Christianity is a meal fellowship.

And ministry is table service.

This is the focus and content of a remarkable chapter in Gordon W. Lathrop’s book, The Pastor: A Spirituality.

And this is the chapter that, most of all, sets the liturgical traditions apart from the free churches. This is what many of us who fled those non-liturgical congregations hungered and thirsted for. It wasn’t just that we wanted to celebrate communion more often or have a more structured form of worship. No, what Lathrop outlines in this chapter is a different vision of the Church, a contrasting culture, an entirely different mindset than what many of us experienced in free church evangelicalism.

Gordon Lathrop makes two simple points in this chapter:

To be the church means to come to the table together.

Christianity came into existence as a meal fellowship. Biblical images, some of them used in the early centuries of the faith, can help us understand the importance of this assertion. The food itself was now the very presence of Jesus, his encounterable body in our midst, his covenant-making blood on the lintels of our bodies. The meal was the taste of the feast on the mountain (Isaiah 25), the Spirit-given end of death itself, the gathering of all peoples to eat and to drink, like Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 18), with the Holy Trinity. The gathering was now the qahal, the ekklesia, eating and drinking with God and sending portions to those for whom nothing was prepared, as in the account of Nehemiah (Nehemiah 8).

To serve the church as a minister means to take up the role of a table-servant.

We would do well to recover the concrete meaning and the concrete connotations of “ministry.” Let the ministers be diakonoi. Let the gospel be set out as food, in the food, and in the relief for the poor. Christianity is a meal fellowship and diakonia is its unique idea about leadership. The words for this recovery, of course, are words from the heart of the Gospel tradition: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and table server of all” (Mark 9:35), and “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your table server, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. for the Son of Man came not to be served at table but to serve the table, and to give his life a ransom for the many” (Mark 10:43-45). Finally, the great table service of Christ to the world is the cross. There, by holy mercy, he is the server and the food, the very fruit from the tree of life for faith to receive and eat and live and also the very famine relief of God served up to all the needy world.

In all this, he is asserting the down-to-earth, lived reality of the Christian life and Church. Jesus introduced the Kingdom not so much in ideas as through incarnational action — by eating and drinking with people. Many of his sayings and stories reflect that, and come to us as examples of “table talk” that he shared around meals. Christianity, Lathrop says, is like that. It is a meeting, a meeting at table. Baptism is how we “wash for dinner.” When we gather, we not only share the nourishment of words and rituals, but also actual food and drink. Furthermore, recognizing that some of the family are unable to gather with us, we take them their meals and visit with them in Christian love. Also, knowing that many of our neighbors are hungry and short on resources, we take care to relieve the poor around us through sharing our bread and possessions with them.

The table service of the gospel belongs to the whole church, of course. But it is also the special calling of the ordained.

If someone asks me what I do, my proper answer should be, “I wait tables.”

I see to it that my family is fed and nourished and cared for.

I sit with them as one who is likewise hungry and thirsty and we break bread together.

At the table, we talk. We listen. We learn from each other.

We are fed.

Gordon Lathrop says, “When it is healthy, Christianity is a meal fellowship still.”

You can have your grand auditoriums, your preaching palaces, your gospel multiplexes, your all-purpose campuses that house every conceivable program.

I’ll be meeting with friends at the table.

* * *

This is part 4 of a series. Here are links to previous posts:

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Today, a rich quote from Gordon W. Lathrop on preparing to preach. This is not so much about the “nuts and bolts” of preparing a manuscript but rather about how preaching grows out of the pastor’s life, prepared through paying attention and engaging his or her imagination.

I want a pastor like this. I want to be a pastor like this. No more Bible lectures or sterile apologetic proofs. No more shallow moralizing. No more insensitive rants that fail to take into account the actual situations of real people. No more cliched optimism. No more posing.

Don’t tell me stories about your life. Tell me about life. Help me imagine it. Introduce me to the One who gives it, and let me feel the wind in my face.

For me, then, because I am a preacher of the church, continual practice in attention and imagination must be a part of my daily round. I read novels and go to a few films, chosen with critical discretion, so that I might imagine the situation of other people and pay attention to the ways fine artists envision the world. I read a little history and some ethnography, and I try to listen carefully to the personal stories that are told to me, not immediately imposing my meaning on them. I listen to the Scripture as we read it at our dinner table and to the great stories we read aloud before we go to bed. I watch the trees and birds outside my window. I walk on the streets of my city, watching faces, and I walk in the nearby woods, attending to the actual place on the earth where I live. In both places — streets and woods — I try to see what is happening. I pursue interests in other cultures than here, other places away from here. I go to museums and to art shows. I try to keep learning languages other than those I already know. I try to see if I can observe in what ways women and men, young people and older people, gay people and straight people may or may not differ in their experience of the world. I read a good newspaper, carefully and critically, though I do not watch much television, my feeling being that there is usually very little there that will surprise me. I read the Scripture alone, seeking to hold myself before Christ in the text, continually surprised by Christ in the text, eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ in the text. For me this lectio divina, the “news,” pastoral care, walking, personal reading, family life, and my personal encounters with other cultures and other languages all make up part of the preparation for preaching. Seldom do such exercises yield an “illustration” for a sermon. Rather, they function to train my attention and imagination. It is attention and imagination I must bring to the preparation for preaching.

– Gordon W. Lathrop
The Pastor: A Spirituality