All the Lenten Suppers are filled up! That’s 40 Old Firsters – more than 10% of whom are “newbies”– getting together over this season of preparation to share a meal together. Thanks to the 5 families who are hosting these meals in their homes. And also to everyone who will participate.
The Lenten Suppers give people the opportunity to get to know one another better and in new ways. It’s just different over the dinner table at someone’s home than in church on Sunday! There is also a reflection at the Lenten Suppers to help participants do at least a little bit of faith sharing.
Faith sharing – that’s sort of a mustard seed of power. I remember – when the United Church of Christ was undertaking its Still Speaking Campaign in the early 2000s – my friend, the Rev. Ron Buford, the marketing guru behind Still Speaking, told me: “If we can just get our people to identify and share their faith, like sparks flying out of a bonfire. Together they become something more like an electrical current, and will bring the whole denomination online.”
A lot of mixed metaphors there, but you get the message – how we have a resource to draw from if we just begin to tell one another our truest faith stories, even if they feel sort of partial and unfinished. (I sometimes think of the Gospels as just composites of people’s individual spiritual experiences of Jesus.) Such a practice of sharing our stories will enliven the whole community, and share God’s blessing farther, beyond our community too.
I often remember Ron’s hope. And I pair it with my pastoral experience that pretty much everyone who comes to church has had some, significant spiritual experience – that’s sort of the “how they are at church”… that experience which they may not be able to completely understand or even explain, but yet feel somehow alludes to the Divine.
In our tradition, we don’t regularly ask ourselves ‘to testify.’ But many of us long for more spiritual experiences than we have had (or recognized). And sharing is one of the ways we support one another: sharing our spiritual experiences with one another almost like a group of pilgrims sharing food for their long journey. I can draw sustenance from what you have experienced.
I am expecting as many conversations as our Lenten Suppers will engender will cause a marked strengthening in our faith community that we’ll feel before Easter.
Remember, beloved, no local church can be stronger than the complex interaction of its members’ individual “vertical” relationships with God and their ‘horizontal” relationships with one another. Not everyone at church knows everyone else, but the wider and thicker the network of our relationships goes and grows… it becomes like an electric grid through which the current of God’s presence travels.
This morning, I heard from one more person who had meant to sign up for a Lenten Supper. We squeezed him in. But if there are others, a “gathering-full of people,” who want to participate, Leo and I can add one more supper…
Of course, one doesn’t need a Lenten Supper to tell someone your spiritual story. We do it weekly at Prayer Group and Bible Study, even sometimes at the much less focused Lunch with the Pastor and the Companionship Groups. But you could simply tell someone that you want to tell them a story and share some spiritual experience you have had. The other person – and retelling it out loud – might help you better understand it and draw its strength from it.
See you in church,
Michael
