Come and Eat: A Celebration of Love and Grace Around the Everyday Table

by Bri McKoy

It’s about discovering that perhaps before we invite people to meet Jesus at church or at Christian events, we should invite them to meet him at our table.

What if there is more power in the simple invitation to come and eat than we can even begin to fathom? What if, in sharing a meal, in our eating and our drinking with others, we truly can proclaim the good news? What if the most accessible and consistent way we can share the love of Jesus with others is right in our home? Right around our very own common dining room table?

This is why Jesus went into the homes of sinners: to seek and save the lost. His willingness to step into Zacchaeus’s world and sit at his table resulted in a much larger work for the kingdom of God. This is what is possible when we learn the importance of being present at the table.

from engaging with your guests, then you’ve lost sight of the main goal. The goal, after all, is not to be enjoyed but to enjoy. Enjoy the people at your table. Enjoy their presence and their beating hearts and the stories they share. They are not puppets to praise you; they are urgent appointments with the heart of God. If your table is the destination for people, then the people who sit around it are a divine invitation. And you’ll miss that divine invitation if all your preparation doesn’t lead to you actually sitting down with them and participating in the fellowship of the table.

will see a therapist someday soon. But here’s why I hold on to this story: if being uninvited made me feel all those unlovely things back then, I want to consciously remember today what being invited can communicate to a soul.

Inviting others to the table ushers Jesus’ life and love into our homes. I think that’s why Jesus showed up to so many tables. It’s why Jesus invited himself to the table of a chief tax collector and the tax collector received him so joyfully. Sharing a meal at the table naturally leads to intimacy. Eating in front of someone is, by nature, a vulnerable act. When we create a space for people to open their mouths, they just might do something more than eat. They just might open their hearts too. In many ways, the fork is the most widely used and unrecognized microphone.

It’s undeniably difficult to hate or judge someone while you sit close and break bread together. It’s nearly impossible to eat a meal with someone and not acknowledge in them the image of our God. Maybe this is why Jesus kept showing up at tables?

RECIPE FOR THE TABLE EASY, DELICIOUS BOLOGNESE SAUCE WITH SWEET POTATO NOODLES Serves 4 to 5. I learned a long time ago that I’m more likely to invite people to my table if I have some easy and delicious recipes in my arsenal that I know turn out well every time. This recipe is one from my mom, and if I could, I would eat it every night. I have also been known to eat spoonfuls of this sauce before even serving it over noodles. It’s that good! Make plenty of this recipe to serve all your guests, and if you have leftovers, this tastes amazing the next day! Ingredients: 2 tablespoons olive oil ½ red onion, diced 1 pound ground beef, 80 percent lean 3 garlic cloves, minced 1 tablespoon dried oregano ¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper (optional) 1 ¼ cups dry red wine (or beef stock), divided 1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes 2 tablespoons tomato paste 1 tablespoon salt ½ teaspoon pepper ¼ cup heavy cream ½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese 1 sweet potato, peeled and spiralized (for sweet potato noodles) or 1 (16-ounce) package spaghetti Instructions: Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the ground beef, and cook, crumbling the meat with a spatula, for 5 to 7 minutes, until it begins to brown. Stir in the garlic, oregano, and crushed red pepper, and cook for 1 more minute. Pour 1 cup of the wine (or beef stock) into the skillet, stirring to scrape up any browned bits. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste,...

Identifying a strong and simple vision can help us funnel all our actions through our main goal. If what we’re thinking about doing doesn’t align with our vision, then we shouldn’t proceed. According to Laurie Beth Jones, author of The Path, a good vision should be 1. no more than a single sentence long 2. easily understood by a twelve-year-old 3. able to be recited by memory at gunpoint2

Our prayer at the table has now also become spectacularly simple: “Jesus, please bring people to our table so we can love them so extravagantly they’ll ask why.” Our table hasn’t looked the same since.

He is not calling us to rescue anyone; he is calling us to pull out a chair and sit amongst the broken. He is the Rescuer.

Hospitality translated from the Greek means “love of strangers.”

When we boast in God and not ourselves, the dirt of others does not repel us; it compels us.

May we be part of many little rehearsals before the grand marriage banquet.

I rarely encountered the poor, the lonely, or the hurting because I did not want them living in my well-to-do story.

My friend Edie often reminds her people of a quote from Pauline Phillips, journalist and creator of the Dear Abby column in 1956: “There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who walk into a room and say, ‘There you are’ and those who say, ‘Here I am.’”

But if I want to be intentional about telling the stories God is giving me when I come to the table, I must feel an urgency to open my eyes even to the routine of my daytime hours. As John Piper tells us, “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”1 God uses us in ways we are scarcely aware of, but we can show up more purposefully every morning and whisper to Jesus, “I want to be awake to the stories you are writing in my life today. I want to lean less into the random and more into the divinely orchestrated.”

Be gracious in your speech. The goal is to bring out the best in others in a conversation, not put them down, not cut them out. COLOSSIANS 4 : 6 THE MESSAGE

“Are we living our life in a way that God can use us as salt in a broken and parched land?”

Jeremy and I keep a small saltcellar on our table. It’s a visual reminder that just a little salt goes a long way. It’s a reminder that we are part of God’s plan to draw others to him, but we are not the be-all and end-all for the people at our table.

There is a new-to-us book Jeremy and I are now reading at our table. It’s called Surprise the World by Michael Frost. The subtitle actually had me hiding the book after Jeremy brought it home and recommended it as our new book for the table. The subtitle is The Five Habits of Highly Missional People.