Feasting in a Fast-Food World*

There is little that we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God's wrath. Our best moments have been mostly grotesque parodies. Our best loves have been almost always blurred with selfishness and deceit. But there is something to which we can point. Not anything that we ever did or were, but something that was done for us by another. Not our own lives, but the life of one who died in our behalf and yet is still alive. This is our only glory and our only hope. And the sound that it makes is the sound of excitement and gladness and laughter that floats through the night air from a great banquet.

--Frederick Buechner, Magnificent Defeat

Have we not been summoned by our Lord Jesus to let him into the church's banquet room so that He and we might enjoy one another? The invitation is to the Church: ". . . If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me" (Rev. 3:20). Jesus has not bid us assemble in front of a white board or Powerpoint, but around the dinner table. There's a place for learning, for classes. But the place of choice is dining, entering into his Presence. The place of studies will come and, in light of such dining, be that much more enhanced. Oh, to relish such opportunities!

*Title and quotation thanks to Michael Horton, "Reformation Today" (July/August 2009).