Jesus Set the Table

Week 2 | Jesus Set the Table

Tables: Building a Community That Looks Like Jesus 

Scripture: Luke 22:14–20; Acts 2:42–47 Approx. 25 minutes

INTRODUCTION

If you read through the four Gospels and pay attention to one thing, just one, here is what you will notice. Jesus is always eating.

A New Testament scholar named Robert Karris said it this way:

In Luke's Gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.

Robert Karris

Go back and check it for yourself this week. It is almost comedic how often we find him at a table.

He eats with tax collectors. The guys everyone else crossed the street to avoid.

He eats with sinners, with people whose reputations made the religious crowd uncomfortable just to be near them.

He eats with Pharisees too, the very people who criticized him for keeping the wrong company.

He multiplies a few loaves and fish until five thousand people are fed.

He turns water into wine at a wedding so the party does not end early.

And after the resurrection, when he could have appeared in glory and overwhelming power, what does he do for his exhausted, grieving disciples? He builds a charcoal fire on the beach and cooks them breakfast.

And then there is the night before he died. In his final hours, knowing exactly what was coming, Jesus does not gather his closest friends for a strategy session. He does not give them an org chart. He does not hand them a building plan. He pulls up a chair. He gathers them around a table, and he says the words that have echoed through twenty centuries of church history.

This is my body, given for you. This is my blood, poured out for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

Think about what he chose not to leave us. He had every opportunity to leave behind a blueprint for a building. He did not. Church buildings, as we picture them, did not exist for hundreds of years after this moment. He could have dictated a single liturgy, a fixed order of service, a script that every church everywhere would follow forever. He did not do that either.

What he left us was a table.

That is what this summer series is about. We have called it Tables, because we believe that table fellowship, eating together, sharing life together, with Jesus at the center, is the antidote to so much of what is eating away at us. We are the most connected generation in human history and somehow also the loneliest. And I want to suggest this morning that Jesus already gave us the cure. He gave it to us two thousand years ago. We just have to set the table.

POINT 1 | THE MEAL JESUS LEFT US

Luke 22:14–20

Let's look at the actual text. Luke 22, beginning in verse 14.

Luke 22:14 NIV

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table.

Pause there for a second. Before he suffers, before the betrayal, before the cross, what does Jesus say he has eagerly desired? Not to preach one more sermon. Not to perform one more miracle. To eat this meal with them. He wanted this moment at the table more than almost anything.

This is the Passover meal, an ancient rhythm the Jewish people had practiced for over a thousand years. The bread. The cup. The prayers. The retelling of the story of deliverance. And on this night, Jesus takes all of that ancient liturgy, all of that history, and he reframes it around himself.

Luke 22:14–22 NIV

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. But the hand of him who is going to betray me is with mine on the table. The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed. But woe to that man who betrays him!”

This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.

Now here is what I want you to notice. Notice what he does not say. He does not say, do this in a cathedral. He does not say, do this with a professional worship band and a fog machine and stage lighting. He does not say, do this with a trained clergy class presiding in robes. He says, do this. Simply. Gathered together, in my name, around a table.

And here is something most of us miss when we read this passage, because we have inherited centuries of church tradition that have shrunk this moment down into something small. We take a tiny wafer and a thimble of juice once a month, and we call it communion. But the Lord's Supper was originally a supper. It was a full meal.

The early church had a name for this practice. They called it the agape feast. The love feast. Picture this. Thirty or forty believers, gathered in an open courtyard somewhere in the Mediterranean world, sharing actual bread, actual wine, singing together, praying together, reading the Scriptures aloud together, and doing all of it in a spirit of genuine celebration. Not a somber funeral mood. A feast. A party with Jesus at the center.

That is what he left us. Not an institution. A table.

POINT 2 | HOW THE EARLY CHURCH ACTUALLY OPERATED

Acts 2:42–47

So the question becomes, did the first Christians actually take this seriously? Did they build their life together around a table the way Jesus modeled it for them?

Let's look at the very first description we have of the church after Pentecost. Acts chapter 2, verse 42.

Acts 2:42 NIV

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Read that list again.

Teaching.

Fellowship.

The breaking of bread.

Prayer.

Notice what is not on that list. There is no building program. There is no annual budget meeting. There is no mention of a sanctuary or a sound system. The defining mark of this brand new movement that would eventually reshape the entire world was a shared table.

Verse 46 makes it even more vivid.

Acts 2:46 NIV

Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.

Every day. Not once a week. Every single day, these believers were sharing meals in each other's homes.

Fast forward a couple of decades. The apostle Paul is writing a letter to the church in Corinth, and he needs to correct some bad behavior happening when they gather on Sundays. Listen to how he opens that section, in 1 Corinthians 11.

1 Corinthians 11:20–21 NIV

So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk.

"So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers."

And then a few verses later he says it plainly.

1 Corinthians 11:33 NIV

So then, my brothers and sisters, when you gather to eat, you should all eat together.

When you gather to eat. Not when you gather to sing. Not when you gather to hear a sermon. When you gather to eat. The center of gravity for the early church, the thing that organized their whole life together, was the table.

There is a New Testament professor named Joseph Hellerman who has written extensively on this. Here is how he describes the early church. They had no temples of their own, no sacrificial system, no professional priesthood, no fixed liturgy. Just an informal weekly meeting in someone's home, where they broke bread together and sang a hymn. And then Hellerman adds this line, almost as a joke. He says, this is hardly the stuff of a major world religion.

And yet. That informal meal in somebody's living room became the seedbed of the largest movement in human history. Because here is the secret. This meal was never just dinner with friends. The bread was never just bread. The wine was never just wine. Every time they gathered, it was a meal with Jesus. He was the unseen guest at every table, and that changed everything about what happened there.

POINT 3 | WHAT IT MEANS TO PUT JESUS AT THE CENTER

Now here is where I want to get practical, because I know what some of you are thinking. Josh, we already do this. We have dinner with friends all the time. We do brunch on Saturdays. We have people over.

And here is the danger I want to name clearly. Our table can very easily become just brunch.

Millennial brunch culture, and honestly this spans every generation in this room, is built around hanging out, keeping things light, keeping things fun. And there is nothing wrong with light and fun. But light and fun is not the same thing as Christian community. You can sit across a table from someone for an hour, laugh together, talk about your weekend, and walk away having connected with exactly nothing real underneath the surface.

The author John Eldredge describes three layers of conversation.

The first layer is the shallows.

This is chitchat.

How is the weather.

Did you see the game.

Small talk that fills space but never costs anything.

The second layer is the midlands.

How was your week.

What is going on with the kids.

A little more personal, but still mostly safe.

And then there is…

The third layer, the depths.

This is where you actually get under the surface.

Where you say, here is what I am actually struggling with.

Here is where I am afraid. Here is where I need help.

Here is the hard truth about our culture. We are so conditioned for the shallows that you can sit at a full table, surrounded by people, and still walk away feeling completely alone. That is the loneliness epidemic in a sentence:

Not an absence of people. An absence of depth.

So what takes us from the shallows down into the depths?

Two things:

Intentionality, and

Jesus at the center.

Practically, here is what that looks like. It means we open the Scriptures together at the table, not just food talk and football talk. It means we pray together, out loud, for real things. It means somebody has the courage to say, here is what is actually going on in my life this week, and somebody else has the courage to really listen. When we do that, the meal stops being just a meal. It becomes communion. It becomes exactly what Jesus had in mind on that night with the bread and the cup.

CONCLUSION

So let me bring this all the way home, because I do not want this to just be an interesting Bible study about the early church. I want this to change what your Tuesday night looks like.

Here is the recipe, and it really is this disarmingly simple.

Three things:

Share a regular meal with a set group of brothers and sisters.

Not a different group every time.

The same people, regularly, so that trust has room to grow.

Put Jesus at the center.

Open the Scriptures.

Pray out loud.

Let his presence be the reason you are there, not just an afterthought tacked onto dessert.

Share honestly in the joys and the sorrows of real life.

Move past the shallows.

Get to the depths.

If you do those three things, you are most of the way there. It is not complicated. It does not require a budget or a building or a program from this church. It requires a table, some food, and the willingness to show up.

So here is your challenge this week. Set the table. Invite two or three people, ideally from this church family, into your home or out to a meal. Let it be simple. You do not need a Pinterest worthy spread. Paper plates are fine. Let it be a little imperfect. And let Jesus be at the center of it.

Jesus did not leave us a building. He did not leave us a liturgy carved in stone. He left us a table. And the question for every one of us this week is simple. Will you set it?

Let's pray.

Loneliness