Practicing The King's EconomySýnishorn

Feasting Together

From the earliest days, the gospel created a community that welcomed everyone. In the process of becoming a community across all lines, few practices were as essential as the shared meal.

Today, our communities and our feasts in the West seem to have undergone a deep impoverishment, both inside and outside the church. For a variety of reasons, U.S. citizens are increasingly likely to live in all-poor or all-rich neighborhoods and much less likely to live in communities where they would never even have the chance of becoming friends with someone from a different class. If Deuteronomic feasts called the whole faith community, rich and poor, to journey to the sanctuary together, such festival pilgrimages today would face the added challenge that rich Christians and poor Christians quite simply do not know one another.

Meanwhile, the Lord’s Supper celebration in most churches in the United States seems to consist of consuming tasteless crackers and shots of grape juice. These Lord’s Suppers are usually consumed by worshipers in culturally and economically homogenous churches.

Such social realities undermine the community-creating function meals so clearly had in both the Old and New Testaments. Paul believed the life of the church would make known the mystery of God to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms simply by becoming a community across ethnic lines (see Ephesians 2:13–3:10). But our witness, our communities, our way of being in the world, and yes, even our economic lives suffer from our unwillingness to become the potlucking community of God. Practical economic practices have the power to make God’s economy encounterable in the present only if they flow out of communities radically committed to loving one another and welcoming all to the potluck.

That’s why we advocate feasting. Feasts give us an easy-to-begin yet essential starting point for becoming a community capable of potlucking with the community of God. Feasts of all sorts among friends and neighbors, as well as the church’s special celebration of the Lord’s Supper, provide opportunities for all of us to become people whose lives are oriented toward God and neighbor.

When has sharing a meal together brought you closer to a community or a person?