Meditation: Altar or Table?
Hebrews 9:12
. . . he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption.
He was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and brake it;
and what that word did make it
I do believe and take it.
This simple sixteenth-century poem sums up the trust each of us has as we prepare to receive the Lord’s Supper. We believe and we receive. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But we know the controversies regarding this sacrament have made it anything but simple. What the church optimistically named the sacrament of unity has often proved to be an occasion of disunity, setting off great arguments among Christians over the status and make-up of its ordinary elements. How can a modest piece of bread be the body of Christ? What is the best way to receive the wine? Must there be wine?
These divisions have even extended to the piece of furniture on which the elements are placed. What is it? Is it an altar or a table? And does it matter? Or is it like the controversy raging throughout Great Britain these days: not over Brexit—but tea. Does one first pour milk in the cup and then add the tea, or tea first and then the milk? Each has its advocates. More seriously, when the people of God eat their sacred meal, do they gather around a slaughter-stone or a kitchen table? Does the symbolism matter?
A congregation I served had just begun to plan for a new sanctuary when it was forced to deal with this very question. The Methodist architect put it to us: tell me about your theology of the sacrament. What’ll it be: an altar or a table? At the end of many earnest meetings and months of study, we made our weasel-worded reply. Make it a table, but a very substantial one.
Our instincts told us that there is something big and powerful looming behind the table, but we were unwilling to name it or let it go. What’s behind the table? As an experiment, perhaps when you are sitting at table, ask a child this question: "Where does that slice of bread on your sandwich come from?"
"From this package."
"No, where, really?"
"Well, from the Kroger, I guess."
"No, silly, I mean where does it come from?"
When pressed, the child will admit that she thinks the bread comes from a truck. If you probe any deeper, you come to what archeologists modestly term "the inaccessibility of origins." And what is true of bread is also true of electricity, hamburgers, lunch money, good books, and iPods. Things just are. We are given our world.
To see how removed we are from the origins of things, wander through the streets of a Guatemalan village until, toward dusk, you hear the sound of an unearthly scream. A child in pain? A dog in heat? A murder in progress? Well, sort of. On the back stoop of a modest house a woman is calmly wringing a chicken’s neck. It’s suppertime. She is preparing a meal which from its source in the back yard will be table-ready in a matter of hours. Compare her grandchildren who are standing in the doorway nonchalantly watching the slaughter with our grandchildren who think that chicken comes from a kindly man with a white goatee, and one arrives at a truth about our culture.
Our culture shields us from origins, for often at the source of a commodity there is profound misery. Adults know this, children do not. So, children ask innocently, “Why do some Native Americans live on reservations?” “Why is Japan our special friend?” “Why are poor people poor?” “What are reparations?” Does one appreciate the product more if one understands the toil and pain that lay behind it? Would we enjoy our barbeque or fried chicken more if we could see the life of the hog or chicken in a North Carolina factory farm, to say nothing of the workers there? You can stroll into your favorite department store and buy a genuine suede jacket for $37. When you get it home you will notice it was made in Bangladesh, which is to say, somebody practically died to make your jacket. You are not alone if you would rather not think about it.
Most churches are shying away from the altar as a monolithic place of sacrifice in favor of a table.
At table there is harmony, unity, and good etiquette. The only sounds are those of ordinary conversation and the clink of sterling on china, or at least plastic on Styrofoam.
At the altar there is the braying and screeching of beasts being slaughtered. It’s not conversation one hears, but a cry of dereliction. "My God, my God. . . ."
At table there is the coziness of family relationships. One belongs at the table. Only for the most heinous of crimes is the child sent from the family table. There, at table the child has direct access to the parent.
At the altar is the alien and austere presence of the priest, the intermediary, who is neither father nor friend. One approaches the altar as one treads on holy ground, with fear and trembling.
At table there is bread, wine, and hospitality.
At the altar, there is body, blood, carnage and death.
Maybe you, like me, grew up at a good table. Okay, it was aluminum with a Formica top, well, fake Formica, but the people at the table were good. There was always a pot roast with carrots and potatoes or, to appease some ancestral god, German sauerkraut and spareribs, but the food was hot, and you could be yourself at the table and belong to something bigger than yourself at the same time. You could put up with comments like "Get your elbows off the table," because you were allowed to be at the table.
But if you’re like the kid I was, maybe you didn’t appreciate all that made that table possible: a woman was holding down a low-paying job and doing her chores late into the night. A man was working one job Monday to Friday and another more hateful job on Saturdays. Together they were spending their savings on medical care for parents and on the distant hope of a college education for their kid. If we fought, we tried not to do it at the table. It’s a place of such intimacy that it almost invites betrayals. Who is the one who betrays me? “It’s the one to whom I give this bread after I have dipped it into the dish we’ve been sharing. ‘Take, eat.’”
The early Christians were sometimes accused of having no altar because they had done away with animal sacrifice. They were Table-people. They were accused of being atheists. Later in the letter, the writer of Hebrews asserts defiantly, “We have an altar from which those who serve in the Tabernacle have no right to eat." We have an altar. We consider Christ’s entire act of self-sacrifice to be our altar. It’s his cross, as stark and ugly and public as it can be, that makes our little table possible. So, maybe we don’t have the ideal dinner hour or the perfect family to enjoy it. Who does? But because of Jesus’s sacrifice we do have a family in which we can be ourselves and belong to something greater than ourselves.
Last month the university where I teach sponsored a discussion of the most divisive issue on campus—race. A few people, including the university president, gathered around a table that looked for all the world like my old table—aluminum, Formica—on a set that reproduced an old-timey kitchen. It wasn’t just a feel-good session, however, because everyone agreed that a lot of suffering had gone into making that table possible. We remembered the pioneering black students who despite their official acceptance faced exclusion every day. We remembered how Dr. King claimed to see white people and black people seated at the “table of brotherhood,” which was only possible because of the blood and suffering of many. We can break bread today because behind our table looms the outline of something more substantial. As Maya Angelou says, "You have been paid for at a distant place."
And yet for all its horror and carnage, the altar can be a place of refuge. For it symbolizes the method of God’s own sacrifice. "For when Christ came as a high priest . . . he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption." In the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a group of Allied soldiers is captured and herded into a defunct meatpacking plant near Dresden. It’s a slaughterhouse in which they will be incarcerated. How the prisoners hate the dank basement of that place! But when the firebombing of Dresden begins, the slaughterhouse no longer seems cold and inhospitable. Slaughterhouse No. 5 becomes a place of refuge.
On Maundy Thursday while sitting at table, Jesus considered himself a dead man and spoke of a body broken, blood poured out, and other subjects not usually spoken of at table. Clearly, the slaughter-stone was on his mind. He said, in effect, “This meal will not be free. All the forgiveness and love in this little room is going to cost Somebody something terrible.”
Then, with his typical generosity, he snapped his fingers and said, “Check, please.”