This morning I went to church to worship the Triune God. It was glorious, as usual. About ten months ago I started going to Memorial Presbyterian Church, which calls itself "an urban evangelical church seeking to renew the city spiritually, culturally and socially." I loved going to Cornerstone but wanted to join one of the churches that is seeking to the city. Today I went to a couple's house in the church for lunch. It was fantastic! We sat down at the table at about 2:00 and got up at 5:15 - not that I was timing it or anything, i just have a good clock in my head. This was a really wonderful time of eating delicious food (Jenny made pumpkin lasagna, which was really wonderful even though I wasn't expecting it to be all that great) and having great conversation. When I left I made my way over to Crossroads Fellowship where my good friend Nate Walker was going to give the sermon for the evening worship. Crossroad's evening sermons this month are on a theology of food. He had some great things to say and did a really wonderful job at explaining some helpful things for people to understand. There are two holy places in the house, he said, the bedroom and the dinner table. It's in the bedroom where the husband and the wife show that they are not just friends or not just family members or not just brothers and sisters in Christ, but they are one body as husband and wife. It's at the dinner table where people move from acquaintance to friends. One is exclusive while the other is inclusive. I think that I experienced the truth of this today. It's incredible what having a meal with someone does to the relationship between the people that have the meal together. I don't what having the meal this afternoon did for my hosts, but for me it made me feel more like a part of Memorial, glad to be part of the body of Christ, and interested in how Gary is doing in his new job. I moved from someone who care from a distance to someone who cares from across the table. I feel closer and it feels right.We are not invited into one of the holy places of the house, nor should we be. It has it has its own way of building people together, which is limited to the one that said "I do" to the other. But the dinner table is open. I was one who was blessed today to be invited to sit around one of the holy places of another's house, and it encouraged me to be more intentional in having people join me in the formative act of eating.
Up above is a painting by Mattise entitled "Dinner Table."
Two quotes just because I read them today and I think that Chesterton is brilliant:
"A man's soul is as full of voices as a forest; there are ten thousand tongues there like all the tongues of the trees: fancies, follies, memories, madness, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes. All the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the conclusion that some of those voices have authority and others not."
"A man dying for his country does not talk as if local preferences could change. Leinidas does not say, 'In my present mood, I prefer Sparta to Persia.' William Tell does not remark, 'The Swiss civilization, so far as I can yet see, is superior t othe Austrian.' When men are making commonwealths, they talk in terms of absolute, and so they do when they are making (however unconciously) thsoe smaller commonwealths which are called families."
Both of these come from his essay "Questions of Divorce," found in The Uses of Diversity, which is the best collection of his essays that I've read.
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