Sacred Meals, Sacred Stories Week 2

Hey Everyone! Here is the scripture for the week and also the reading that goes along with it. Please try to read this and read/meditate on the scripture before Tuesday. Sorry this is later than I said. Still not sure what we will be eating Tuesday. But plan on coming to Wesley first at least. Also if you could bring money to pay back Anthony and I from last week, it was about $4 a person. This week I will let you know the price soon. Thanks!

~Brooke~

Scripture: Luke 14:15-24

Another characteristic activity of Jesus was an open and inclusive
table. Anthropologists maintain that "In all societies, both simple
and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining
human relationships . . . once the anthropologist finds out where,
when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything can be
inferred about the relations among the society's members . . . To know
what, where, when, and with whom people eat is to know the character
of their society."

Sharing a meal with someone had a significance in the social world of
Jesus that is difficult for us to imagine. It was not a casual act, as
it can be in the modern world. In a purity society one did not eat
with anyone who could be considered impure. For in a general way,
sharing a meal represented mutual acceptance. That is why there were
rules surrounding meals. One couldn't be too careful. Those rules
governed not only what might be eaten and how it should be prepared,
but with whom one might eat. Pharisees and others would not eat with
somebody who was impure, and no decent person would share a meal with
an outcast. The meal was a microcosm of the social system -- table
fellowship an embodiment of a social vision of a purity society of
hierarchies, differences, distinctions, and discriminations.

The meal practice of Jesus therefore had socio-political significance.
His open table fellowship became a vehicle of cultural protest,
challenging the ethos and politics of holiness which led to a closed
table fellowship. It embodied an alternative vision of an inclusive
community reflecting the compassion of God. Open commensality(1) is
the symbol and embodiment of radical egalitarianism, of an absolute
equality of people that denies the validity of any discrimination
between them and negates the necessity of any hierarchy among them.
The inclusive vision incarnated in Jesus' table fellowship is
reflected in the shape of the Jesus movement itself. It was an
inclusive movement, negating the boundaries of the purity system. It
was what Walter Wink has called a Domination-Free Society. It included
women, untouchables, the poor, the maimed, and the marginalized, as
well as some people who found his vision attractive. It has been said
that for Jesus, "the Kingdom of God is pictured as a new kind of meal
arrangement. A nondiscriminating table depicts in miniature a
nondiscriminating society, and this vision clashed fundamentally with
the basic values of ancient Mediterranean society."
- Richard Wheatcroft