ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 11.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> DAVID: My second question addresses the less formal kind of worship. What exactly do we mean when we speak of the table fellowship of Jesus? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: We saw in the sermon at Nazareth how important teaching and miracles, word and sacrament, are as foundational elements of not only the ministry of Jesus, but our worship today. The same thing is true of what we might now call the table fellowship of Jesus. In the ancient world, table fellowship was a very formal way in which not only Jews but the pagans themselves, the Romans, got together to show kind of the intimate character of their life as a people. Table fellowship has always been something that is a way of expressing an intimacy between people. I think you can see this in your own life that we have ways of demonstrating our real intimate relationships with our wife or with our friends or family by gathering together for a meal. Some of the great moments in our life are celebrated at a meal. Now, unfortunately in our fast-paced culture of fast food, we don't sit down and eat very much anymore. We've always tried in our family to at least eat one meal together at dinnertime, and my wife has been very, very strict about that. Sometimes, we simply kind of can't do it, but we do it as often as we can to have this opportunity to sit and talk and kind of express with one another our family unity at this moment of eating. In our culture, we really don't have many meals anymore that are kind of times of this great table fellowship in our families. We have Christmas dinners. We have Easter dinners. Perhaps the one in our culture that is the biggest dinner of all is Thanksgiving where we have, essentially, all the same foods. We eat turkey. We eat sweet potatoes, etcetera. We have those kinds of things, pumpkin pie. That's kind of the great national table fellowship, so to speak. But we�ve really lost that in our culture. Years ago, they used to talk about the Christmas goose, but there's no real food at Christmas time. It�s interesting at Easter--I'm from the New England area. At Easter time, we always had lamb because that's what you do at Easter. You have lamb. I married this Midwestern girl from Ft. Wayne, Indiana. And the first time we had Easter together, we had ham. I said to her, only gentiles have ham at Easter. You have to have lamb because didn't we sing in church this morning at the Lamb's high feast we sing, not at the ham�s high feast. It's too bad we don't have those traditions anymore in our culture that we have these specific foods, but they did at the time of our Lord. And this table fellowship was a way of marking kind of a special relationship. Now, table fellowship, not only among the Jews, but among the Romans had two important elements to it. And we're going to see in the Jewish table fellowship there is a third one. The two important elements are very simple. There was teaching, and there was eating. We're talking about formal meals. We're talking about meals that are festive in character. And you would never get together and just simply eat. There would always be table talk. And interestingly, in the ancient world, the table talk always preceded the meal, not like today in some of our banquets we have after-dinner speeches. They would always have a before-dinner speech because the teaching would bind them together as a community, and then the eating would seal that table fellowship, so to speak, by the fact that they would break bread together. If you look in the Old Testament, you'll see that God shows his salvific intentions with his people, Israel, by means of a meal. In fact, going back to the very book of Genesis itself and the sacrifices that are made, sacrifices. When you have a sacrifice of an animal, you always eat it afterwards. There's always table fellowship. Moses and the elders go up on the mountain, Exodus 20:40 eat with God. And of course, there's the Passover Seder, which is a meal. So meals are very important in the way in which God transacts his salvific reality with his people in the context of eating and drinking. And so it's very natural in the New Testament, especially when you see this continuity of the Passover, for Jesus to continue that because as a good Jew, he simply is doing the things that he inherited from his own people. The third element, however, in Jesus' table fellowship and the table fellowship of the Jews in a religious context was the presence of God. So there was teaching. There was eating. And there was God's presence. And of course, in the case of Jesus, this is the presence of God in the flesh, sitting down at table with them eating and drinking with them as one who dwells among them as a fellow human being who was also at the same time the Son of God. Now, this table fellowship has a number of climactic moments in the Gospels. In the Galilean ministry the climactic meal was the feeding of the five thousand, which is the great Moses miracle, where Jesus does what Moses did in the wilderness, but with abundance. The cup overflows, and there are leftovers, as opposed to the men in the wilderness where they could only take enough for the day. So here you see the creator coming to his creation and the cup overflows. This is a remarkable moment in which when Peter sees this he recognizes this is the new Moses. This is the Messiah, and he confesses in Luke's Gospel at least, that this is the Christ. The second climactic meal is at the end of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem which is, of course, the last supper where he institutes the Lord's Supper. This is the meal that we continue to celebrate in our churches. The third climactic meal is the meal after the resurrection the Emmaus meal where after Jesus has risen from the dead, he teaches them on the road and then their eyes are opened in the breaking of the bread. There you see teaching and a meal. Now, this is a very important structural perception that we must have of the table fellowship of Jesus. That again we see teaching is the word of God. And the eating of the meal, especially at the Last Supper in which he institutes the Lord's Supper and all the meals after that; we have the sacrament of the altar, word and sacrament. Here again, we see the foundational structures of the liturgy coming out of the table fellowship of Jesus. And this table fellowship is something that goes on today. One of the things we have to say about what we do when we gather to worship today when we hear God's word and receive his sacrament, that it is nothing more and nothing less than a table fellowship with God where we are reaching back into the Old Testament and all those Covenant meals and the Passover. And what we're going to see is the house Seders, and we continue with Jesus through his own meals with his disciples culminating on the night in which he was betrayed and then the meals he had with the disciples, Jesus did, after the resurrection at Emmaus and as it says an Acts, he ate and drank with them for forty days after he rose from the dead. And then the breaking of bread in Acts 2:42 which happens after Pentecost and continuing in all the countless Lord's Suppers that have been celebrated by the church since then. All of this is nothing more and nothing less than table fellowship with God. And if you remember earlier how I said heaven is nothing but a messianic feast. What we do here now, as we celebrate table fellowship with God in word and sacrament, is we simply have a foretaste, kind of a dress rehearsal, but already now a participation in the messianic feast where we anticipate the glorious, full communion with Christ at his feast that has no end. And so table fellowship with God is another way of simply recognizing that liturgy is a simple act of hearing God's word, having him come to us and teach us, and then sitting down at table with him where he is the host, and he is the meal. And he feeds us this life-giving food of his very body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins.