Holiday At The Sea

Shared meals construct and sustain human relationships. Inviting someone to share a meal powerfully symbolizes solidarity. The word companionship actually comes from the Latin cum + panis, meaning "breading together."

Meals are social realities of great importance. Because meals express the very texture of human associations, they often exhibit social boundaries that divide human communities. We make decisions about not only what we will eat but with whom we will eat. Patterns of table sharing reveal a great deal about the way of life - the norms and commitments - of a particular community.

Within the Gospels, Jesus' meal patterns receive special attention. Many of his critics observed that "this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." They were shocked and appalled that Jesus welcomed everyone to the table.

Nourished and strengthened into a new relationship with Jesus Christ, those who break bread together are drawn into and participate in his ministry of conquering need, overcoming alienation, and accepting the despised.

"When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." (Luke 14:12)

I was riding in the passenger's seat of the car when we stopped at a traffice light. That's when I saw him. Sitting in a wheel chair, legs propped into position against the foot rests, leaning forward against his elbows, hands folded together, chin against his hands, eyes closed, and face upward in prayer....

He was a beggar who might have been staging a pose so that someone passing by would feel pitty and hand out some cash. I don't know, and I don't care. I do know that the Spirit prompted me to get out of the car, run to him, and give him what I had in my billfold. Something.

I have passed-up probably a million chances to do the same thing but, on this particular day, the Spirit said, "You have to go to him. Help him." So, I did.

Not every divine opportunity will create a new ministry or organization, but that really isn't the point. Every divine opportunity is born out of the power to do good. The fuel of doing good can range from passion to compassion to a commitment to serve others. The Scriptures provoke us to do good toward others when it is in our power to do so. And sometimes a simple act of grace toward another human being becomes the window through which God pulls us into His future for us. While God never promises that we'll know everything about the future, or even that we'll live without mystery in the present, He does promise that we can live life to the fullest.

God clarifies in the midst of obedience, not beforehand.

Real faith communities witness to the nature and quality of God's presence in their midst through worship and their service. But they also witness just as strongly in the way they share power and influence in their decision making. The processes of making decisions within the church are usually viewed as an organizational concern. Modernity has placed great trust in reason's ability to uncover a shared understanding of the truth. In contrast, postmodernity has so stressed the contextual nature of truth and the diversity of human perspectives that all truth claims have become relative. As a result, the process of making decisions are now largely viewed as a matter of power dynamics in which either comopeting forces are balanced or one side seeks an advantage through manipulative strategies.

Discernment: Cultivating Communities of Spirit-filled Deliberation

The ecclesial practice of discernment in faith communities indicates a different approach. Discernment is a process of sorting, distinguishing, evaluating, and sifting among competing stimuli, demands, longings, desires, needs, and influences, in order to determine which are of God and which are not. To discern is to prove or test "what is of the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Rom 12:2). Thus the goal of decision making in the church is not simply to discover the will of the community, but instead to discern together the will of God. It is the role of the Spirit to convict, convince, and lead those who profess faith in Jesus Christ into God's truth. Discernment requires this guidance because God acts and speaks in and through the ambiguous circumstances of worldly life. Thus the church is called to "test the spirits to see whether they are from God (1 John 4:1) through cautious, attentive, and humble discernment. As can be documented through historical review, not only the Holy Spirit but also destructive forces operate and multiply within Christian communities. As the ekklesia of God, a people gathered and sent to be about God's business, the church is called to a way of making decisions that articulates and correlates with listening, hearing, testing, planning, and obeying together in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Contemporary images of community tend to exhibit an "ideology of intimacy." They emphasize sameness, closeness, warmth, and comfort. Difference, distance, conflict, and sacrifice are alien to this approach and therefore are to be avoided at all costs. Modern communities maintain a facade of unity and harmony by eliminating the strange and cultivating the familiar, by suppressing dissimilarity and emphasizing agreement. The traumatic and tragic events of human life are glossed over, ignored, or explained away. Those who are strange - other than we are - are either excluded or quickly made like us. "People with whom we cannot achieve intimacy, or with whom we do not want to be intimate, are squeezed out." These images portray homogenous communities of retreat where persons must be protected from one another as well as from ourselves, and where reality is suppressed and denied due to fear and anxiety.

Communities shaped by faith in Jesus Christ and the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit, present a different image. Rather than seeing themselves as one more civic institution offering religous goods and services to individuals (or to society at large), such communities take the time to create gracious and caring space where they can reach out and invite their fellow human beings into a new relationship with God and with each other. They offer both the protection and the freedom to enable estranged and fearful human beings to bring the actual circumstances of their lives into coversation with the peace of the gospel. In a world increasingly "full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture, and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God," communities shaped by faith evidence the good news of Jesus Christ. The welcoming news of the reign of God shapes them into welcoming communities, open to all creation. - From The Missional Church