The high point of our life together as the people of God

Of all the quotable passages in A Meal With Jesus, this was my favorite...

The Lord's Supper should be a meal we "earnestly desire" to eat. We should approach it with anticipation. With longing. With excitement. With joy. The Lord's Supper should be a joyous occasion. A vibrant meal with friends. A feast.

Our earnest desire must surely affect how we celebrate the Lord's Supper. Today it has commonly become ritualized. We're the group in town whose central meal involves a fragment of bread and a small sip of wine. How is this a foretaste of the messianic banquet?

The bread and wine in the New Testament are part of a meal. Luke says of the Jerusalem church, "Breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts" (Acts 2:46). Commentators often can't decide whether this refers to meals in general or Communion. That's because we assume they're two different things. We think of a meal taking place around a dining table at home while we think of Communion as a solemn rite in a church building. But in Jerusalem followers of Jesus ate meals together in their homes, eating bread, drinking wine, remembering Jesus, and celebrating the community he created through his death.

These were feasts of friends. Some in the church in Corinth were abusing the meals, but Paul doesn't tell them to separate the bread and wine from the meal. Quite the opposite. He tells them to wait for one another so they can eat the meal together. Communion should be a feast of friends shared with laughter, tears, prayers, and stories. We celebrate the community life that God gives us through the cross and in the Spirit. We can't celebrate it with heads bowed and eyes closed, alone in our private thoughts and strangely solitary even as we're surrounded by other people.

When we recapture the Lord's Supper as a feast of friends, celebrated as a meal in the presence of the Spirit, then it will becomes something we earnestly desire. It will become the high point of our life together as the people of God. In this sad and broken world, the Lord's Supper is a moment of joy, because it is a moment of the future.

(A Meal With Jesus, pp 118-119)

Think about that last paragraph, one sentence in particular. The Lord's Supper as a meal shared together will be the high point of our life together as the people of God. What is that high point now? "Going to church"? Sitting in a pew for an hour singing a couple of songs and listening to a sermon? That is not the life that God intended for His people to live with one another. We are called to lives lived together, to community, to sharing meals and opening our homes. Hospitality, love and openness are the true marks of the church, not ritual and performance and religion.

My full review of A Meal With Jesus is coming out later this morning.