Join us this Thursday at 7:30 as we begin our four-week Advent study series, Hopeward Bound, a hope-peace-joy-love sequence of conversations in tandem with Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. We will meet in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park, Illinois. If you’re unable to get there in person, find us online at Facebook Live. 

Shea: We’re wrapping up the “Feast!” series in a unique and exciting way.

Tim: Yes! For our final study we’re going to have “dinner church,” which is part of a new kind of liturgical movement that harkens back to the Early Church, when the first Christians worshiped around the table.

Shea: So it will be worship and study?

Tim: Sure will—we’ll enjoy a simple meal while we sing and pray and hear a brief message. “They shared all things in common,” the Book of Acts tells us as it describes what community life was like for the first Christians. So we’ll do something similar.

Shea: Any tip on the message? What are you thinking about there?

Tim: We’ll look at the harvest feasts that the Early Church observed: Pentecost, or the spring harvest festival, and Sukkot, the autumn festival. Both celebrations fire the imagination and invite us to think about our own faith tradition in fuller ways.

Shea: Pentecost gets our attention because we think of it as the Church’s birthdate. It’s when that great moment happens. The Holy Spirit descends on the believers, a great manifestation of power takes place, and Peter preaches his stunning message of radical inclusion: God said, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.”

Tim: You know what we say around Gather…

Shea: All means all, y’all!

Tim: Amen to that! If folks doubted what the Spirit was up to at Pentecost, it was because they had no idea what the harvest feast was all about. Pentecost’s main purpose was to celebrate the first great in-gathering of the season. The early wheat constituted a bounty that guaranteed folks would be nourished during the longer season, when they needed strength and stamina to bring in the autumn harvest.

Shea: So the Pentecostal “all means all” in-gathering was necessary to nurture the Church’s future growth.

Tim: Check this out. If the first-century believers behaved remotely like most Christians today there wouldn’t be a Christianity to speak of. If they got all wrapped up in keeping folks out, they would have never grown the Jesus movement as quickly as they did. The harvest at Pentecost—that first great in-gathering—provided Peter and Paul and all those working beside them with the fortitude and staying power to reap an even greater harvest.

Shea: Is that why there are so many references to harvests in their letters?

Tim: Yes. As bona fide Pentecostals, they identified as harvesters called to bring a new thing into existence. Since they’re our ancestors, we should be harvesters too. And we should embrace the Pentecostal view that “all means all!”

Shea: I say amen to that! I’m really looking forward to Thursday’s feast!

Join us this Thursday, as we conclude our study series, “Feast!” in the Fellowship Hall of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street in Oak Park (Green Line: Ridgeland). Doors open at 7:00p, the worship begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Fully, Properly Fed

Tim: There are so many feast stories in the Gospels.

Shea: The first thing that comes to mind is the large number of feasting parables. Stories about feasts, preparing for feasts, who gets invited, and how guests behave. Jesus talks about banquets because that was his world. Apart from the parables, nearly every time Jesus steps indoors he’s at a feast of some kind.

Tim: That’s tough for a lot of folks to accept. Jesus was quite the partygoer. He eats with the tightly wound religious set one day and then he upsets them when they see him hanging with folks they regard as “sinners.”

Shea: Jesus’s eagerness to accept any and every invitation caused many folks to view him as a libertine and radical.

Tim: If we were seeing Jesus in a contemporary setting, he’d cover the social landscape, from fancy black-tie events to house parties. It’s not like he’s a social climber, leaving old friends behind to worm his way into the jet set. But he was a social butterfly. He went wherever he wanted to go and took his posse with him. That was radical.

Shea: In Jesus’s day, classes and genders didn’t mix at banquets. Ethnic groups tended to hang together, although the hospitality ethic sometimes required inviting a foreigner into one’s home. There were all kinds of rules and customs in place to keep everyone segregated.

Tim: Just like today. While it’s got a whole lot better, there are still a lot of places I wouldn’t be comfortable walking into, even if I was invited. That’s not only because I would be concerned about not being welcomed. I wouldn’t know how to behave or what to eat.

Shea: It’s the old joke about not knowing what fork to use. It was no better in Jesus’s day, even though they ate with their hands. There were all these subtleties: where you sat, how you dressed, who poured the wine, who washed guests’ hands and feet, what was on the menu. First-century readers caught these nuances and saw what was really going on around the table. It’s a little tougher for us. Without the background info, we’re not getting fully, properly fed when we read the feast stories. That’s what we’ll be looking at this Thursday.

Tim: I couldn’t have set it up better. This week is all about menus and etiquette and social demands, and how all of that became powerful material for Jesus to show us a better way of being.

Join us this Thursday, as we continue our study series, “Feast!” in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street in Oak Park (Green Line: Ridgeland). Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.