Desiring the Kingdom (): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies Book 1)

by James K. A. Smith

Hence, the Eucharist—the heart of the church’s worship—is also the liturgical practice that requires and effects reconciliation. A table forces us to face up to reality, making the discomfort of fractured relationships starkly bubble up to the surface (think of those awkward dinner scenes in The Gilmore Girls where the family is silent and seething!). Marshaling the mundane and universal human practice of eating, and thus also taking up the common connection between food and fellowship, the table of the Lord is a catalyst for reconciliation on the “horizontal” level as well. This normal, everyday human activity of eating will be the occasion for undoing the abnormal but all-too-common reality of human enmity and discord.[106] Just as Jesus admonished us to be reconciled before leaving our gifts at the altar (Matt. 5:23–24), so too Paul admonishes the Corinthians to examine themselves before partaking of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:27–34). From the earliest practices of the church, the discipline of reconciliation has been tethered to the Eucharist. Thus in the Didache, the author warns, “Let no one who has a quarrel with a companion join you until they have been reconciled, so that your sacrifice may not be defiled.”[107] The gracious invitation to the table is also a call to reconciliation, which is a reminder that the task of humanity is ineluctably social; we cannot image God in isolation (“in the image of God he created them”).