Dear Friends,
Growing up, I was, for a long time, an only child. When it came to household chores, then, there was no one to hand down the simplest tasks to. Things like setting the table, then, remained my job until I was a teenager. In other words, for many years, it was my job to prepare a place for others in my family. It was a simple task, but necessary, making way for dinner together.
Then, there were more important-seeming meals. I primarily dreaded large holiday gatherings, which unsettled my routines and made me feel overwhelmed, but I adored the extra care that went into preparing the table for a holiday, especially when it meant my mother’s bone china, featuring a blue rose print and gold trim, would be used.
Today, that coveted china is in storage at my in-law’s house alongside any number of other items we don’t have room for in our cramped quarters, but it is waiting. Waiting until we live somewhere where I can play host, when I can once again set a place for others. As I fantasize over dinner party menus, I consider the place that waits for us in the by and by. (I also feel like bits of this passage came tumbling out of Jeff Chu’s phenomenal Substack, Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer. If you want to think about food and faith, you need to be reading his work!)
I Go To Prepare A Place
There’s something fascinating about the places where Jesus shows up and the particular things he says, as we press forward into those days and weeks following resurrection. Thinking back a moment, Jesus’s act of breaking bread at the end of the road to Emmaus, is a striking act of communion in the wider sense. It’s a scene that presses up against the limits of our knowing, or at least the limits of my personal imagination. Taken alongside moments like Thomas’s direct contact with Jesus’s wounded body, there is a solidity alongside a simultaneous immateriality, the intangible that comes with conquering death and the grave. When the body is beyond mortality, sharing in bread is about so much more than nourishment.
We cannot live by bread alone, and when you are beyond death, you are not in want even of bread, and so the table changes. Jesus sits at the head of a table of radical community, and we are invited to do the same – but how?
A Tea Party Faith
When was the last time a child invited you to a tea party? Or offered your food made our of Play-Doh? I imagine many of us encounter such moments often; even without children of my own, someone small will inevitably offer me the imaginary or inedible, the color-changing cup of water (shoutout to my fellow 90s kids who know exactly what toy tea set I’m talking about). When we are invited into those moments, the only right answer is: Yes. Thank you. Might I have some sugar?
A child’s tea party isn’t about the food, just as the feast time in Godly Play is not about the food. There may not be any in either case. No, what it is about is relationship an hospitality. In a world that typically positions children as less than, as needing to be managed and controlled, it is a means of children offering service and hospitality in ways within their control. They want to prepare a place for us and for their friends, real or imaginary. They want to create an occasion that also supports connection. And we need to allow ourselves to be invited in.
I went to a college that is known to have weekly house teas, so maybe I’m biased, but I hope you’ll make some time for a tea party this week. You don’t have to make tiny sandwiches or petit fours, but you certainly can. You don’t have to dress up, but you can. The heart of it is taking the time, creating a sense of ceremony, falling back into the beauty of welcome.
The Here And Now
Before we step away from this Sunday’s Gospel text, I want to turn to one of the trickier aspects of it, the things that a kind of evangelical culture have hung upon this passage.
As I’ve written about before, I grew up in the ELCA at a moment and in a particular congregation, in which that Evangelical element felt unusually BIG. It was the early-mid 2000s. My middle school years, during which my faith became particularly intense, were punctuated by Youth Quake, an annual regional gathering that, to be honest, looked a lot like anything you might see on your average Sunday morning at an Evangelical mega church. At home, I tuned one of the radio buttons in my mother’s car to the nearest (poorly received) Christian radio station.
All of this means that my musical lexicon included not just the standard pop punk tunes of the day, but also tracks like “Big House” by Audio Adrenaline an “This World” by Caedmon’s Call, both of which this particular Gospel text conjures for me. And both of which pose a problem for us when it comes to our lives as Christian. When we ascribe ourselves too fully to the idea that we are not of this world, that we have a home in heaven and only in heaven, we aren’t motivated to live into the Lord’s prayer – toward the act of ushering in the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Sure, we are not meant to pile up our treasures earth-side (rust and moths – you know the drill) – but heaven is so much more than all that. Heaven is setting the same table here that waits for us above, or coming as close as we can. This world may not be our ultimate home, but we’re still meant to open our doors while we’re here.
Until it’s time for the greatest tea party, let’s do it right here. Set the table. Invite your neighbors and strangers and teddy bears too. Let us embrace a tea party faith, where the food isn’t the point, but the hospitality is.
Peace,
Bird