One Table, Many Breads: Who Is Missing from the Table?

By Jon Singletary

World Communion Sunday began in 1933 at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh at the depth of the Great Depression. Breadlines stretched down city blocks, fascism was rising in Europe, and the world was beginning to come apart. It was born in a fractured and hungry time, as a way of saying that Christ’s table is bigger than any one church, any one nation, any one people.

We live in a fractured time too. Food assistance is cut while grocery prices climb. Refugees and immigrants are treated as threats rather than neighbors. Our communities sort themselves into camps. So it seems right, on this Sunday, to ask what it means to be one people at one table. And to ask a harder question alongside it: who is missing from the table, and who has been left to go hungry?

A Refugee's Feast

Isak Dinesen's short story "Babette's Feast," made into an Academy Award-winning Danish film in 1987, begins with two pious sisters who lead the small congregation their late father founded in a poor, isolated coastal village. Pleasure is suspect. Food is plain. Over the years the congregation has grown brittle. People who have worshiped together for decades can barely stand one another.

One stormy night a stranger arrives at the sisters' door. Babette is a refugee, fleeing political violence in Paris, carrying nothing but a letter of introduction. The sisters take her in, and for fourteen years she cooks and cleans for them, unrecognized and unseen. Then she wins the French lottery and asks one thing: to cook a real French dinner for the hundredth anniversary of the pastor's birth.

The congregation panics at the extravagance and makes a pact. They will eat the meal, but they will not enjoy it. Yet course by course, hard faces soften. Old wrongs are forgiven. By night's end the whole congregation is under the stars, holding hands around the village well, singing. Only afterward do they learn that Babette had been one of the finest chefs in Paris, and that she spent every franc she had on them.

It is worth noticing who saves this little church. Not its leaders. The refugee they had taken in out of charity, whose gifts they never thought to ask about. The stranger at the door turned out to be the one who could set the table.

The Table in Corinth

Paul's first letter to the Corinthians was written to a congregation as divided as that village. "I hear that there are divisions among you," he says (11:18). And the place those divisions showed up most painfully was the Lord's Supper.

In the early church, communion was a real meal shared in someone's home. In Corinth, those with wealth and leisure arrived early and ate their fill. Those who came later, the day laborers, the enslaved, the poor, arrived to find the food gone. "One goes hungry and another becomes drunk," Paul writes (11:21). The table meant to make them one had become the place where the economic order of the city was reenacted in the church.

Paul does not treat this as a matter of etiquette. He calls it contempt. "Do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?" (11:22). Then he gives them the words we still say at the table: "The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread." The words of institution, so familiar to us, were first spoken as a rebuke to a church that let the poor go hungry while the comfortable feasted. His instruction is simple and costly: "When you come together to eat, wait for one another" (11:33).

A Body That Honors the Least

Paul then turns to the body. "For just as the body is one and has many members... so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free" (12:12-13). This is not sameness. "If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?" (12:17).

But Paul goes further than celebrating diversity. He reorders the body's honor. "The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable," he writes, and God has arranged the body "giving the greater honor to the inferior member" (12:22, 24). The ones the world treats as least are the ones the body cannot live without. And then: "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it" (12:26).

This is where unity and justice meet. The unity Paul describes is not a polite agreement to overlook differences of power. It is a unity that requires those at the head of the table to change how they eat. Unity without justice is only uniformity in disguise.

Then comes "a still more excellent way" (12:31). We read chapter 13 at weddings, but Paul wrote it to a church divided by class. Love waits for the ones who come late from work.

The Table We Are Called to Set

Babette's feast did not ask the villagers to agree, pass a test, or settle their theology. It fed them, generously, all of them together. That is grace. But the Corinthian table reminds us that grace has a shape. A table where some feast and others go hungry is not the Lord's table, however correct its words.

So, on this World Communion Sunday, every congregation might ask itself some honest questions. Who arrives at our table late, because they were working a second shift or caring for a child? Who among us has been serving faithfully for years, like Babette, without ever being asked what gifts they carry? And who is not at the table at all, because our policies, our neighborhoods, or our fears have kept them away?

The answers will take us beyond the sanctuary. They will take us to food banks and city councils, to immigration courts and school boards, to the long work of making sure the bread of the world is shared as freely as the bread of the table.

We do not come to the table because we are the same. We come because we are loved. We do not come because we have settled every question. We come because we are invited. And we do not leave the table to go back to business as usual. We leave to set a wider one.

One table. Many breads. One body. And no one left hungry.

Jon E. Singletary, PhD, MSW, MDiv, serves as professor of the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work at Baylor University. He is a nationally recognized Enneagram teacher and consultant and focuses this work on leadership development and relationship building. His research and teaching have centered on educational leadership as well as on congregations and religious organizations. He is the author of Leadership by the Number: Using the Enneagram to Strengthen Educational Leadership.