From Tablet to Table Quotes

“At the table, where food and stories are passed from one person to another and one generation to another, is where each of us learns who we are, where we come from, what we can be, to whom we belong, and to what we are called.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving. Martin Luther was right. Theology is table talk.[38] Jesus didn’t sell the food of his Father. He issued invitations to the table. In fact, Jesus’ favorite image for the kingdom of God is a banquet where everyone is sitting around a table.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Scholar George Myerson has recently written a study of happiness. After 250 pages tracking moments of joy throughout history, he concludes that humans are happiest hanging with friends, gathered around tables with good food and conversation and laughter. If you can get that table out of doors, so the sun can kiss the skin—if as you dine together you can also provide help for others—then, according to Myerson, you’ve won the lottery of life.[36]”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“To come to the table is to learn to be our real selves—not some construct conceived by someone else, but who God made us to be.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“For Jesus the home is not what defines the table; the table is what defines the home.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Have your breakfasts all alone. Share lunch with your best friends. Invite your enemy to dinner. Nelson Mandela”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Someone once challenged me: “I bet I can tell you the whole Old Testament and New Testament in six sentences—three for each.” “You’re on!” I said. He started with the Old Testament: “‘They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!’” My friend went on. “Now here’s the New Testament in three sentences: ‘I love you! I forgive you! Let’s eat!’” Jean Leclerc offers the best definition of the gospel you’ll ever hear: “Jesus ate good food with bad people.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“If we were to make the table the most sacred object of furniture in every home, in every church, in every community, our faith would quickly regain its power, and our world would quickly become a better place. The table is the place where identity is born—the place where the story of our lives is retold, re-minded, and relived.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“The greatest blessing you will ever bestow in your life you may never know. And you don’t need to know. We don’t have to do spectacular things. We just have to keep doing what God has called us to do. In a very real sense, that boils down to bringing people to the table, and trusting God to… bring in a harvest decades or generations later.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“The meal is the message. The gospel is an invitation to go to Jesus’ house for a meal. The life we live is the journey to that banquet….”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“It is more important that our churches have tables that are relationally correct than liturgically correct. Rules aren’t “truth”; we don’t follow out of slavish obedience to something absolute. We follow preestablished rules because we want to signal our love of community….”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“You never get a blessing for yourself. You get a blessing to bless others. In the words of the black church, “a blessing can’t get to you unless it first can go through you.” We are blessed to bless.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Jesus didn’t care about a “holy table” as the religious establishment defined “holy.” For Jesus a holy table was one that was open to anyone, a table where all God’s children were present.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“More recently, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird faced each other on the basketball court as arch-competitors—first in high school, continuing through college, and culminating in the NBA, with Johnson playing for the LA Lakers and Bird playing for the Boston Celtics. The rivalry of these two champions became legendary—as did their dislike for one another, which seemed to grow in intensity with every passing year. Somewhere along the way Converse paid each of them to shoot a shoe commercial; they faced each other on the court, Bird wearing white shoes, Johnson wearing black. Bird insisted that they film the commercial at his farm in Indiana. The shoot began icily, with both superstars circling each other, but when they broke for lunch and started to go their separate ways, Bird’s mother announced that she had made lunch and invited everyone to the table. In Larry Bird’s words, “It was at the table that I discovered Earvin Johnson. I never liked Magic Johnson very much. But Earvin I like, a lot. And Earvin didn’t come out until I met him at Mom’s table.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Got some conflicted relationships—people who have attacked you and hurt you, whose very presence causes gruff intestinal rumble? The table reduces fighting. It has been proven that one of the secrets to a successful marriage and loving family is to eat before you argue. Blood sugar levels correlate with irritability and annoyance; low glucose levels escalate tensions and heighten tempers.[70] The same goes for the body of Christ. The secret of a loving, forgiving church is to commune before you argue. In feeding you, I forgive you.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Adam means “human.” Eve means “life.” A human needs another for “life” to come alive and become living. Identity can’t grow ferally, only communally. We were meant to eat together, not solo. Eve’s solitary eating is what got her in trouble.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“The main thing that distinguishes mealtimes with Jesus, as Conrad Gempf has shown, from the meals of his contemporaries are four verbs.[44] Whether it’s the feeding of the five thousand, the Last Supper, or the Emmaus meal, four things take place: First, Jesus takes something. Second, Jesus blesses what he takes. Third, Jesus breaks what he has blessed. Fourth, Jesus gives away what he has broken, to be a miracle in the lives of others. First, Jesus takes something. It doesn’t matter what it is. No matter how meager or damaged or out-of-touch it is, it comes to life at the touch of God. Second, Jesus blesses what he takes. You never get a blessing for yourself. You get a blessing to bless others. In the words of the black church, “a blessing can’t get to you unless it first can go through you.” We are blessed to bless. Third, Jesus breaks what he has blessed. The word company derives from Latin words cum and pane, meaning “breaking bread together.” Companion means “the one who brings the bread along,” a community of broken people breaking bread together.[45] Every day I make plans to live forever, but bless everyone I meet that day as having one broken thing in common: the life we soon must lose. Fourth, Jesus gives away what is broken. For Jesus it is not enough to be creative and witty and wise in oneself. Are you the cause of creativity and wit and wisdom in others? Just as we are blessed as we bless, we are fed as we feed. At the table we feed others the Bread of Life to be fed the Bread of Life. The more we give, the more we receive. Of course, these four verbs become one in Jesus himself, who is the Bread, blessed, broken, and bestowed. Some of Jesus’ followers thought he came to give bread to them like manna in the desert. The truth was Jesus came to be bread for them—and for us.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“IF A PROBLEM PERSISTS for generations, it is no longer a crisis. It’s a condition. The identity crisis facing our faith, our families, and our world has prevailed so long it is now a condition—a condition of shadows and storms, yielding a world of confusion and conflict, unruly souls, and unraveling societies. As both consequence and contributing factor, eating has become not so much a God-designed daily routine of identity formation as a function, a procedure to ingest the energy we need to keep going, or a therapy of comfort foods to alleviate our anxieties.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“Professional storytellers tell of getting an audience in a “story trance”; people so come under the spell of a story that they start breathing together, nodding their heads in unison, gasping in unison, smiling in unison, moving eyes in unison. It’s almost as if they are reenacting the story in real time. Could this be what it means to “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5)? By the telling and retelling of the Jesus story, God syncs our mind with Christ.”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“How many Nicodemites are there in every corner of Christianity whose versitis has caused them to be more committed to words than to the Word Made Flesh? How many have made a religion of words and lost sight of God’s Image-Made-Story?”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“The first word God speaks to human beings in the Bible—God’s very first commandment—is “Eat freely” (Genesis 2:16, NASB). The last words out of God’s mouth in the Bible—his final command? “Drink freely” (see Revelation 22:17).”
― Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed