RECORDING SCRIPT — Who Belongs at the Table?

Prepared from the approved narration script. It has not been checked word for word against the recording and may differ from what is heard.

Second Humanity. Who belongs at the table? There is a gathering in Corinth. People have come together in the name of Jesus. There is food. There is drink. The words about the Lord's death are known there. And someone is still hungry. Paul tells us that one person goes hungry while another is drunk. He asks the people with enough a question: “despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not?” Shame them that have not. The person with little has come into the gathering and found the difference between them and the person with much made visible again. Even here. This is one of the questions I have carried into Second Humanity. If the life we receive from God is a life of love, what happens when we sit down together? Can we speak truly about communion while arranging the room so that someone else goes without? And how would we know that our account of faith had actually changed the way we live? The hungry person gives the question a place to begin. Someone whose need continues while the words are being spoken. This is What Are You Seeking. The show takes a question every other Thursday. Today is the third of three special editions on the founding questions behind Second Humanity. Together they are called The life we receive, the life we share. The first followed the hope that God raised Jesus and that death does not have the final word. The second asked how new life is received and grows within us. This one asks what that life requires of us together. The written essay is The Life We Share: Jesus and the Meaning of the Feast. It is in the Anchor, with the sources and the fuller discussion. Here we will follow the meals, the people, and the obligations that become visible between them. When I say “we read” or “we hold,” I am naming Second Humanity's own reading. Our conviction is this: life received from God through Jesus calls us into love that another person can actually receive. Food. Attention. Protection. A hearing. A place in which their presence matters. The table helps us see what that asks. Before the last supper, there were other suppers. Mark describes Jesus eating with tax collectors and people called sinners. Some of the religious teachers ask why he eats with them. Luke preserves a charge made against him: “a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” His company at the meal was part of the argument about him. The people he ate with helped make him suspect. Historians commonly regard that disputed company as a credible feature of his ministry. The Gospels give us particular encounters rather than a complete policy for every table. But the challenge is clear enough. Someone whom respectable people had a reason to avoid was someone Jesus could sit beside. Then, in Luke, he addresses a host. When you make a meal, invite people who cannot repay you. Poor people. People with disabilities who are excluded from the ordinary exchange of invitations and favors. Hear what happens to the invitation. The guest no longer has to be useful to the host. Their presence does not have to improve the host's standing. We know how quietly that bargain can enter a room. We make a place for the person who may make a place for us. We attend to the person whose attention carries weight. We call it hospitality, and some of it is hospitality. But the person with nothing to return can reveal the condition we had attached without saying it aloud. Can you be welcome here when you have nothing I need? Jesus' instruction asks the host to change something. A different person has to receive the invitation. There has to be food for them. Their arrival has to matter to the arrangements. The generosity becomes visible in what the host does. The banquet story that follows widens the invitation when the expected guests make excuses. Others are brought in. It also speaks of people who refuse and do not taste the supper. Jesus' stories make room for welcome and for the seriousness of our response. We have to hear both. And there is joy in the meals. John places Jesus' first sign at a wedding where the wine has run out. Mark has him speak of his presence through the image of a bridegroom. A life shared with God can include gladness, company, and the relief of sitting down with people who are pleased you came. Care need not make every gathering solemn. Mark also gives the feeding stories and the final supper a familiar movement. Jesus takes bread. Blesses or gives thanks. Breaks it. Gives it. Within the Gospel, those actions connect the crowd that needs feeding with the meal before his death. So when we reach the last supper, we arrive within a life already spent eating with others. The bread and cup have a remembered host. His earlier meals help us hear what remembering him may ask. The earliest surviving written account of that bread and cup comes from Paul, in a letter written in the middle of the first century, before Mark's Gospel. “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you.” Received. Delivered. Elsewhere in the same letter, he introduces the resurrection tradition with that same movement. Something has come to him, and he hands it on. He also asks those tempted to boast, “what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” That question helps carry the title of our collection. What have we received, and what happens to it in our hands? Does the gift reach someone else? Or does it become evidence that we deserve a higher place? Paul says he received the supper tradition “of the Lord.” Readers differ about the route he means: a tradition originating with Jesus and handed down, or a revelation. He does not name his intermediaries here. We can hear the importance of what he is handing on without pretending that he has supplied a complete history of how it reached him. In the Gospel accounts, the meal belongs within Israel's life of blessing, festival, and covenant. Mark, Matthew, and Luke present it as Passover. John appears to give a different timetable: during Jesus' trial, his account still speaks of the Passover meal ahead. We let that difference remain visible. The sources give us a Jewish setting without giving us one harmonized timetable. Covenant is the relation we need to hear in the cup. The words recall blood in Exodus, where a people is bound to God, and the promise of a new covenant in Jeremiah, where God speaks of forgiveness and a law written within. Mark and Matthew recall the blood of the covenant. Paul and Luke speak expressly of the new covenant in Jesus' blood. The King James uses the word testament, and its text includes “new” in Mark and Matthew too; many modern editions follow manuscripts without that word in those two accounts. The written essay follows the distinction. The important thing for the ear is the world those words open. A people addressed by God. Forgiveness. A relationship that asks to be lived. Jesus' approaching death is spoken of within that history. The cup has a meaning larger than the private experience of the person drinking it. It also looks ahead. In Mark, Jesus says he will drink the fruit of the vine new in the kingdom of God. Isaiah had pictured a feast for all peoples and the overcoming of death. The shared meal and the hope we explored in the first recording meet within Israel's Scriptures. Paul says the people keeping the meal proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. They remember and they wait. And in the meantime, they eat together. There are difficult questions in these words. I want to keep them in the room, because a table cannot become more trustworthy by asking an honest questioner to hide what troubles them. Paul and Mark preserve different forms of the meal tradition. That difference deserves study; it does not by itself prove that their accounts are independent. The instruction to repeat the action in remembrance appears in Paul and Luke, and is absent from Mark and Matthew. Some manuscripts of Luke omit part of the passage; the longer reading has broad early support. These are questions about transmission and memory. They give us reasons to investigate the wording carefully. Then there is the blood. Israel's law forbids consuming it. Acts retains that prohibition for gentile believers. How could a cup be identified with Jesus' blood within that world? The difficulty is real. The cup contains wine, and covenant blood supplies a scriptural echo. But in Exodus the blood is sprinkled. That is not a precedent for drinking it. Calling the language symbolic offers one way to understand it; it does not, by itself, tell us how these particular words arose. John gives the difficulty a place in his own story. When Jesus speaks about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, disciples object, and some leave. That discourse occurs earlier in John's Gospel. At the final supper, John emphasizes the washing of feet and the command to love. Another early witness, a church manual called the Didache, gives us prayers with the cup before the bread. It thanks God for the holy vine of David made known through Jesus, and asks for the scattered church to be gathered. Those prayers do not recite the familiar words about Jesus' death. The manual is usually dated to the late first or early second century, later than Paul's letter, and speaks from another community. Its silence in those prayers cannot tell us everything that community believed. What survives is a range of ways early communities gave thanks, remembered, hoped, and understood their gathering. We learn from their differences by allowing each witness to speak. The wider ancient world knew sacred meals too. The historical companion, A World of Sacred Meals, follows that comparison through Dionysus, Eleusis, and Mithras. Shared forms are real. A shared form alone cannot establish that one rite was borrowed from another. Here, we have reached the question that belongs to this recording. Whatever remains open about the meal's transmission, Paul tells us plainly what was happening among the people keeping it. Someone was being shamed. We are back in Corinth. Paul tells the gathering that it is coming together for the worse. Some proceed with their own meals. One is hungry. Another is drunk. He refuses to let the name of the Lord's supper cover what they are doing. We do not have to invent a floor plan to hear him. Scholars have proposed different accounts of the rooms, the arrival times, and the privileges involved. Paul gives us the unequal eating and the humiliation. Those are enough to bring the question home. Now notice where he puts the words about Jesus. He tells them of the bread, the cup, and the death being remembered inside his argument about the people they are shaming. These belong together in the letter. He asks them to examine themselves and warns about eating without discerning the body. The King James says, “the Lord's body.” Many modern editions follow the shorter reading, “the body.” Readers have understood this as Christ's body in the meal, the gathered community, or a connection between them. That disagreement deserves care. It also cannot erase the people whose treatment Paul has already named. In the preceding chapter he calls the cup a participation in Christ's blood and the bread a participation in his body. Then he joins the one bread to the many becoming one body. The gathering has a relation to Christ that brings its members into relation with one another. Feeding someone does not exhaust what that participation means. Participation makes the way we treat them answerable to the Lord we confess. That is the stand Second Humanity takes. A table that humiliates the poor contradicts the communion it proclaims. We can hear that demand without first settling every disagreement between churches about Christ's presence in the meal. There is a word here that has frightened people: unworthily. Some have heard it as a demand to become a flawless person before they can approach. But Paul's warning concerns how these people are eating. Their examination has to reach the conduct of the gathering. It cannot end with everyone privately feeling unworthy while the person without food remains without food. He also connects weakness, illness, and death with judgment. The passage is severe, and interpreters differ about how to understand that connection. It gives us no responsible method for assigning spiritual fault to someone else's illness. What these people can change is the way they gather. In plain language, his practical instruction is to wait for one another. Some scholars and translators understand the verb here as receive, or welcome, one another. That remains a debated rendering. Either way, the person who has been overlooked has to enter the others' attention. Wait. There is someone else here. A small instruction can expose a whole arrangement. Who has the freedom to arrive early? Who has to keep working? Who knows the people serving? Who is too embarrassed to say they have not eaten? These are questions for our gatherings today, rather than details we can claim to know about every person in Corinth. Paul's next chapters widen the concern. The parts of the body that seem weaker are necessary. Those receiving less honor are to receive particular care. Impressive gifts cannot take the place of love. A community becomes answerable for the people it has learned to treat as peripheral. So the question is not finished when we say everyone is welcome. We have to ask whether the arrangements let that welcome happen. Now another room. Another supper. John tells us that Jesus rises, lays aside his outer garments, takes a towel, and pours water into a basin. Then he washes his disciples' feet. John places this action beside Jesus' knowledge of his relation to the Father. The one who knows where he comes from bends down to serve. Peter objects. He cannot readily receive this from the one he calls Lord. Jesus tells him that without receiving the washing, he has no share with him. The scene concerns cleansing and belonging as well as the service the disciples will be asked to offer. There is something here that Peter has to let be done for him. He is being addressed as someone who needs to receive. Then Jesus makes the obligation explicit. If their Lord and teacher has washed their feet, they ought to wash one another's. The order gives our collection's title a bodily form. A gift is received. It becomes the shape of a life shared. Betrayal is already present in the account, and Peter's denial is about to be foretold. This group has not earned the washing through a record of dependability. At the same time, the story names betrayal and denial. Care does not require pretending that failure has not happened. For us, the towel asks a particular question of authority. If I hold the resources, set the agenda, or receive the deference, whose ordinary needs am I responsible for noticing? What have I become accustomed to having someone else do for me? And can I receive correction from the person doing it? It is possible to preach service so that the people with least power are asked to give still more. The person holding the power needs to hear the scene first. Love includes protection. The towel cannot become a reason to conceal abuse, compel forgiveness, or require someone harmed to restore access to a person who remains dangerous. Care asks what will help an actual person live safely. Sometimes that means setting a boundary and making a wrong answerable. That brings us back to the title. Who belongs at the table? We should distinguish a few things that the word welcome can hold. Jesus' meals challenged the boundaries of respectable company. Early Christian ritual meals also had conditions of participation. The Didache restricted its Eucharistic meal to the baptized and asked people in conflict to be reconciled. Paul distinguished the Lord's table from other sacred tables. Convictions about worship belonged to the communities keeping it. Our purpose here is not to settle every church's practice of admission. People who cannot share every act of worship can still share food, attention, and responsibility for a neighborhood. A disagreement about ritual participation does not cancel another person's dignity. And inside a community's own commitments, welcome has work to do. A person may be able to enter the building and still be unable to participate. The cost is too much. The timing makes attendance impossible. The invitation assumes a body that can manage the stairs, a child who can remain quiet, a caregiver who can leave someone alone. Sometimes we will discover these things only because someone tells us. Then care begins with listening well enough to change an arrangement. The person needs more than our account of how welcoming we intended to be. The same is true of giving. A gift can carry a hidden invoice. Tell us your story. Let us photograph your gratitude. Accept the advice. Make us feel useful. Then the person receiving has become part of the giver's account of being good. Their own voice recedes. We need to ask what help would look like to them, and allow them privacy and a response of their own. The person is more than the need we happened to notice. Shared life takes patience because people remain people after the moving moment. They have preferences we may not share. They may be able to give something we had not thought to ask for. A relationship can grow when we stop deciding in advance who will always give and who will always receive. This is also why the Upper Room exists within Second Humanity. It is an app that supports daily prayer, reading, reflection, and shared practice. It can help us attend to what we have received and to the response that is becoming possible. Its direction is outward. A reading may bring someone to mind. A moment of prayer may let us hear the apology we keep avoiding. Reflection may expose an arrangement we can change, or help us recognize that we need to ask for care ourselves. What follows may be a visit, a conversation, a meal, money quietly offered, or a promise kept. Much of that goodness will never appear in the app. It does not need to be captured there to be real. A screen can help care reach someone. A call can be company across a distance. A message can bring help to a person who cannot leave home. What matters is the actual life being reached. We ask whether the tool makes us more available to that life and its needs. This is a question for the House, too. Our books and teaching cannot prove their value by how beautifully they speak about love. We have to keep asking what becomes possible through them, and listen when people tell us what remains difficult. And I want to leave room here for the person who is tired of being needed. You belong in the shared life when you need to receive. You do not have to become endlessly useful to keep your place. Some days you can prepare the meal. Some days someone else needs to bring it. Mutual dependence includes both. So we return to Corinth. The words have been spoken. The meal is underway. Someone is hungry. Paul asks the people there to recognize what is happening and change it. That is where this founding collection leads us. Hope can sustain care when loss makes it seem futile. New life can loosen the fear that keeps us defending our own place. Shared life asks whether another person can receive something of the goodness we confess. The historical companion asks how Jesus' table stood among the other tables of the ancient world. The Paris companion asks what following him looks like when faith feels mocked. Those inquiries continue in the Anchor. Here, the question stays close enough to act on. Who is here? What do they need? What have I received that can now be shared? This has been What Are You Seeking, a special edition from Second Humanity. The written essay and its sources are in the Anchor at Second Humanity dot com. The regular show continues every other Thursday. You are welcome to bring the questions you are carrying. For now, let the meal have its meaning in the way we keep it. Make room. Let someone else be heard. And when it is your turn to need the bread, allow yourself to receive it. The life we receive. The life we share.