COMMUNION MEDITATION: The family meal …

Individuals are very habitual, but families can be, too.

If there’s one habit or practice a family should make sure it observes, it’s eating dinner together. That single practice can be a key time of connecting all of the family members together, something highlighted in a Time magazine article in 2006:

There is something about a shared meal — not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably — that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm.

“If it were just about food, we would squirt it into their mouths with a tube,” says Robin Fox, an anthropologist who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey, about the mysterious way that family dinner engraves our souls. “A meal is about civilizing children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture.”

Unfortunately, even families who gather for a meal only eat together — about 25 percent of families that do sit down to eat together have the TV on, about half say they are pestered by phone calls, and 15 percent say texting or emailing on a cell phone can mess up the meal time.

Nevertheless, there’s something special about time spent around the family table.

The same is true for the church — the family of God — as it gathers around the Lord’s Table and together partakes of a “meal” that binds us together in a unique way. We’re reminded that we’ve all sinned (Rom. 3:23) but we are now united in a Savior who offered up His body to be broken, and shed His blood so that we might be saved from our sins. That great sacrifice is our means of being reconciled to God:

“And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them …” 2 Corinthians 5:18-19a.

“For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ,” 2 Corinthians 5:21.

That sacrifice, that reconciliation, has resulted in our being adopted into God’s family:

“God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure,” Ephesians 1:5.

So as we gather on Sunday, or any other time, to observe Communion, we come as brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s family around a table, bound together in a bond of love for God and one another, to remember together the redeeming sacrifice of our Savior. It’s a priceless tradition that strengthens our faith and a practice we as the family of God must cherish as our “family meal” together.

Scotty