Celebrating Beyond The Lord’s Table: A Communal Invitation to Solidarity
Meditation
After graduating from college, I worked for Emmaus Ministries, a nonprofit that serves men living on the streets of Chicago. One day I was staffing our drop-in ministry center when a former regular, now on his way to recovery, came in to spend time with our staff. Deshawn was his usual self, constantly joking around and teasing. He had recently gotten sober and was finally working a regular job. He decided to drop by for our usual family-style meal, to spend time with friends who had helped him on his journey.
“How about church? You been going to church recently?” one of my colleagues asked over lunch. “Ah, don’t ask me about church,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Church ain’t for me.”
Emmaus works with some of the poorest of the poor: men in survival prostitution. These men are despised even within the homeless community, and all of them have unbelievably tragic stories, marred by abuse, systemic poverty, racism (most are racial or ethnic minorities), mental illness, and substance abuse.
In my two years there, I counted it a true privilege to hear the stories of men like Deshawn and to be a small part of sharing Christ’s love with them. As a staff, we faced the continual challenge of introducing these men to churches where they can continue their healing journeys outside the walls of Emmaus. For many of them, the church is not a place of welcome but one of judgment, where they face rejection particularly for their sexual behavior. Most echo Deshawn’s stark assessment: “Church ain’t for me.”
This struck me as entirely backwards. I believe we can find true healing in the church through an encounter with Christ. Yet if his invitation is for everyone, why do the most destitute feel excluded?
Since our conversation, I keep wondering what it might look like for our churches to become home for the Deshawns—people on the margins of society. What might it mean to reimagine our faith through a marginal lens, reintegrating into the heart of the church a regard for the most rejected members of society? This question transforms who we are and how we worship, realigning our hearts.
Many of the practices we already use to remember our Savior are key to this realignment process. Our Lord who lived alongside society’s outcasts and died on a criminal’s cross lives in us and should animate all that we do. Our celebration of the Lord’s Table is particularly pivotal for realigning our hearts toward our neighbors like Deshawn, calling us again to do life with them as we embody the lifestyle of Emmanuel, “God with us.”
The Lord’s Table
It is no accident that Jesus came to earth in the humblest of circumstances. No stranger to poverty or oppression, he became a refugee (Matt. 2:13–15) who narrowly avoided death at the hands of Herod. He grew up in the obscure town of Nazareth, an obscure town of backward country folk, in a nation under harsh Roman rule. His ministry testified to his deep affection for those on the margins—for example, Jesus called a man from the despised profession of tax collecting to be one of his closest partners in ministry. His love for everyone, including those on the bottom of society (socioecomically and/or reputationally), drew thousands to him, who were mesmerized not only by his teachings and miracles but also by his willingness to walk with them when others wouldn’t.
Jesus died a criminal’s death, crucified on a Roman cross. In this ultimate act, he canceled sin and proclaimed ultimate solidarity with us, especially victims of injustice, through his unjust death. Human in every way, Christ was very familiar with the harshness of society’s margins. We celebrate our marginalized Messiah at the Lord’s Table.
Yet the Lord’s Table also calls us together to a particular way of living. On the cross, as in his life, our Lord showed radical unity with the poor and the lowly, and he calls us to remember together this part of his ministry at the Table. After all, the word “communion” literally means “union together”; here we acknowledge a radical unity in the body of Christ. This unity is a participatory one, in which we take on together the fullness of Christ’s continuing ministry and fulfill his promise: “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do” (John 14:12). We are to reflect the life of Christ, not letting our faith be confined within the walls of the church.
Christ wants to nourish us to enter a world that is dying of spiritual thirst and hunger. He invites us to use his Table as a place where his story becomes alive again in each of our lives. We retell the story to ourselves as we both receive his forgiveness and take on the manner of life that he lived.
He has already invited the Deshawns of the world into full communion with him. His Table, spread out in each of our churches, is open wide not only to us but to any who would come, no matter their background. As my time at Emmaus taught me, breaking bread in a shared meal breaks down the walls that divide us. The Lord’s Table allows the love of Christ to shatter our world anew and piece it together again. When we enter into deepening, self-denying communion with one another in this way, true shalom becomes possible as never before.
Exploration
Ask the Lord to lead your imagination.
1. How would God have you walk with the poor in some way this week or this month? Perhaps it is through a conversation with someone who is experiencing homelessness, or a visit to a nursing home resident who receives few visitors. Maybe it means opening your home to a new immigrant family. As you participate in the feast at the Lord’s Table, remember the people around you who are also invited to the coming feast in the kingdom of God.
2. How can we begin to see our time now as a dress rehearsal for the wedding supper of the Lamb, when the rich and poor really will feast together as we proclaim the unity won through his shed blood?
At the Lord’s Table, we remember the marks of suffering on Christ’s body, recalling also those who carry on their bodies and in the unseen places of their souls the marks of pain and sin. Let us live in the world as people of Good Friday, in active remembrance of the Lord who lived and died on the margins. In our rehearsal for his feast, let us welcome the Easter reality of the coming kingdom of God. Here at last, all parts of our broken societies will be made truly one body of Christ, fully united to celebrate with him.
Joel Brown is a lay pastor serving with Greenhouse Movement, an Anglican mission society in Chicago. He leads Cornerstone Anglican Church–Edgewater, a congregation planted in a nursing home on the city's north side.