The Tables of Our Lives

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It’s got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot. -Michael J Fox

            I like to walk around my neighborhood and observe things. Sometimes I listen to music, but most often I don’t because I want to hear the outside world. I especially like walking on sunny days when I can really soak up some extra vitamin D. In the front yard of a house a few streets away from me is a big teal picnic table. It’s in the center of the yard and looks inviting. It looks like the kind of table where family gather and pass plates in a kind of informal communion where iced tea or lemonade is the blood of Christ and burgers or hot dogs are the body. I wonder how many games of chess have been played on that teal picnic table. How many hands have been held, arms stretched across the surface like bridges from one heart to another? Do children color on the table? There must be a story behind every dent, every crack, ever scar embedded in the table’s bright, teal paint.

            Tables tell amazing stories. I inherited the kitchen table of my childhood when my parents bought a new kitchen table with chairs. The round table sits in my kitchen now and I know how many things happened at that table. I know how many monopoly games destroyed family unity. I know how many bowls of ice cream my brother and I ate together. I leaned against the table leg of this table in front of the heating vent in the early mornings when the heat came on. That space on the kitchen floor was my own little world when everyone else was still asleep.

            I wonder what kind of stories the communion tables in churches could tell. How many annual meetings have they witnessed? How many children of God came to the table with doubts and left feeling a kind of love they had never felt before? How many drips of Christ’s blood have been wiped off the surface? I bet every dent, crack, and scar embedded in the table’s wood has a story. 

            What stories do we want our communion tables to tell?

            Whenever we do communion in church, I’m struck by the story from Luke 24. After the resurrection, some disciples have a meal with a man they met on their way to Emmaus. As the man breaks bread with them, their eyes are opened and they recognize Jesus. I always wonder how many people come to the communion table during our worship service and feel the scales fall away from their eyes. Is this a place where you recognize Jesus?

            Think about the tables in your life. Think about the conversations you’ve had there, the meals you’ve exchanged, the flowers you’ve put in the centers, and the hands you’ve held there. Think about the tears that spilled onto the table top and the number of napkins that have gone into keeping the table clean. What tables in your life have been places where you have recognized Christ?

           

When he as at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of bread. -Luke 24:30-35