Communion Sunday September 5, 2010 “Table Fellowship” Reverend Michael D. Powell Luke 22:14-20

When my uncle George died a few years ago I was asked to speak for the entire family at his memorial service. He was a devout Lutheran, and it was at that service that I first heard “I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry,” which immediately became one of my favorite hymns.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to put a memorial tribute together, so I spent the better part of a day talking with his three boys, my two sisters, his sister (my mom), and his wife, (my aunt). We all shared our memories and, as you can imagine, we all remembered different things. To remember him growing up, as a brother, is a whole different thing than remembering him as a husband, a father, or an uncle. We all agreed that he was a wonderful man, a sensitive and faithful husband and father, a good natured uncle. And we all remembered him as a terrible tease. But there was one other thing that we all remembered, and it caught me by surprise. I don’t think any of us knew at the time that it would become one of our most indelible memories.

Uncle George and Aunt Gudrun lived in a very small house on Vancouver Avenue in Portland, and there was never really enough room for the whole family to comfortably gather, especially for a meal. But, comfortable or not, we somehow managed to squeeze everyone in around their kitchen table. They had a circular nook with a bench that curved around a table in the center. It was always quite a process, getting everyone organized and seated properly and, if you were in the back, once you were in there was no getting out without everyone having to stand up and get out first. Unless, of course, you were a kid, and then you just scooted down and crawled out under the table through all the legs and feet. As I talked with everyone in the family, we all, independent of one another, remembered stories of our family gatherings around that kitchen table. We remembered him offering a blessing, or sometimes all of us singing a grace before eating together. We remembered laughing and talking, then just sitting around enjoying one another after we’d eaten. I don’t think it happens as much as it used to. It’s called table fellowship, and it’s one of the most powerful experiences a family can have.

Jesus gathered for table fellowship with his spiritual family. The most famous example, obviously, was what we refer to as “The Last Supper.” We know it was in an upper room, but we really don’t know what the room or the table looked like, and there’s even disagreement over when it was and who was there. All we know for sure is that the table fellowship they shared that night changed history forever. We are still gathering for table fellowship today, even this morning, based on the profound experience they shared at that Last Supper.

I said we don’t really know what the Last Supper looked like but we have many paintings, some of them very familiar. Salvador Dali painted this modernistic scene.

And Leonardo da Vinci's great masterpiece "The Last Supper" is for many Christians the clearest image they have of Christ's last meal with his disciples:

Yet though it is great art, da Vinci's painting is bad history. All the details are inaccurate:

1. The painting shows daylight outside the window, but scripture says the supper was at night
2. The figures are seated on benches, but Jesus and his disciples reclined on couches.
3. Da Vinci shows a meal of fish and ordinary bread, yet a Passover meal consists of unleavened bread, roast lamb and bitter herbs.
4. Da Vinci shows only Jesus and the twelve apostles, omitting
• women, yet the Passover had to be eaten by whole families including women.
• children, yet the laws of Passover require children to ask questions so that they can learn the meaning of the Passover meal from their parents.
• the disciples who prepared the meal during the day.
5. Da Vinci shows thirteen Renaissance Italian males in oriental costume in a Florentine palace, not a Jewish celebration of the Passover in Palestine.

Communion has always been important to me. As I was growing up in the Methodist church we took communion once every three months, and we always knelt at the altar rail. It was truly a spiritual experience, but I never thought about it as table fellowship, as a family event, or as something that could be a joyful celebration, like sitting around my uncle’s kitchen table. That changed when I first took communion in a camp setting, and then even more when I participated in my first Walk to Emmaus. I love communion, and I love the fact that we United Methodists believe in an open table, where the only requirement for receiving is that you be hungry. I love it when children come with their parents. I think that’s the way Jesus would have wanted us to celebrate his memory.

There’s an organization, B.A.S.I.C., which stands for Brother and Sisters in Christ, which is praying and working for the ordination of woman in the Catholic Church, and they fervently believe that there were certainly women and children who were a part of the table fellowship of Jesus’ Last Supper. BASIC commissioned the eminent Polish artist, Bohdan Piasecki, to paint the Last Supper as a Jewish Passover meal with women and children present. Iris Gibson has a copy of it hanging in her home and, when I admired it, she gave me a copy, which now hangs in my office. Here it is:

I love this painting. Not only is it a more realistic depiction of what the Last Supper probably looked like 2000 years ago, it’s also the kind of table fellowship that our sacrament of Holy Communion is meant to celebrate.

We are family. I can see my whole family in that painting, including my wife and daughter, my grandbaby and my Lutheran uncle. And I can see each of you around that table as well, for we are all One Body, brothers and sisters in the family of God.

Let us break bread together, in remembrance of the great love that was expressed in the Table Fellowship of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.