The table can be an icon of God’s grace and goodness. To take up a place at the table is to occupy sacred space.

The people we love most sit with us there. Meals are shared. Stories are told. Sins are confessed. We laugh together and cry together. Together we remember where we’ve been, and we dream of where we might one day go. We pray at the table. And there we experience God’s nearness, God’s kindness, and God’s love. Christians need to recover the art of a slow meal around a table with people we care about.
 

Christian spirituality has something important to say about the way that sharing tables nourishes us both physically and spiritually.

We need a recovery of the spiritual significance of what we eat, where we eat, and with whom we eat. In Matthew’s account of the Last Supper, he writes, “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat; this is my body’” (Matt 26:26). The same pattern of language—blessing, breaking, and giving—also shows up in the accounts of Jesus’s miraculous feedings. Eugene Peterson has observed that this pattern of being blessed, broken, and given is at the heart of the Christian story. He rightly insists, “This is the shape of the Eucharist. This is the shape of the Gospel. This is the shape of the Christian life.”  We need to recover the importance of gathering with people around our tables for the purpose of enjoying a meal as both a gift and means of grace.
 

They are those meals where we gather with guests and get a glimpse of the banquet of the kingdom to come, those meals where we get a little foretaste of the shalom of God.

These meals are what the Celts called “thin places”—where the veil that separates heaven and earth seems exceedingly thin. The table is the place where broken sinners find connection and belonging. Despite our best intentions, we all, like Peter in John 21, stumble after Jesus. We desperately need people who will journey with us in our stumbling. The great poet/prophet Isaiah spoke of a coming day when Yahweh will prepare “a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines” (Isa 25:6).
 

In that day when all that is wrong is made right and all that is broken is made whole, there’s going to be one extravagant meal.