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| ISBN-13: | 9780819225573 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 573 KB |
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SOUL BANQUETS
How Meals Become Mission in the Local Congregation
By John Koenig
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2007 John KoenigAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-1926-8
CHAPTER 1
The Mission-Meal Synergy
The shrimp salad at Michael's Restaurant was superb, and we couldn't help praising it as we dug into our over-generous portions. But our table talk quickly turned to other matters. My lunch partner, the Rev. Lyndon Harris, was about to complete his assignment as priest in charge at St. Paul's Chapel, the small eighteenth-century church in lower Manhattan that had miraculously survived the destruction of the World Trade Center towers across the street. Survival alone had granted the church a certain iconic status in the days immediately following 9/11, but St. Paul's did not rest on that reputation. Only a week or so after the attacks, the congregation's mission of hospitality to the crowds of emergency workers at Ground Zero became legendary. Having served as a night chaplain at the church some months later, I knew about its diverse ministries first hand, but I wanted to learn more about how they came into being, especially those that involved meals. So I asked Lyndon for an hour of his time, suggesting that we talk over lunch. He responded graciously, with the proviso that we had to eat at Michael's. I soon found out why.
Lyndon explained that this restaurant, about two hundred yards from the World Trade Center complex, was a favorite haunt for church staffers even prior to 9/11. No loud music deafened its customers, and because it was located below street level cell phones didn't work there. Wonder of wonders, actual conversations at table became the norm. After 9/11, when choking white dust filled the air for days, Michael's functioned as a kind of bunker, continuing to operate when other area restaurants were forced to shut down.
But there was much more to it than that, Lyndon said. As he and his co-workers at St. Paul's gathered around the table, several times a day during that first awful week, they felt that their praying and planning came naturally, in fact, became one and the same thing. Old hierarchies and interpersonal tensions seemed to melt away as the companions sensed that they were being guided by a greater Power. Chaos reigned outside, but here a kind of inner peace sustained them. The many New Testament stories of Jesus' words and actions at table came quickly to mind, leading the group to resolve that their very first congregational response to the situation must be to provide round-the-clock food and drink for the firefighters, police, National Guard soldiers, and rescue/retrieval workers of all sorts who were crowding into lower Manhattan.
At first, the meals were simple. No one could enter the church building until engineers had established that it was structurally sound. But the delay didn't prevent congregational workers (along with many volunteers who had no formal relationship with the church) from setting up grills on the street to serve burgers and soft drinks. Very quickly this operation moved to the large front porch of the church, which was found to be safe. A small crisis occurred when city health officials ruled that all outside cooking had to cease because of the poor air quality. But almost simultaneously other officials gave the go-ahead to enter the sanctuary. The bottom line was that a moveable feast had come into being, a non-stop provision of food and drink that continued for well over a year.
Soon after the meal service at St. Paul's began, Lyndon and his co-workers made an important decision about its character. Precisely in the midst of this tragic setting, they reasoned, the food and drink they were furnishing ought to be of the highest possible quality. As Lyndon put it: "We wanted people to see and savor the extravagance of Christ's love." Almost from the beginning a restaurant owner in the area, Martin Cowart, became the operation's "food captain" and began to enlist the help of his professional friends. Basic provisions and fully cooked meals poured in on a regular basis, some of them from world-renowned restaurants. Lyndon recalled being blown away one night when a large delivery of chicken dinners arrived from the Waldorf Astoria.
Ten days after 9/11, when the church building was fully secured, public celebrations of the Eucharist began to take place every noon. The timing was intentional. People who came to lunch could also attend the service, and while the majority of diners did not join the worship in a direct way, they honored this special offering as a sign of their host's distinctive mission. Without conflict, the wall between "secular" and "sacred" virtually disappeared. Everyday talk continued at food stations in the back of the church even as the liturgy proceeded up front around the altar. Yet none of the worshipers complained about irreverence on the part of "non-participants," nor did people milling around the lunch tables protest that religion was being forced upon them.
A volunteer chaplain from New Jersey described his experience of St. Paul's this way:
I attended mass with the most incredible hodgepodge of humanity I've ever seen gathered in a church.... There were the chiropractors and massage therapists doing their thing along the side aisles. There were rescue workers sleeping or eating lunch—some of them Jews wearing yarmulkes under their fire helmets. There were National Guard troops from the farms and forests of upstate New York looking very young and lost in the big city. People sat on the floor and on the steps leading to the choir loft. Some of the rescue workers who had not shown much interest in the mass when it began found themselves drawn into the ancient prayers that promise life forever with God and ended up taking communion with tears in their eyes. This was Christ's church in all its messiness, diversity, ambiguity, brokenness, and holiness. And it was truly beautiful.
Somehow the emergency feeding program and the ritual meals at St. Paul's were beginning to flow together, reinforcing and enriching each other as facets of God's mysterious welcome.
Meals and Mission
I've chosen the Greek term "synergy" to describe this complex set of interactions. The word comes from syn ("with") and ergon ("work"), but it means more than "cooperation." Webster defines it as "cooperative action of discrete agencies such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the two effects taken independently." Synergy is also a good biblical word, since a verbal form of it appears in Romans 8:28, the famous passage in which Paul declares that "all things work together (synergei) for good for those who love God." Some scholars think that the real subject of this verse is not "all things" but the Holy Spirit, who in 8:27 is said to be interceding "for the saints according to the will of God." If that's true, the proper reading for 8:28 would be: "We know that [the Spirit] causes all things to work together for good...." Because we'll have a lot to say throughout this book about the work of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist and other church-related meals, we'll want to keep this alternative reading in mind.
We might be going too far if we claimed that the resonance between the two kinds of meals at St. Paul's—those in the back and those at the altar—created the plethora of ministries to recovery workers, but everyone who visited felt the force of that resonance. One can make a strong case that people who just "showed up" at St. Paul's with new ideas and talents for service did so to a large degree because they understood that this survivor church had made a long-term commitment to nurturing meals that defied easy distinctions between the physical and the spiritual. The chiropractors and podiatrists, the psychologists and musicians, the volunteers dispensing gloves and clean socks and aspirins to workers in the dreadful Pit—these were not necessarily people of deep faith, or any faith at all in the traditional sense. But most of them discerned a mystery at work in the table fellowship at St. Paul's, a sacred task in which they wanted to participate.
Of course one could argue that the situation at Ground Zero was so unique that it alone produced the special mission-meal synergy evident at St. Paul's, but I think that just the opposite is true. I've come to believe that what happened at this small church in lower Manhattan is a window into what could happen (and often happens already) in all our congregations—whether we are large or small, whether or not we find ourselves in crisis situations, whether or not feeding programs occupy a major place in our outreach ministries. If we don't experience a mission-meal synergy in our churches at present, or we discover it only on rare occasions, we can take steps to open ourselves more fully to its ongoing presence and power. All of us, I am guessing, want the outreach ministries of our churches to be more effective than they are, but we often don't know quite how to concentrate our efforts to make this happen. My reading of Scripture and my interviews over the past few years with leaders in a number of North American churches suggest that a very good place to begin is with an assessment of the diverse meal events that occur right now in and around the lives of our congregations.
Encouragement from the Bible
Scripture itself practically mandates this kind of assessment. The Old Testament abounds in stories about meals, many of which serve to reveal God's presence and deeper purposes for the whole world. Of these, perhaps the best known concerns the patriarch Abraham's welcoming of three strangers who approach his Bedouin tent at high noon. The travelers, who are simply called "men," have variously been identified as prophetic messengers, angels, or in the case of the Orthodox church tradition, the persons of the Holy Trinity. Nothing in the text of Genesis 18, where the story is recorded, indicates that Abraham knows who the three are, yet he and Sarah prepare a lavish feast for them. This probably means that we should think of the ancient couple as demonstrating a special talent or virtue for welcoming the stranger. Indeed, in later Jewish writings Abraham comes to be known as the patron saint of hospitality. The real climax of the story occurs when one of the guests, apparently still feasting, suddenly announces: "I will surely return to you in due season, and ... Sarah shall have a son" (18:10). Hearing this, Sarah, who is more than ninety years old, laughs to herself in disbelief and is immediately called to account by the speaker, who seems to be reading her mind. Abraham is not reprimanded here, but we already know from previous stories in Genesis that he, too, has essentially given up on the promise God made to him at the time of his calling that his own natural descendants would become a great nation (12:3, 10–20; 16:1–6; 17:15–22). Contrary to all expectations, this mealtime prophecy somehow moves the plan of God forward, and by Genesis 21, Abraham and Sarah's son Isaac has been born.
Without stretching the Genesis narrative too far, we can think of this meal in missionary terms. Abraham is the very embodiment of "outreach ministry." He welcomes the strangers enthusiastically, running from his tent to greet them with a low bow and then urging them to rest under a nearby tree while the meal is being prepared. He sets food and drink before them, far more generously than the law of desert hospitality requires, while he stands by as a servant. Then, in the course of the meal itself, another kind of mission comes to light, for Abraham and Sarah hear a divine word that challenges their despair. They are strengthened for their greater mission—to persist in their journey until they become progenitors of God's chosen people Israel, through whom, in turn, all the families of the earth will be blessed (Gen 12:1–3). Here, during a guest-meal by the Oaks of Mamre (Gen 18:1), the Missio Dei for all humanity is revealed once again, and two chosen figures find new courage to play their unique roles within it.
Much later, when Abrahams descendants have in fact become a people, the biblical record shows that two distinctive meal celebrations emerge from the nations common life to express its covenant relationship with God. These rituals are the weekly Sabbath eve supper, along with meals on the day of the Sabbath, and the yearly Passover Seder, or order of worship at table. Nothing explicit is said about Sabbath meals in the Old Testament, but there may be an allusion to them in Exodus 16:22–30, where the people of Israel are commanded to gather twice as much manna on the sixth day of the week and bake or boil as much as they want so as to make it last through the next day, on which they are to rest. In any case, meals on the Sabbath became a fixture of Israel's identity sometime during the Second Temple Period (roughly 450 BCE–70 CE), well before the time of Jesus. The yearly Passover festival, culminating in a dramatic communal meal, is well attested in both the Old and New Testaments. The foundational story occurs in Exodus 12. By the first century, Passover had come to commemorate not only Israel's flight from Egypt and deliverance at the Red Sea, but also its wilderness wanderings. In addition, the festival stirred up a fervent hope for Israel's political and spiritual restoration. All of these themes appear in contemporary Passover celebrations.
The Sabbath and Passover meals are best understood as community-defining activities rather than attempts to include non-Israelites. On the other hand, there's evidence of Jews living in cities outside Palestine at the time of Jesus who interacted with their Gentile neighbors in ways that allowed them some degree of participation in synagogue worship. Whether this openness also applied to meal celebrations in Jewish homes is uncertain but not impossible, especially in the case of Gentiles sympathetic to Judaism. Jews who welcomed Gentiles most intentionally may have done so to fulfill God's promise that through Abraham and Sarah's descendants, all of the world's nations would be blessed. (See the inclusive interpretations of Sabbath-keeping in Isaiah 56:1–8 and 58:12–14.)
Nearly all contemporary scholars agree that in the synoptic gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) Jesus' personal meal practices stand out as radically hospitable. Contrary to the customs of his day, which required one's dining partners to be morally upright and ritually clean, he regularly ate with tax collectors and sinners. Even when Jesus appeared to be setting up boundaries by inviting a small group of his disciples to a last supper on the night of his arrest, he intended not to exclude people but rather to draw those who had accompanied him to Jerusalem (probably women as well as men) more deeply into his expansive mission for the world, which he foresaw as continuing after his death. Well before the origin of our Christian Eucharist, Jesus used a meal setting to inspire a vocation for outreach in his followers.
Some New Testament stories of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances also reveal a mission-meal synergy. For example, in the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus who come to recognize the Risen One at their dinner table when he blesses and breaks bread, Luke hastens to add that the two immediately speak of their encounter as a conversion from despair to hope. As they do so, they decide against continuing their journey to Emmaus and instead hurry back to Jerusalem to share their experience with the other disciples, who just happen to be dining themselves. Once again, Jesus appears, eats a bit of fish to prove that he still inhabits a human body, and then announces that
repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in [my] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high (Lk 24:47–49).
Virtually all commentators understand the "power from on high" to be the Holy Spirit. With Jesus' prophetic promise, an ordinary meal becomes a commissioning ceremony.
Once the predicted coming of the Holy Spirit has occurred at Pentecost, the earliest disciples discover that their daily community meals have begun to function as missionary events with unique opportunities for spreading the gospel. In Acts, Luke tells us that the Spirit-filled believers "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42). But these meetings were not secret enclaves. Although the meals took place in the homes of disciples, they were public enough to be noticed by non-disciples and proved attractive to some. Luke reports that believers "ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people [in Jerusalem]. And day by day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved" (Acts 2:46–47).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SOUL BANQUETS by John Koenig. Copyright © 2007 John Koenig. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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