Heaven begins at a table. 

I don’t think I really fully understood that when Mrs. Vickie Martin carried a pan of steaming warm rolls out of her oven, straight down our back country road, one early fall morning last week, and set the dish down there at the end of our table. 

Our little grandboy, who lives in the farmhouse right next to ours, Theodore, just smidge of a glinting notch past his third birthday, he flashes that irresistible grin of his and reaches up with a dimpled finger to swipe a bit of the icing. Vicki only grins right back, and slides the dish closer to little Theo.

Make your tables long — so more people know that they belong. Open the gates and lay out more plates.

Vicki’s little girl shyly crawls up on a chair by Theodore. Vickie’s gently rocking her baby boy in arms – a baby born the same month as Theodore’s little brother, our second grandboy, Jeremiah. I’m grabbing a stack of plates and can’t stop shaking my head like a fool, smiling at the strange ways of God. 

“Your little one’s born the same month as little Jeremiah, and both boys’  dads grew up as next-door farm boys playing together…” Vicki’s smiling too; her husband, Darcy, was one of 4 Mennonite brothers on the farm, right on the other side of us, who all of our 4 boys grew up with, building forts together back in the woods, or up in the hay barn, late into warm summer nights. 

“… And now their little sons are growing up right next to each other, the next generation of neighbors!”

Across three generations now, we’ve been next-door farming neighbors to the Martin family.

To eat is a necessity, but when we eat with each other, it becomes ministry. 

The Martin’s were the very first neighbors who invited us over for dinner when we first moved to the farm, poor-as-church-mice young parents, working long 20 hour days, digging hard, month after month, trying to hold on to the farm.

Mr. Clayton Martin warmly welcomed us in the side door off the porch, and Mrs. Miriam Martin had the table all set. Darcy and his brothers were just shy little freckled boys back then, sitting well-mannered and ready, at the Sunday table. Our 2 oldest boys were only a tow-headed toddler and a plump baby in arms at the time, yet I can still remember Miriam’s warm smile and her heaping bowls of home-grown potatoes and corn passed around the table, and all our steaming plates. 

For almost 30 years, we’ve been neighboring, with the Martins our first call to help us look for a lost dog or goat (or a boy or two), the ones who loan us a  wagon to help us get a wheat harvest off before a coming storm, the ones who invite all the farm neighbors over for a big old summer picnic dinner in the backyard, the ones we exchange Christmas family photos – names handwritten on the back – and plates of Christmas cookies with decade after decade, the ones who showed up with a meal and real support when  our Levi and Aurora’s house burnt to the ground. 

“We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore,” is what Dorothy Day wrote. “Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.” 

Hospitality is the ministry that only requires that you get hungry.  If we eat about 21 meals a week – is it possible to make it a practice every week to commit to eat just one of those 21 meals – with one other person? 

We’re generations of neighbors who’ve had companionship – and it’s been a bit of a taste of heaven.  That word, companion comes from the Latin, com and panis literally meaning “the one you share bread with.

My dear daughter-in-love, Hannah, she’s helping her little Theo get pulled up to the table, and Vicki’s serving up her steaming dish of sweet rolls, baked up from her own gorgeous recipe book, Served with Hospitality, and I get to hold her sweet baby boy, and this is a family who has lived hospitality and neighboring over decades and generations, and I can feel this gratefulness for the sharing of bread and plates and sweet rolls and maybe that is this era’s most pressing question:  

If we shared more bread together – would we share more companions and less loneliness? 

How many times do we find Jesus either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal? There isn’t one of Luke’s 24 chapters that doesn’t include eating and drinking, and wasn’t the claim against Jesus that He came eating and drinking? (Matt: 11:19) 

If we eat about 21 meals a week – is it possible to make it a practice every week to commit to eat just one of those 21 meals – with one other person? 

“Hannah, you and Malakai had folks over for dinner after church on Sunday?” I’m dangling a baby on my knee and flipping through the stunning pages of Vicki’s Served with Hospitality, and trying to explain: 

“I just had overheard Malakai in the kitchen this morning, after barn chores, mentioning to Aurora how impressed he was with Vicki’s recipe book, and how you found all these hospitality helps that actually helped with hosting folks?” 

Hospitality is not about entertainment — it’s about making a Gospel statement.  Who gets to hear the good news that they are invited to the table?

“Yes, ma’am, I sure did!” Hannah’s smiling, and and dear Vicki’s blushing and passing down the plates of her sweet rolls, and here’s the next generation of neighbors welcoming people to their table and Vicki’s honesty and heart is.

“We are far from perfect, but we serve a perfect God, and it’s just about how to share our imperfect tables to reflect His perfect love to those around us.”

To eat is a necessity, but when we eat with each other, it becomes ministry. 

Hospitality is the ministry that only requires that you get hungry.  

No need for a seminary degree, a building budget, charitable status, interns or staff — getting hungry is the only necessity for the ministry of hospitality. Hospitality is not about entertainment — it’s about making a Gospel statement.  Who gets to hear the good news that they are invited to the table?

Make your tables long — so more people know that they belong.  Tear down the gates and lay out more plates.

Vicki’s recipe book, lays open there on my kitchen counter.

My daughter-in-loves, Hannah and Aurora, and I, all make these meals, and keep setting out plates, and Ezekiel said that a table can be before the Lord Himself, (Ex. 41:22) and the leaders of Israel, when they saw God, what they did was eat and drink (Exod 24:11), and Jesus vows to do nothing less than drink new wine in the Kingdom (Matt 26:29), and the story of history and time will end at a table – a table set for wedding supper — and all of our forever will begin there before the feasting plates (Rev 19:9).

And maybe it’s time that we all served it up: We need a revolution around the word hospitality so there can be renewal and a remaking of the world. 

Hospitality isn’t about the beauty of place settings — but about setting a plate for one more soul to see the beauty of Christ. 

Hospitality is not about becoming the next Julia Child — hospitality is about welcoming in the marginalized as the next child of God. 

Hospitality is not about new napkins and getting our etiquette right — hospitality is about the renewal of all things, and about those who feel lost, to know they belong right here with the people of God.

And it’s humble and glorious and sacred and the realest real:

Heaven begins at a table… 

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Served with Hospitality