Feast of the Kingdom
Jesus said, when you have a dinner or a banquet, don’t invite your friends and rich neighbors who can repay you in kind. Rather, when we throw a feast, we should invite “the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind,” and we will be “blessed.”
In the 1990’s when I was pastor at Broadway Baptist Church, Ft. Worth, Texas, we began a weekly meal with and for the homeless community. We called it our “Agape Meal.” It is still going strong sixteen years after I left. For twenty years now, a hundred to two hundred homeless friends have come every Thursday for a meal, worship and communion. Every week has felt like a banquet of the kingdom of God.
Broadway Baptist Church is a center-city church. They have provided social ministries to the homeless and poor for years, including a clothes ministry, daily sack lunches and often the presence of a social worker.
Inspired by the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., we decided to offer the meal. We would provide a delicious dinner (with identifiable meats), with tablecloths, cut flowers and nice dinnerware. We served the meals family-style, our members sitting with our homeless guests. Friendships were formed around these tables. A regular guest told me one night: “We know the food will be good because you sit down and eat it with us.” Claudine Marion, our Minister of Hospitality and the Arts, had a spiritual genius for organizing the meals and helping people feel the welcome of Christ. More than a few told me that the hour or so at the meal was the safest they felt all week. They could relax and breathe freely. One young woman – she looked to be a teenager – was so touched by the tender love of the congregation, that after the one meal she attended, she called her mother and said, “Mom, I’m coming home.”
We began each meal with a welcome followed by bread being passed around each table. As each person passed the bread to the one next to them, they said, “God wants you to have this bread.” Then we would say the Lord’s Prayer and begin the meal. One night, as time for the Lord’s Prayer came near, a man said to his friend whom he had brought, “Here it comes!” We take for granted what it means to pray the Lord’s Prayer in community.
After the meal, we held a 30-minute worship service. About half of our guests usually stayed. One regular guest said to me about the non-requirement of worship: “Thanks for giving us our freedom of religion!”
During the worship, we had song, scripture, intercessory prayer and a short sermon. During the intercessory prayer, people were invited to voice their prayer concerns. One of the regulars was a man name “Tree.” He was a mountain of a man with a bushy black beard and a red bandana on his head and a voice that sounded like a tree splitting down the middle. When he stood to pray, he called God “the Head Dude.” During that time of prayer, we learned intimately the travails, the joys and sorrows of our homeless neighbors — a guilt-ridden Vietnam vet, a woman having trouble maintaining her meds for schizophrenia. Our prayer together was a holy time.
After worship, we invited any who wished to adjourn to the chapel next door for communion. Usually ten or twenty came to share the Lord’s Table. Some would begin crying as they entered the room. It had been so long since they had taken communion. When you lose your home, you lose your church and its sacraments, too. One night after communion, a man thanked me, and I breezily said something about how good the food was. He corrected me: “That’s not why I come,” he said, then pointed to the Lord’s Table. “This is why I come.”
One night, a transsexual woman came forward to communion. She had “graduated” slowly from the meal alone, to staying for worship, and now here she was taking communion. As she took the bread and cup, she said to me: “All my life, I’ve been told this was the last place in the world that would accept me, but here I feel the most welcome I’ve ever felt.”
Over the years, we’ve had baptisms, weddings and baby dedications. One Thursday, just before Christmas, we held our annual Christmas dinner for our guests. “Tree” came in, red bandana and black bushy beard, looking like some bizarre Santa, hauling a big black plastic bag filled with mistletoe which he had gathered. We placed some on each table. The party was on!
In I Corinthians, Paul invited all worshippers to bring some spiritual gift to the church in worship. Our homeless friends would bring their gifts: a song, a prayer, some word God had placed on their hearts. One man, an excellent pianist, would play as we assembled. It was his only chance to play. In one service, a young Hispanic man came forward and crooned his love song to God in Spanish. “Senor,” Lord, was the only word I knew, but we all felt the meaning of his song.
One of our homeless guests, Mary, has become a regular and beloved member of the congregation. The first year she came for the meal, she scarcely said a word or made eye contact with anyone. But she gradually felt more safe and free to talk and develop friends. On my last Sunday at Broadway, at the going-away party, she stood and spoke to the whole congregation.
Jesus said people will come from north and south, east and west and sit at table in the kingdom of God. Every Thursday afternoon – I can see them now — they come streaming from north and south, east and west to the meal. Every week felt like a drawing near of the Kingdom, and, as Jesus promised, we have been “blessed.”
Published in Christian Century, 2017