social equals.  Church potlucks and picnics, also with social equals, are the closest we come to agape meals of the past — and how many of us view an all-you-can-eat church potluck meal as a sacrament?”

I don’t know exactly what it might look like for an ordinary meal to have theological or sacramental significance.  The best meal I can imagine that might have this weight would be a “family dinner” with all of the children and maybe some friends sharing in one conversation about their day’s activities and joys and burdens.  I’m left humiliated by my lack of commitment to sacramental meals, but I do have hope that ordinary daily activities can have spiritual significance.  That is why we keep trying.