Culture of Authentic Fellowship: Replacing isolated convenience with deep community connection.

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

How reclaiming the dinner table counters the loneliness and hyper-convenience of modern American culture.

Friends sharing a festive dinner around a table in a warmly lit home counters loneliness and builds culture and community.

Reclaiming the dinner table offers a practical response to the loneliness and hyper-convenience of modern American culture because shared meals create regular opportunities for attention, gratitude, and belonging.

Nearly every Friday my wife and I gather for dinner with friends. We always go to the same restaurant and every week, without fail, they have our table waiting for us — even though they don’t actually take reservations.

I did not grow up in a household that ate dinner together. There were only my mother and me, and I think she was often too tired to prepare a shared meal. Over the years, however, I have grown to love the times when my family and friends gather around the table to share food, play games, and laugh. There is something both magical and healing about the experience.

Unfortunately, the data show that fewer and fewer families eat dinner together regularly. According to YouGov, only 29% of families report eating together every day. The reasons vary widely, but I think one of the most important is that many of us do not understand how important it is to sit down and eat together.

According to The Messy Bite Podcast, having a structured meal time for your family is incredibly important to raising healthy eaters and supporting long-term good mental health. While not an expert, my experience every Friday night confirms for me the importance of having a meal routine on mental health. I look forward to our time together and try to keep Friday evenings as free as possible.

Eating together is one of the most basic forms of community building and has been a staple of faith communities since time immemorial. In many Christian denominations, a central part of worship is Communion, or the Eucharist. The term comes from the Greek eucharisteō, meaning “to give thanks”. Theologically, there is much debate about what it means and what happens during the ritual, but what they all agree on is that the purpose of eucharist is to bring people together to give thanks to God.

Of course with church attendance dropping, fewer and fewer people are participating in this ritual. Perhaps because they don’t believe it worth their time, perhaps because they don’t believe in God, or perhaps because they don’t fully understand its meaning.

The communion table is first and foremost a banquet table, it is a table where people gather to sing, eat, drink, and most importantly be with each other. Although the ritual has become highly formalized, its communal meaning is still present. However, churches rarely explain that meaning, and I think this silence significantly affects both those who participate and those who do not.

I have met many people who approach communion with what appears to be reverent fear. They seem to know it is important, but not understand what it is all about and I find that to be a significant issue for two reasons. First, as a teacher I believe it is important that we understand things we choose to interact with, especially cultural practices. Second, I believe that by not fully understanding what they are participating in they are not able to reap the full benefits of it. This is, of course, no fault of their own. The church has often done a poor job of explaining its practices. In some cases, it has barely explained them at all.

When Jesus established the Eucharist at the Last Supper (see Mark 14:22–25, Matthew 26:26-28, Luke 22:19–20), he was not merely creating a way for his followers to remember him. He was establishing the heart of what it means to be a Christian: as followers of Jesus, we are all members of his body. This is a metaphorical way of saying that we are members of the church, a community that belongs to the Lord.

I can see your eyes glazing over—bear with me. Communion is a tool for building community. The purpose of the eucharist is not only to remember Jesus, but to bring people together, symbolically and physically, around a shared table. The bread and wine matter, but so does the act itself: sitting beside one another, receiving the same gifts, and recognizing that faith is not meant to be practiced in isolation.

That same truth is present in the ordinary meals we share at home. A family dinner may not look like communion, but it carries a similar invitation. We pause our separate routines, put down our phones, pass food around the table, and make room for one another. The meal gives us more than nourishment. It gives us time to listen, laugh, and notice who is struggling. Around the table, community is built through repeated, ordinary acts of presence.

This is what can get lost in a DoorDash culture. The convenience of having food delivered is not the problem. The problem comes when convenience replaces gathering altogether. We receive the meal, but miss the table. We satisfy our hunger, but lose the unplanned conversation, the shared laughter, and the simple reminder that our lives are connected.

Before the communion table became a place of formal worship, it was a banquet table, a place where people gathered to eat. That history matters. The communion table reminds us that nourishment is both physical and relational. We need food, but we also need one another. Reclaiming shared meals, whether around a family table, with friends at a restaurant, or within a church community, is one small way to resist the isolation of modern life. It is hospitality in its most ordinary form: making room, sharing what we have, and staying long enough to become a community.

The purpose of the Eucharist is not only to remember Jesus, but to bring people together, symbolically and physically, around a shared table. The bread and wine matter, but so does the act itself: sitting beside one another, receiving the same gifts, and recognizing that faith is not meant to be practiced in isolation.

That same communal truth extends beyond the church: ordinary meals can also interrupt our separate routines and give us a physical practice of belonging. A family dinner may not look like communion, but it carries a similar invitation. We pause our separate routines, put down our phones, pass food around the table, and make room for one another. The meal gives us more than nourishment. It gives us time to listen, to laugh, to notice who is struggling, and to remember that we belong to something larger than ourselves.

Before the communion table became a place of formal worship, it was a banquet table, a place where people gathered to eat. Perhaps that is why shared meals still have the power to restore something in us. They turn strangers into companions, families into communities, and a collection of individuals into a people.

Reclaiming shared meals does not require a perfect family, an elaborate recipe, or a spotless dining room. It may begin with inviting a friend to dinner, keeping one evening free each week, or simply lingering at the table a little longer. These ordinary choices resist the isolation of modern life. They remind us that hospitality is not mainly about what we serve. It is about making room, sharing what we have, and staying long enough to become a community.

For more thoughts on community check out Sheep form Community, so should we and Finding peace through Community and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus, Faith and Fear: The Triumph of trust

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Lessons from Jesus Walking on Water

Jesus walking on water Matthew 14:22-23

Could Jesus walk on water? Probably. But if that is where our fascination with this story begins and ends, we have missed the point of the narrative entirely.

The story of Jesus walking on water, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, is one of the most famous passages in the New Testament. Yet, it is also one of the most thoroughly misunderstood. For centuries, modern readers have treated this account as a display of divine gymnastics, a spectacle designed to prove that Jesus possesses supernatural powers that defy physics. 

The problem with this framing is that the language Matthew originally used loses a tremendous amount of nuance in English translation.

First, consider how the voyage begins. Matthew notes that Jesus ordered the disciples into the boat. It was not a casual suggestion or a polite request; it was an imperative command. Jesus intentionally sent His closest followers directly into the dark, toward a journey He knew would prove perilous.

Second, consider the storm itself. Most English translations say that as night fell, the disciples’ boat was “battered by the waves.” That phrasing paints a picture of bad weather. But “battered” falls far short of Matthew’s actual intent. The Greek word Matthew chooses here is basanizomenon (Bah-sah-nee-ZOM-eh-non) It is the same word used elsewhere in the Gospels to describe torment, agony, severe distress, and demonic affliction. So Matthew was not writing a weather report. He was using language that denoted a deep, spiritual, and psychological anguish. This was an internal storm, a chaos so violent and overwhelming that no human skill or rowing technique could control it.

When we read the text through this original lens, the passage transforms from a story about physical buoyancy into a commentary on the human condition and the power of God to meet us in our internal hells. The moment Jesus climbs into the boat alongside Peter, the torment ends. It is at that exact moment, not when Jesus is hovering above the water, but when He enters their shared space of terror, that the disciples declare for the very first time in Matthew’s Gospel: “Truly you are the Son of God.”

So, if this story is ultimately about the reader’s internal and spiritual life, why does Matthew bother including such dramatic elements as walking on water?

The likely answer is that Matthew knew his audience. Human beings need something tangible to grasp intangible spiritual truths. Concrete imagery gives our minds an anchor. Unfortunately, over centuries of translation and institutional repetition, we have clung tightly to the physical anchor, the water walking, while completely abandoning the profound internal reality it was meant to illustrate. We inevitably focus our attention on the wrong message.

Matthew is attempting to do something far more radical with his Gospel than merely hand us a warm, sentimental reassurance. He is showing us what happens when our fear becomes more real to us than our faith; when the internal struggle grows so deafeningly loud that we can no longer see the help standing directly in front of us.

The point is not simply that Jesus can stride across a body of water without sinking. The point is that God actively enters the storm, stretches a hand toward those who are drowning in terror, and invites them to trust that they do not have to overcome the agony alone.

Notice what happens next in Matthew’s account. Peter does not remain safely inside the wooden walls of the boat. He sees Jesus walking through the dark, and instead of staying put, he steps over the edge directly into the raging water.

Peter’s faith is far from perfect. Almost immediately, he panics, loses his focus, and begins to sink into the deep. But his failure does not render his attempt meaningless. In his panic, he reaches his hand into the dark for help, and Jesus instantly reaches back to grab him. The Gospel presents Peter as an ordinary, terrified human being who was nevertheless willing to move toward God while still afraid.

That is precisely what faith asks of us today. Faith does not demand that we sit back and wait for God to erase war, eradicate poverty, or heal every broken body. It asks that we refuse to accept these horrors as inevitable.

We may not possess the power to calm every storm on the planet, but we possess the power to decide whether we will leave our fellow human beings to face those storms alone. We can feed a person who is hungry, shield someone who is vulnerable, challenge systems that cause suffering, and extend our hands when another human being begins to sink beneath the weight of life.

Maybe God does not enter the physical world by bending natural laws from on high. Maybe God enters the world through human beings who refuse to look away from suffering. The miracle is not always that the wind stops blowing. Sometimes, the true miracle is that, in the middle of the tempest, human beings become willing to reach for one another.

This brings us back to the ultimate declaration made by the disciples: “Truly, this is the Son of God.”

They did not make this confession simply because Jesus performed a miraculous stunt on the water. They declared it after witnessing Jesus meet their absolute terror with personal compassion, climbing into their battered vessel rather than abandoning them to the deep. They recognized something far more profound than raw physical power. They recognized a God who refuses to remain distant from human suffering.

The story of the storm does not promise that every trial will disappear the moment we ask God to make it stop. Instead, it tells us that God is deeply present in the struggle, that rescue often comes in forms we never expected, and that true faith will inevitably require us to step outside the safety of our boats. When we reach toward those who are drowning and refuse to abandon one another to despair, we finally begin to understand what those weary disciples realized in the dark so long ago: Truly, God is in this place.

Embracing Differences: Lessons from the Weeds and Wheat

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

In today’s parable, the Master indicates that the weeds should be allowed to grow with the wheat because if the weeds are removed, then the wheat may be damaged. At face value, it appears that this parable is about the end times when the angels will separate the believers from the non-believers, but I caution us from jumping to that conclusion. I caution us about assuming that there is such a thing as those that are in and those that are out, and I do so because binary thinking is not only dangerous, but it is usually wrong. It is natural for us to want to have clarity, and on the surface this parable provides that: the people who follow the rules, the wheat, will enter the Kingdom and the people who don’t, the weeds, will not. The slaves, who represent us, want to hurry up and get rid of the weeds—the people that do not fit our vision of who belongs.  

The difficult truth is that we live in a world consumed by this exact kind of weeding. Our current landscape is defined by deep, exhausting partisan divisions and international standoffs. Whether it is political polarization here at home where we view the “other side” not just as neighbors with different ideas, but as enemies, or global conflicts flashing on our screens, the secular world is constantly demanding that we sort humanity into binary columns. We are told to pull up the weeds, to cancel, to exclude, and to isolate. We want the field clean, and we want it done now.

But when we do this, we miss the whole context of the world Jesus was talking to. In ancient Jewish teaching, a parable like this was called a mashal, basically an extended metaphor or story used to make a comparison. And Jesus follows it with a nimshal, which is just the explanation of the story. You see this structure all the time in rabbinic commentaries, where stories of kings planting orchards are used to show God building up or pulling up people based on whether they follow his will.

But Jesus puts a much more urgent spin on his explanation. He says that at the end of the age, the angels will collect the “evildoers” and throw them into the furnace. Now, in English, “evildoers” sounds like a word for the absolute worst villains of history. But the actual Greek phrase Matthew uses, poioūntas tēn anomīan (poy-OON-dahss teen ah-noh-mee-ahn) takes the word for the Law, the Torah, and puts a negative on the front of it. It literally means living against the Law 

And what is the Law according to Jesus? He tells us later in this same Gospel: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.

So, if you look at it that way, the weeds aren’t people who hold the wrong opinions or fail our social litmus tests. The weeds are simply those who live against the law of radical love. The wheat, the righteous, are the ones actually enacting that love.

God has been lovingly tolerating humanity far longer than we ever will and it is not our job to decide who belongs; our job is to love each other like Jesus did. The hardest part of this whole situation is that we do not naturally love each other, mostly we just tolerate each other and try our best not to exclude the people that annoy us the most. So on one hand we know it is so much easier to just do what feels right in the moment, to just take care of ourselves and the people who are closest to us; but on the other hand our entire faith tradition says that we are supposed to do the complete opposite; we are supposed to give aid and comfort to everyone, no matter what; we are supposed to include everyone, no matter what; we are supposed to love everyone, no matter what.  

Earlier I cautioned us about binary thinking because it can lead to misinterpretation and inaccurate assumptions. The reason the master, who is God, said to leave the weeds is because he knew that some of those weeds might actually turn out to be wheat. There are many plants in my garden that I mistake, every year, but I leave them because I suspect that they might be flowers and when they do flower, I am grateful that I left them. It is also worth mentioning that a weed is only a plant growing in a location you do not want it to be in. It is very possible to cultivate a weed into a beautiful thing, but it takes time and that is what God in their infinite patience knows.

The process of becoming people of love takes time, and if we kick people to the side too soon, if we write off entire groups of people because of the political signs in their yard or the country they reside in, then they will not have the chance to grow into the people God intends them to be, and if in the end they don’t “make it”, that is between God and them.

Now, focusing on doing God’s will and loving people doesn’t mean we are earning our way into heaven by our own merits. This isn’t about “works righteousness” meaning doing morally correct things. Think of it like a mechanic who fixes up a broken-down car. Once the car is fixed and saved from its old state, the owner is expected to actually start driving it to get somewhere. If you just refuse to drive it, you completely ignore and undermine all the hard work the mechanic just did. It’s the same thing here. Jesus saves us from our sins so that we are freed up to actually do good works and live out that righteousness. Refusing to love, refusing to do those good works, basically cancels out the whole purpose of what Christ did on the cross. The parable is showing us what it looks like when saved believers actually live out that righteousness.

So, the only weeding or dividing, we can, or even should do, is within ourselves. We need to look deep into our souls and weed out those traits of our character; our tribalism, our judgments, our self-righteousness, that inhibit our ability to love like God. Daniel Berrigan, who was a Jesuit priest, once said, “If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.” Let me repeat that, “If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.”  

The message of Jesus was radical. It was radical two thousand years ago and it is radical today because it is contrary to human nature and that is the point. Jesus was nailed to a piece of wood because he told people to love each other and that idea was so radical, so contrary to the way his society thought, that they killed him. You see, Jesus was killed because people thought he did not belong, they thought he was the weed. Whether we are a weed or wheat does not matter because we are all children of God and we are all loved wholly and equally, even though we are really bad at loving other people.  

Jesus was willing to die for his radical message of love; he was willing to look good on the wood, are we ready for that? Are we ready to love so deeply, across ideological and political divides, that we will face discomfort or even social “death” for that love? My guess is no, and in the end, what matters is that we try to love each other, and when we fall short, not if, but when, we work even harder to make sure that we don’t fall short again.