The Table- Week 1 - "An Invitation" by Heather F.

Some of the most transformational and sacred moments of my life have taken place around a table. My kitchen table, tables in the homes of dear friends, little tables in the corners of coffee shops, woven bamboo tables that you sit on the floor around in Asia. At these tables I’ve experienced extravagant hospitality, vulnerable conversation, and genuine friendship. I’ve laughed, cried, questioned, confessed, and prayed life-changing prayers around tables. But the truly beautiful thing about those moments isn’t the tables themselves, but the people I find around them. We all long for friendship. We desire meaningful connection and relationship with people where we can know and be known. But in times like these, it can be harder than ever to find a table with an empty seat. Over the past 20 months the world has experienced trauma, isolation, and polarization. We’ve been afraid to be together. We’ve been worried we’ll say or do the wrong thing. We’ve been hurt by people who disagree with us. And to some degree, it has seemed safer to just keep to ourselves rather than search for a seat at a table with others. That’s why I sense so strongly that the Lord is inviting us to look this month at the way that Jesus modeled what it means to be a friend. When I think about Jesus and his pursuit of friendship I wonder, why would the Incarnate Word of God, who created all and needs nothing, choose to invest so much of his time and energy during his 3 year ministry on earth to hanging out with a rowdy crew of unlikely comrades? If we’re talking about efficiency, surely he could have accomplished more if he wasn’t having to constantly answer their silly questions and chastise their ignorant mistakes. He had to have known that after all that time, in the end they would still abandon him at his point of greatest need. One of them would betray him to death. So why pursue friendship? I believe that the Word shows us that it’s because at the very core, God is about relationship. God himself operates in perfect unity and relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He created us because he desired relationship with his creation. And as image-bearers of God, we at our core are also designed to be relational. When Jesus walked on earth, he prioritized these two relationships above all else- his relationship with the Father, and his relationship with his friends. His ministry and everything else that he did flowed out of those relationships. Since we are created for relationship, it makes sense that the church would be established, not as a building or a specific place, but in the hearts of the family of God. The church’s foundation in Acts was rooted in relationship. (Acts 2) Jesus knew when he was investing in his disciples that these relationships were part of the master plan for the kingdom of God to be established in the world. The heart of God is to restore mankind to himself, and the means he has chosen to do this in through relationship. We cannot call ourselves followers of Christ if we are not also seeking to model our pursuit of relationships after Jesus’s pursuit of people. If we believe Jesus is the way, truth, and life, if we believe he has called us to take the good news to the ends of the earth, then we must also believe he has called us to expand the kingdom through meaningful and intentional relationships. Friendship isn’t just about our pleasure, it’s about eternity. When I think about Jesus’s pursuit of friendship, my mind goes to the culmination of those three years he spent with the disciples- the Last Supper. And that’s where I want us to abide this month because it’s here in this sacred space of the last moments that Jesus would have with his closest friends that we see what God intended friendship to look like. In the coming weeks, we’re going to look at some of the invitations that Jesus gave to his disciples that night, and the invitation he gives to us today as he pulls up a chair for us at his table and asks us to do the same for others. Join us next week as we look at Jesus’s invitation to serve and be served.