Tables That Link Past Faith to Future Hope
Apr 02, 2026I grew up in a family with deep and meaningful table traditions. We gathered for civic holidays, church celebrations, anniversaries, and sometimes birthdays. It felt like we were always cooking and always eating!
All but two of my mother’s seven siblings lived in our small town, so you can imagine the scene—cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends, and church members gathered everywhere: around the dining room table, at the kitchen bar, on couches, across the floor, upstairs and downstairs, and sometimes lingering outside. It was an ever-growing, extended table of people connected in one way or another.
We passed stories, played games, opened gifts, wept, prayed, and practiced a kind of consecrated, extended fellowship. I experienced it as something glorious. I felt deeply connected—to a people, a history, and a faith.
I know this is not everyone’s story. But when you grow up with table fellowship woven into your life—or, like Jesus of Nazareth, you are formed by traditions of shared meals and sacred festivals—those practices stay with you. They settle deep in your bones. The ethos travels with you long after the moment has passed.
Even as cultural outsiders, learning about traditions like Passover, the Festival of Weeks, the Festival of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, the Festival of Booths, Purim, and Hanukkah help us understand what it means to be formed as a people. These practices shape identity, faith, relationships, and even how we understand the cosmos itself.
Sometimes, in Christian communities, we forget that when Jesus sat at the table with the twelve for what we now call the Last Supper, he was drawing from this rich legacy of Jewish meal traditions. That meal was not spontaneous or disconnected from his past. It was not a random “death row” request at the end of his life. Jesus did what he knew to do. He practiced what his people had taught him.
He was working with the disciplined act of re-membering—of gathering the story back together—and offering it anew to his disciples.
Many of their meal liturgies began with remembrance:
“Remember when God delivered us.”
“Remember when God brought us out of bondage.”
“Remember when we faced what felt impossible.”
In this way, they were not only recalling the past—they were participating in it, while also trusting that God would act again in the future. This kind of remembering is alive. It is participatory. It reaches both backward and forward.
A simple table. A shared meal. A people—like us—living across time and space, trying to make sense of who we are and who we are becoming.
This weekend, we are invited to re-create tables of remembering—to gently resist disconnection, erasure, and avoidance. Empire thrives on short memories, on incomplete stories, on rewritten histories. And sometimes, if we are honest, we are tempted to forget, too—to move on, to set aside what is painful.
Because the past is not only triumphant. It is also layered with loss, betrayal, violence, escape, disconnection, and grief.
And yet, we begin here with a different kind of remembering—a benevolent re-membering. An invitation to gather all the pieces of ourselves, all the parts of our story, and hold them with care.
Who are we?
Who have we been?
Are there parts of ourselves that have gone uninvited to the table for too long?
Are there parts still waiting—hoping—for a seat?
You may come with rich table traditions, or perhaps with none at all. You may even be longing to create something new. This weekend offers that possibility.
If this is a liturgy, then it begins with remembering.
And it begins with kindness.
What tables have nourished your soul?
Who was there?
What did it sound like, feel like, look like?
What stories are yours to carry forward?
Let’s create our table.
You are invited to help build a table of remembering. And in that remembering, may we celebrate the saints among us—two-legged and four-legged—who made space for love, belonging, and connection.
May we remember, together, the divine love that holds all things—and all of us—together.
~Dr. Amy Steele, WTC Graduate and Board Member
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