This is a Table For All Who Are Hungry (If You Are Hungry, Come)
Photo by Kate Remmer on Unsplash
We share this reflection from Atlanta-based writer, Laura Jean Truman, originally published on Laura Jean’s blog in February 2020.
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
Rumi
It is Christian orthodoxy that only Christians can take communion. This is a “family table,” as some theologies put it. Taking communion is something that you do once you are initiated into Christian community – whether that means baptism, “accepting Jesus into your heart,” or a lengthy confirmation process, every Christian denomination believes that eating the body and blood of Jesus (whether it’s called communion, Eucharist, or just the Table) is something for people on the inside, not the outside.
I don’t believe that anymore.
This may be a family meal, but we are all family.
In my conservative background, communion was paradoxically “not such a big deal” because it was just a “symbol” or “remembrance,” but it was also treated a bit hysterically, thousands of new weird rules around what kind of a mood you had to be in to “take communion” always cropping up (don’t be mad at anyone! don’t have any unrepentant sin! don’t be in a bad mood! you gotta be perfect or feel perfect before you take this shiny silver plate!). Like my hippie friends warning me about psychedelics, evangelicals were always saying things like you have to be in a good headspace before you eat!
I don’t remember feeling any particular way about communion as a kid and young adult. I remember those two things: it’s just a symbol people and it’s only for Christians. Why something so bland and meaningless, relegated to weeknights and intentionally downplayed in salvific importance, would be so aggressively protected as just for Christians is beyond me.
After college, I was furiously angry at the church and briefly identified as an atheist before finding myself wandering back to spirituality – not an atheist, not a Christian, but in an in-between place where it felt like God was reaching out to me, but I felt too tired to have that conversation. So I didn’t. What I did do, though, was end up at a silent Anglican monastery during Lent, and in that woodsy set-aside place, I took communion.
I ate it every single day, walking up to the altar with the monks and nuns and holding hands in a circle. We sang very old prayers and the priest put a thin wafer on my tongue, every day, for a month.
I didn’t go to the monastery believing in Jesus, but I left the monastery believing in Jesus.
Was it taking communion that made me a Christian? Was it the rhythm of liturgy, the silence of the woods, the communion of saints, the space to walk and breathe, the good books? I don’t know always how God finds our wounded, wandering hearts when they are too battered to come searching for Her. I don’t know how Jesus still finds us when we are too tired to have that conversation.
I do know that when I didn’t have words, Jesus found me in my body – in what I ate, and in what I drank.
When I came back to Christianity, I went back to my old “communion is only for Christians” ways pretty quickly, because orthodoxy is a helluva drug, and because I had never heard anyone give a defense of another way. I went through life with my personal experience in my back pocket, and my contradictory theology in my front pocket, like we all do in some ways. But when I read Sara Miles’ book Take This Bread, where she shares her own story of moving from atheism to Christ during Eucharist, I wanted to holler and shout and dance. This was my experience, this was what I believed, this was how God is longing to break into the world and into our souls, in the food that we eat and the wine that we drink.
Nothing made more sense to me than that someone would encounter Jesus for the first time at the Table, just like Paul thrown off his horse on the way to Damascus. I think I’d always believed that you could meet Jesus in physical things, bump into Him the way you bump into a friend out at a restaurant. Oh, hello, Jesus, here you are, at the diner, sharing waffles.
That this encounter could happen at the Table – it wasn’t orthodox, but it felt right.
I wrestled in conversations with more traditional friends over this. “If everyone just comes up, without thinking about it, without knowing it’s important, it loses some of the sacredness. If everyone just eats and drinks like it’s another religious ritual like sit-stand-kneel, the holiness is lost.”
How do we practice radical hospitality, but let everyone know exactly what it is that they’re getting into?
I was asked to preach at my seminary’s chapel service in my final year, and I invited my then-pastor to come preside over the Table. He was a conservative Presbyterian, and if there’s one thing that a Presby likes, it’s a good Table fencing (fencing the table is a fancy way of saying that it’s your job to tell the congregation who is allowed to take communion and who is not). My seminary didn’t fence the Table at their services, at least not out loud, so I had to tell him that he wasn’t allowed to tell the non-Christians to stay away. He was surprisingly chill with it. I thought he’d balk, blessed conservative that he is, but he only nodded and promised that he wouldn’t.
My pastor stood up and spoke over the bread and wine, casually and informally, like evangelicals do. Then he held the Body of Christ out over the congregation of grad students and professors and said –
This is a table for all who are hungry. If you are hungry – come.
I will never say anything else when I preside over the table, ever again.
This is a table for all who are hungry. If you are hungry – come.
An open table theology matters so much to me because it feels like the Gospel, the Gospel that says that at the very center of our life with God is reckless, unimaginable grace that comes seeking us on our good days and bad days and weak days and strong days alike.
This is a Table for all who are hungry. If you are hungry – come.
On the days that we are so entirely burnt out, on the days that we’re tired and sad and scared and lonely and we don’t know if being a Christian makes any sense, but we know that we’re hungry, God’s table is set and God’s table is radically hospitable.
Open Table theology might be the worst theology in the whole world. Maybe one day I’ll find my way to a more orthodox way of being, but for now, I can’t imagine a God who doesn’t want every single person to come and eat and drink, no matter what we believe, no matter what we can articulate, no matter what conversations with God we are able to have or unafraid to have or entirely incapable of having. This God is open to everyone, at all moments, calling us and wanting us and holding us no matter if we come with good intentions or terrible intentions or as perpetrators of dysfunctional family systems or as oppressors or as oppressed.
God is opening constantly the doors and inviting, inviting, inviting.
And experiencing this God only in a disembodied way – praying, writing, talking – doesn’t feel like enough.
Our invitation into the Presence is visceral. It is in our eating and in our drinking.
That embodied invitation matters.
If you’re hungry, come.
This is the Gospel.
We all experience hunger differently. I know it as a gap in my soul between what I am and what I want to be. I know it as an ache inside me that wants to be whole and doesn’t know how to be. I know it as a longing for Narnia, as the feeling that there’s something just around the corner that I haven’t seen yet but I want to swing open the door and turn the light on, and maybe, maybe, I’ll catch it before it hides.
I’m a “wanderer and a worshiper and a lover of leaving” (Rumi) and these are exactly the people that God has set God’s table for.
Is this an adequate and complete theology of the Table? No. Absolutely not.
But some theologies we carry in our guts and not in our brains, some theologies we feel in our bodies, and sacraments are physical things, to taste and touch and eat and be dunked under. They are water. Bread. Wine. Oil on our heads. Dust on our foreheads.
Don’t “think and believe” that the Lord is good, “taste and see.”
All the questions of “am I enough” and “am I good” and “do I belong” fall away as bread dissolves on your tongue because there’s no question that I’m good, because I am in Christ, and in Christ’s death, just as Christ was with us in His life.
We are all inside this suffering and death and resurrection together.
The first time I ever served someone communion, it was to a seminary classmate that I’d just had a fight with in class. One of my professors had grabbed me in chapel to serve at the table and I was still hot around the collar from me and Emily’s head-butting. We were both strong-willed seminarians, and while I don’t remember what we fought about, we were both still really mad. I was sitting in the front of chapel stewing, and my professor snagged me to serve communion (“Say whatever you say in your tradition. Doesn’t matter”), and then Emily was walking up in line towards me.
I ripped off a piece of the dark molasses brown bread and placed it in my ornery colleague’s open hands and told her,
This is the body of Christ, broken for you, Emily.
She looked me in the eyes and we both got a little teary, and she took and ate.
I’ve presided at the table a lot since then. I’ve served communion in retirement communities and queer living room churches and at weddings and once, in a hockey stadium.
This first time I looked at my enemy who was my neighbor and told her that this is the body of Christ, broken for you, is still my favorite.
This is the table for the ragamuffins and failures and the ones who pick fights in seminary classrooms and the ones who don’t want to talk to God at all and the ones who have made terrible mistakes that they don’t even know how to begin repenting of and the ones who don’t think their whole embodied self is welcome and the ones who don’t know for sure if Jesus is worth it and the ones who are sure that they are not worth it.
This is for the ones who have been kicked out of their families and the ones who have walked away from their loved ones.
This is for the ones who have succeeded at great cost to their souls and the ones who are afraid to try.
This is the family table for the ones who aren’t sure they really want to be family with the other folks coming up taking this bread and this wine.
This is a Table for all who are hungry. If you are hungry – come.
