Reflection and Awe Lent Series - The Table

Throughout this week, we have been exploring the discipline of fasting, but today, we’re going to flip things on their head a little. For the next few moments, we are going to look at the power of the table.

You can’t fast forever. At some point you will have to break the fast, and so why not use that as an opportunity to gather some family, friends, colleagues, or neighbors around the table for some food? Traditionally, every Sunday is a feast day throughout the season of Lent. It’s a chance for some respite during the 40 days and creates space to celebrate.

It is important to note that although fasting is primarily the abstinence from food, food in itself is not the enemy. Rather food is a representation of our earthly or fleshly desires. In fact, meals are great occasions for bringing others into a place of relationship with Jesus.

Just think for a moment how many times in the ministry of Jesus that He was attending a meal. It seems like much of His time was either going to someone’s house for dinner, already sat around a table, or on His way from a meal.

In his book, Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer suggests three ways to categorize the ministry of Jesus.

1. Making space for the Gospel
2. Preaching the Gospel
3. Demonstrating the Gospel

One of the key areas Comer speaks about as a platform for these things is hospitality. Something happens when you sit together around a table over food. This “table fellowship” was an important part of early Jewish culture and still is today. The opening up of our homes and tables to others demonstrates the invitation of God to us, to the far-off, the disregarded, and the marginalized. The Greek word for hospitality, philoxenia,translates in its two parts to mean to love the stranger, foreigner, or guest.

This invitation can be counter cultural. Although we live in a time where we are more connected than ever before, the statistics will support the fact that we are also experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness.

We can often live in association with one another and not in true relationship with those around us. 

We can live in a world of boxes—moving from one box to another and yet remaining isolated. We live in the box of our home, walk to the box of our car, to go to work in the box of our office or cubicle, do the same return journey, and then stare at the box of our TVs. And at every potential moment we may interact with another human, we pull out the boxes from our pockets and scroll through our phones. We can so easily live parallel to the very ones God has called us to impact… unless we break away from our boxes and invite others in. The reality is that the breaking of our fast will happen at some point anyway, so why not use it as an opportunity to gather, speaking about what the Lord is doing in and through you. Maybe as you invite those around you who don’t yet know Christ themselves, you may have the chance to share and demonstrate the Gospel in action.

This kind of hospitality is what the writer Rosaria Butterfield calls radically ordinary hospitality. As we close out today, consider her words:

“Radically ordinary hospitality – those who live it see strangers as neighbors and neighbors as family of God. They recoil at reducing a person to a category or a label. They see the God’s image reflected in the eyes of every human being on earth…Those who live out radically ordinary hospitality see their homes not as theirs at all but as God’s gift to use for the furtherance of His kingdom. They open doors; they seek out the underprivileged.”

They know that the Gospel comes with a house key.”