Friend of Sinners

It has been really good reading this book by Tim Chester as a team. We discuss it every other week at team meetings. Here's a summary of the book:

"Chester argues that meals are also deeply theological - an important part of Christian fellowship and mission. He observes that Luke's Gospel is full of stories of Jesus at meals. And these meals represent something bigger. In six chapters Tim shows how they enact grace, community, hope, mission, salvation and promise. Moving from New Testament times to today, the author applies biblical truth to challenge our contemporary understandings of hospitality. He urges sacrificial giving and loving around the table, helping readers consider how meals can be about serving others and sharing the grace of Christ."

This is taken from chapter 4 "Meals as Enacted Mission" Luke 14:

We’re called to follow Christ into a broken world. Simply writing a check keeps the poor at a distance. But Jesus was the friend of sinners. As we learned in chapter 2, to invite someone for a meal in Jesus’s time was an expression of identification. That’s why Jesus’s habit of eating with tax collectors and sinners was so scandalous. He was saying, “These are my sort of people.” Christine Pohl says:

Often we maintain significant boundaries when offering help to persons in need. Many churches prepare and serve meals to hungry neighbors, but few church members find it easy to sit and eat with those who need the meal. When people are very different from ourselves, we often find it more comfortable to cook and clean for them than to share in a meal and conversation. We are familiar with roles as helpers but are less certain about being equals eating together. Many of us struggle with simply being present with people in need; our helping roles give definition to the relationship but they also keep it decidedly hierarchical.1

We think we’re enacting grace if we provide for the poor. But we’re only halfway there. We’ve missed the social dynamics. What we communicate is that we’re able and you’re unable. “I can do something for you, but you can do nothing for me. I’m superior to you.” We cloak our superiority in compassion, but superiority cloaked in compassion is patronizing.

Think how different the dynamic is when we sit and eat with someone. We meet as equals. We share together. We affirm one another and enjoy one another. A woman once told me: “I know people do a lot to help me. But what I want is for someone to be my friend.” People don’t want to be projects. The poor need a welcome to replace their marginalization, inclusion to replace their exclusion, a place where they matter to replace their powerlessness. They need community. They need the Christian community.

If you tell someone he’s a sinner who needs God while you’re handing him a cup of soup, then he’ll hear you saying he’s a loser who should become like you. But when you eat together as friends and you tell him what a messed up person you are, then you can tell him about sin and grace. Jim Petersen writes: “I know of no more effective environment for initiating evangelism than a dinner at home or in a quiet restaurant.”

Consider Jesus. Yes, he adopted the attitude of slave when he washed the disciples’ feet. But think, too, how often he accepts service. He accepts hospitality from Levi (Luke 5). He lets the woman at Simon’s house wash his feet (Luke 7). He asks for water from the woman in Samaria ( John 4). He’s not just the helper of sinners, still less their project worker. He’s the friend of sinners, who came eating and drinking.

Philip Yancey begins his book What’s So Amazing about Grace? with the story of a prostitute in Chicago who is asked if she’d ever thought of going to a church for help. “Church!” she cries. “Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”

Prostitutes loved sharing a meal with Jesus (Luke 15:1–2). They avoid the church he founded like the plague. Something has gone wrong:

Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. 2

1. Pohl, C. D. Making Room

2. Keller, T. The Prodigal God