Welcome Home: Hospitality as Community (Acts 2:41-47)

Creating Community With Food

About seven years ago, a Palestinian and Israeli had an idea to start a restaurant together in Berlin utilizing recipes from both of their backgrounds. They were not sure their idea would work. Their families were not sure it would work. Palestinians and Israelis have been fighting for decades. And the two men had no money, no space, no passports. So the two chefs ran an experiment, launching a two-day food and dance festival called the "Hummus, Fashion, and Peace Connection". During the festival the two men and others served up food from both of their families. To their surprise, thousands showed up for the event. And a few shorts months later, the restaurant Kanaan, named after the Promised Land, was opened. The two chefs, from completely different backgrounds, found that food brought people together, even if they were enemies.

Food creates safe places and food is a catalyst at creating community. It’s a lesson that is hard learned for us. We often think that one must have community first and then you eat together, when in fact, it is the act of eating together that produces community. And not only does it produce community, it grows community.

This is what we’re looking at today in our Bible talk. We’re continuing our series on hospitality. Last week, we looked at the hospitality that Jesus provides us here in our community through Word and Sacrament. He creates the community and he provides us all with family and a home. This Acts passage is continuing that theme, but does so with a little more detail.

What Makes a Church?

Along the way, we have to return to a common question we ask ourselves here at The Table from time to time to keep our identity in front of us. The question is this: What is it that makes a church, the church? Historically, the most common and well-known answer is one found in older confession…

church/(chûrch): a church is where the Word is faithfully preached and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

This is a helpful starting point. Certainly, this is what we aim to do here at the Table… we preach the Word because it is here Christ meets us. And we administer the Table because it is here that Christ feeds us.

But presumed in this formal definition of "church" is that this is a gathering of people around the Word and sacraments. A gathering of people who are connected to Jesus connecting other people to Jesus. Both here in our services and beyond our gathering. "Church" is not a building… it is people.

The beginnings of church

And it has been this way since the beginning of the church community in the book of Acts. And that’s where our story of community begins. The book of Acts begins with Jesus’s last words to the 12 guys who had been with him for 3 years. They watched him do all sorts of miracles, heard all of his teachings, watched all the showdowns with the religious leaders, then were on hand as he was arrested and crucified as a common criminal. They were then among the 500 witnesses who saw Jesus alive after he rose from the dead. And about 40 days or so after his resurrection, he gives them some instructions and a promise… that they would tell his story all over the world. They see Jesus leave the earth and go into his glory in heaven.

One week later, the Holy Spirit descends in tongues of fire and Peter preaches a sermon to thousands who are gathered at the temple in Jerusalem. That sermon is recorded in the book of Acts chapter 2… he tells the crowd a story about God making promises in the Old Testament to send Israel a savior… a Messiah… a ruler who would bring about the salvation of the nation and set up a rule on earth. Israel had been waiting for this Promised Champion for a couple of thousand of years… going all the way back to Abraham and Moses and Joshua and David. And Peter says in just the past few years, God finally sent the champion. And instead of embracing the champion who was promised, Israel killed him. Crucified him. They crucified the very guy who had been promised for thousands of years.

This crowd is absolutely stunned that they didn’t recognize Jesus for who he was and is… the Promised One of the Old Testament. The One who came to save them from their sins. They didn’t believe Jesus then. But they do now. They are mortified. “What do we do?” Peter tells them to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins.

And that’s exactly what happens.

Acts 2:41 Those who accepted his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand people were added to them.

3000 people are connected to Jesus through baptism that day. And this is the beginning of what we know to be the church… the community of believers. For the past 2000 years, people have been connected to Jesus the same way… over and over and over and over… accepting in faith the Good News that Jesus has died for their sins and being baptized.

But the story doesn’t end there. The natural question that arises from this story or any other story like it is this… now what? Once Jesus saves us from our sin, what’s next? Our Bible lesson from Acts is the answer to that question.

Acts 2:42 Those who accepted Peter’s message and were baptized devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.

Whatever you think you know about church, whatever I think I know about church, right here is what those who know Jesus do. Four things that characterized these 3000 plus in Acts, and what characterizes us here at the Table:

Devoted themselves to the Word.

Devoted themselves to the Gathering.

Devoted themselves to the Lord’s Supper.

Devoted themselves to Prayer.

We’re given a couple of additional details that flesh out this devotion in verse 45 and 46:

Acts 2:45-46 They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts.

So we add two more to the list:

Sharing possessions

Eating Food Together

This is what the church does when it is brought together in community. But don’t miss the beginning. It all begins with the Word. The Word is what creates the community. The Word becomes the center of the community. And this community devotes itself to and centers its life on the Word, gathering together, communion, and prayer. The community is generous. The community eats together.

When we are connected to Jesus, Jesus places us in a community, a community in which we continue to tell our story through the Word and through communion. In this community, we encourage each other and talk to God together through prayer. It is in this community we get to know Jesus better, a place where we find continually find grace and life and forgiveness of sins. A place of hope and rest.

Hospitality at the center of “church”

But if we focus on those four things alone, we’ve missed the main point of what is happening in this passage. In the middle of it all, Dr. Luke tells us:

Acts 2:44 All the believers were together and held all things in common.

What we are supposed to see here is a spirit of hospitality that binds the entire new creation together. This is like the glue that holds the community together. They held “all things in common”. It’s far too easy to pass this off as a first century quirk of a kind of church socialism, where everyone shared everything. The church was doing this… but that’s not the gist here. “All things in common” is talking about everything… all things means all things… their devotion to the Word, to the Gathering, to the Lord’s Supper, to Prayer, to sharing of possessions… and then just being together and eating food together. They held all of these things in common.

The entire life of the church is bound up with hospitality. Taking care of the stranger. Taking care of each other. Creating commonality in community. And it’s not an accident that there is a phrase repeated twice to give us the rhythm of what is happening in community:

Acts 2:42 They devoted themselves to the breaking of bread

Acts 2:46 Every day they broke bread from house to house.

That first sentence is talking about the Lord’s Table. The second is about common meals together. Like our potlucks. Eating and drinking the Lord’s Supper was part of the larger feast. It’s all in the context of hospitality. Making all feel welcome. All things in common meant they held the Word in common, they shared the Lord’s Table in common, they ate their meals together in common.

The Lord’s Table shapes all of the meal-making here at The Table. We’re not used to thinking this way about our food or about sitting down to eat a meal together. This meal that provides us life, salvation, and forgiveness gives energy and life to all of the other meals we eat together.

Hospitality at the center of mission

What we know about the first 100 years of the church is this: they met in houses. And they shared meals. And in those meals, they administered the Lord’s Table. The Lord’s Table was part of the meal. It wasn’t until the 2nd and 3rd centuries that people began gathering in church buildings and the Lord’s Table became isolated away from the common meals.

I’m not saying we should go back to that. We do share a common theme with those early churches not meeting in their own buildings. But we do need to see that food was a big part of the church life. And the common meal was an outgrowth of sharing communion together. Life together means eating together. And one of these days, here at the Table, we will celebrate the Lord’s Table as part of a larger meal. We’ve lost this sense of the Lord’s Table being real food that gives us nourishment, both spiritually and physically.

This is important because we need to see what happens when the Lords’ Table is giving rise to the common sharing of a meal. Jesus uses meals to expand His kingdom:

Acts 2:47 Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Every day they gathered. Every day they shared a meal, a part of which was the Lord’s Table. Every day, the Lord added to their number. The rapid expansion of the church was fueled by hospitality. By the church being a safe place. Welcoming people in the gathering and in the meals. A community that prizes hospitality is a community where Jesus is adding and growing through Word and Sacrament.

I have witnessed this multiple times. Very small community groups that have not been eating together begin making it a priority to eat regularly together and that very small community in no short order is no longer small, but very, very big. It’s not an accident that the growth began when the meals began.

We can take a cue from the Israeli and Palestinian chefs who decided to merge their food and see what happens. What happens is that food and the act of eating together is community building… bridging cultural and philosophical divides. That’s what the Lord’s Table does here. The Word and Table create the community. The Word and Table create the unity of the community. You don’t get unity before the Table, the Table unites you and gives you the unity as a community. And that then becomes the catalyst for unity in eating together other meals. That’s what it means that this is a Sacrament. The Sacrament creates and provides and we receive.

And we’ve experienced some of that here. Our potlucks, because it is a common sharing of food, take on an added spiritual dimension because we are eating together in the context of church. These meals are almost sacramental. While they do not provide the same spiritual benefits as the Lord’s Table, they do provide grace and healing and are part of Christ’s mission and community building.

I don’t know what you think “church” is. I often say, “church” is not a building. The church is where the Word is preached and the Sacraments provided. And what does that look like? It looks like Acts 2. The “church” is a community of people who come together to do these things… listen to learn from and received from the Word preached, receive life and forgiveness in communion, prayer with each other and serve others together. Eating meals together. It’s all here. If we, as The Table are going to be what Jesus designed us to be, we will a community of hospitality, where enemies become friends, and strangers become family.

Let’s Pray

The Table

From the very beginning of the church, central to its life was the Table. Twice in our passage, “breaking of bread” is mentioned. It becomes quite clear that the Table and communion is central to the identity of the gathering. In those days, there was no such thing as “membership” per se… you knew who was part of the community by who was at the Table. And in those days, more often than not, they weren’t simply putting together a table of wine and bread. No… they ate full-course meals and during the meals would celebrate communion with the bread and the wine. Over the course of 2000 years, the rest of the feast went missing and now we simply have the bread and the wine. Regardless of how it comes to us, what we do know is that the Table was the centerpiece of the community. It is where the family gathers to feed from Jesus himself, taking a cue from that very first night when Jesus told his 12 followers to continue to eat the bread and drink the wine in his name for the forgiveness of sins and eternal life.