• Home
• Services at Saint Peter’s
• Theology
  • What We Believe
  • The Pulpit
  • The Caversham Lectures
• News
  • News and Opinion
  • The Rock Archive
  • News Archive
  • Our Printed Heritage
  • Photo Gallery
• People
  • Friends of Saint Peter’s
  • External Links
• About
  • Music at Saint Peter’s
  • Saint Peter’s Character
  • Our History
  • Church Groups
  • Staff and Contacts
  • How to Get Here
• Login
  • Parishioners’ login
  • Vestry Members’ login
• Search Saint Peter’s

Communitarian Rituals

Or How Changing People’s Dining Habits Changes Them

22nd Sunday : 1 September 2013  : Luke 14: 1, 7-14

Looking back on the recent film festival the most thought provoking offering was "The East," about a former FBI agent who infiltrates an eco terrorist group on behalf of a private security firm. As mealtime comes around on her first night with the group she is told put on a straight jacket as the compulsory dinner dress for the occasion. Everyone else turns up around the dinner table similarly attired, and she is then invited to demonstrate the appropriate way to eat given the limitations of not being able to use her hands. Hesitantly and with difficulty she picks up the spoon between her teeth, and ladles the food into her bowl.

But that apparently was the wrong thing to do, she has failed the test, and the group now demonstrates the correct modus operandi. Dipping in to the serving bowl they turn to their neighbour so that each can drink from the others spoons in turn.

Members of the early Church would have instantly understood what was going on here. The habitual rituals of table fellowship were reinforcing intense group solidarity, and the putting of the needs of others first. The members of the group were changing their self-perceptions and the way they thought about each other by changing the way they arranged their affairs of daily living, particularly when it came to that basic human need, the daily intake of nutrition.

The advice Jesus gives in this morning’s gospel is not about avoiding social shame and pushy social climber behaviour, but is rather about the table etiquette at the community meals that are such a central part of his own ministry. He practices open table fellowship without regard to the distinctions of who is on side or off side with the tightly regulated norms of his shame/honour culture. The religion of his day was good at reinforcing the group solidarity of a people living under foreign rule, except for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t keep the full requirements of the religious law, and so were excluded from the acceptance world of warmth and care.

The first followers of Jesus picked up on the priority of this open table fellowship, and allowed it to revolutionise the internal dynamics of their house churches. They were hospitable to strangers, to visitors, and above all to one another. Such generous hosting of community meals were a welcome signal to newcomers, and something of a recruiting strategy. We might recall from last year’s Agape banquet here at St Peter’s that the Eucharist we are now celebrating took place originally in the context of the love feast, in the middle of the Sunday community meal. What we are doing now in this act of worship reflects the formalisation of that recalling of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the lifting out of that central component of the love feast, and the making of it a thing apart.

Of course the organising of these community meals was not without its problems, which is why St Paul gives some very astringent advice to the Corinthian Church about not allowing class distinctions, spiritual elitism and inequalities of wealth and poverty distort the central gathering of the assembly with downright selfish human behaviour.

Above all, the communal meal helped to generate a new perception of this new kind of community. They thought of themselves as a family, which is why they referred to one another as brothers and sisters, a descriptor that occurs 271 times in the New Testament, and occurs in every New Testament book except Titus and Jude. Of course, strictly speaking that wasn’t true. But the fiction that the brother and sister you spent time with at the weekly love feast was as important to you, maybe even more important than your blood relatives, spoke volumes about the importance of the group you had now joined. What was more this wasn’t just the equivalent of a new age commune which was into group solidarity and kum ba yah moments – you had now become the younger brother or sister of Jesus, the head of the family, who ruled over this community from table, font and pulpit.

The description of the Christian community as a family was also a way of talking about its strong sense of belonging, a sense of belonging so strong that it overcame the old hostilities of a deeply divided Mediterranean world. Open table fellowship with people who came from backgrounds you had been brought up to fear and despise was a powerful way of breaking down the wall that divided Jew from Gentile, and every other kind of opposed group. By sharing in the deep things of Christ you had found a reason to link up with, and find new value in, people who were not comfortably part of your accustomed world. And Jesus himself had reordered his personal world in this way by those famous words, "Here are my mother and brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

And of course being a part of this new family was to experience the possibility of hostility from one’s former family, or from outsiders in general. There was a price tag to joining this acceptance world of warmth, care and new meaning.

In this last generation of the Church’s life house groups and house churches have become a standard part of the way churches work, and of what they have to offer. Sometimes that has been because it is the only form of Church that is possible. Bishop Kelvin, in assessing what has become of some of our rural parishes says that they have now become so small that they are in effect, a house church meeting in a church building. But in most cases these smaller forms of Christian community have emerged out of what Paul Trebilco describes as, "a search for intimacy and care, and a turn away from what they (their members) see as irrelevant institutions more concerned with their own perpetuation than with propagating the faith."

The situation in which we now find ourselves is so different to that of the first generation of believers. But the need to put hospitality, care of others, a strong sense of family feeling in our church life is just as important for us as is was for them. And we have a lot to learn from the early Christian’s generativity and originality in the way they ordered their life around open table fellowship and unique forms of solidarity. This is why bus trips and other new initiatives in social belonging in parish life matter. Being a Christian isn’t just about turning up to Church on Sunday. It is helpful and important to belong to the household of faith in other ways too. There too Christ is met and known in the sister and brother for whom Christ died, and in whose life he is located in a unique way. When we break bread with them we meet him too.