Acts
2:42-47
There
was a church I served where someone had married a man from Nigeria and they
were in the midst of moving him over here when 9/11 made it difficult. There was suddenly an unexpected obstacle because,
although he was a Christian, his last name was Abdul. It took many months to prove that his name
did not automatically make him a terrorist and to take him off the no-fly
list. When he finally arrived, people
were eager to meet him and so he and his American wife were invited to dinner a
lot.
I
remember the first time I had them over.
It was short notice, right after he arrived, and so I made what I had on
hand. I put the food on the table, we
said grace, and then I watched him try to figure out what to do with
spaghetti. I thought it might be sort of
an icebreaker. After a minute, we showed
him, but he was quiet through most of the rest of the meal and I thought, “Oh,
no. I’ve made him uncomfortable. I hope he likes ice cream.”
Later
that month, after the couple had been to dinner with several other church
families, and more than one person had commented quietly that they felt like
they had offended him somehow, but they weren’t sure what they might have done,
I figured that it wasn’t just me. A
pattern emerged, where everything was fine and dandy until they sat down to
eat, and then he clammed up and became distant.
I
decided to ask him about it, which felt kind of awkward, but I had a sense that
there might be a problem, like homesickness on a major scale, or that it was
going to be a long-term problem for him to find food that he could eat. I don’t remember how we finally figured it
out, but it came down to table manners.
In Nigeria, when someone has made a meal for you, it’s considered rude
not to pay close attention to the gift.
So if you’re talking while you’re eating, or not looking down at the
plate, that means you are kind of brushing off this wonderful thing that
somebody has done for you. He wasn’t
ignoring his hosts; he was trying to show them respect.
I explained that, for us,
sharing food is also an important expression of being together, which is why
when we have anything serious to discuss, we usually do it over a meal. One person talks while the other chews, and
then one person chews while the other talks.
I had never really thought about it until then. The way we eat together, even beyond formal
occasions where everything is staged, says something about what we think of
each other.
You know people are
friends when you see them at the movies and one holds out a bag of popcorn. There’s no, “Would you like some
popcorn? I should warn you that it has
greasy butter all over it. Oh, and I
hope you’ve washed your hands recently before you take any.” Nope.
It’s just stick-your-hand-in-the-bag and keep walking.
You know that someone
wants to be more than friends when a heart-shaped box of chocolates is involved. A teacher gets an apple. Someone sick gets a quart of chicken
soup. For graduation from the police
academy, it’s a dozen donuts.
We have our formal
rituals and informal rituals that emphasize our commonality, so many of which
center on table fellowship. Who you eat
with and how you do it signals who you are willing to be friends with. As Will Willimon comments,
“Interestingly, the earliest charge against Jesus was
not, ‘this man is a heretic and social revolutionary.’ Rather, Jesus’ critics looked at his behavior
and cried that he was a ‘glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and
sinners!’ (Luke 7:34). Jesus refused to
accept the social and religious barriers which people erect around the
table. He broke with convention and
feasted with everyone.”[1]
Jesus’ followers have tried to follow through on his
attitude of welcome. The book of Acts
describe the early church engaging in a formal sharing of food with prayer that
sounds very much like what we would call communion.
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and
fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” [Acts 2:42]
We also read about the sort of informal community
meals and the welcoming of one another around the supper table that has its
echo in the lunch that everyone’s invited to after the second service today.
“Day by day, as they
spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate
their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the
goodwill of all the people.” [Acts 2:46-47]
It goes together.
Jesus welcomes and feeds us, so we welcome and feed one another. When we do that, the circle grows wider.
“And
day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” [Acts 2:47]
Just how wide that goes sometimes
depends on how we negotiate the difficulties that we meet when we sit down and
really share our lives along with our food.
On the menu today is pulled pork.
A huge chunk of the book of Acts, along with sections of Paul’s letters,
are all about whether it is okay to eat non-kosher food or to sit at the table
while someone else eats it. I quoted
Will Willimon earlier. He is the one who
taught me that you don’t shoot a possum, you trap one and fatten it on table
scraps for about a week before you eat it.
And from Demola Abdul I learned that fried bats are a treat for children,
but adults only eat them on rare occasions.
Jesus didn’t have to deal with
that. What he did do, and taught his
followers to do also, was to meet one another honestly on the basic level of
shared humanity where we all need the same things: love, forgiveness,
acceptance, and sometimes someone to share a meal with. What he showed us is that when God’s love is
on the menu, there’s always plenty to go around.
I always like the story of Zaccheus, the tax collector who
wanted to see Jesus and climbed up in a tree to get a good look. There he is, up there on a branch, and Jesus
stops in the middle of the crowd to tell him to get down, because he’s inviting
himself to dinner. [Luke 19:5] Or how
about the time when he saved the day at a wedding feast in Cana where they were
just about to run out of – ahem! – refreshments? [John 2] Or what about the vision of eternal joy that
comes in the book of Revelation, where God throws a great feast like a wedding
reception and invites all of his people with the words,
“Blessed
are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” [Revelation 19:9]
When we share what we have here and now, “with glad and generous hearts,” [Acts
2:46] it’s like the hors d’oeuvres
for that banquet in heaven.
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