From Tablet to Table – Community Found & Identity Formed

What if the Bible were seen less as a tablet of ink than as a table of food?

Author Leonard Sweet is a scholar of US American culture who communicates the gospel with a signature bridging of faith, academe, and popular culture. In 2006 and 2007, Len was recognized by his peers as one of the “Fifty Most Influential Christians in America” (ChurchReport magazine).

From Tablet to Table invites readers to explore the importance of The Table in biblical theology, and what it might mean for us to bring back the table to our homes, churches, and neighborhoods.

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Chapter Excerpt: Bring Back the Family Table

In his book Cooked Michael Pollan shows that meals eaten out are almost always less healthy than foods cooked in; homemade foods generally have lower fat, salt, and caloric content. And yet we are eating out more and more, eating in less and less.

• We eat one in every five meals in our car.
• One in four of us eat at least one fast-food meal every single day.
• US households spend roughly the same amount per week on fast food as on groceries.

Sixty years ago, the average dinnertime was ninety minutes; today it is less than twelve minutes. And that’s when we do eat dinner together, which is less and less frequently. The majority of US families report eating a single meal together less than five days a week. And even then our “dinners together” are mostly in front of the TV.

No wonder the average parent spends only 38.5 minutes per week in meaningful conversation with their children. We are losing the table.

This was brought home recently to the Sweet family when one of my kids invited a friend (let’s call him “Horace”) to spend some days with us over the summer. After the friend left, I commented that Horace seemed somewhat uneasy during his stay in our home. “Was anything wrong?” I asked.

“He did feel a little uncomfortable,” my daughter SØren offered.

“Was it something we did?” I asked.

“Sort of,” SØren answered. “He said that he has never eaten with his family at a table, and so he wasn’t sure how to act or what to do.”

A Christian teenager, attending a Christian college, had never eaten a home-cooked meal at a family table.

Much of our culture today reveals fragmented families with busy, out-of-the-box lives that don’t conform to what is now considered “traditional” mealtimes. Yet while shows like Modern Family portray families that never eat together at the table, an increasing number of shows, such as Duck Dynasty and Blue Bloods, prominently feature family dinners, including prayers over meals and story sharing. It seems there is a craving for more intimacy in our lives and relationships. And if we can’t get it in our homes, we’ll at least watch it on TV.

Our culture is hungry for table time. And in this respect, popular culture is right in step with findings in socio-science that advocate for table gatherings. In fact, when sociologist Cody C. Delistraty culled the most recent scientific literature for Atlantic Monthly, he discovered proof that the loss of the table has had “quantifiable negative effects both physically and psychologically” on our families and our kids. Here’s what he found:

• The #1 factor for parents raising kids who are drug-free, healthy, intelligent, kind human beings? “Frequent family dinners.”
• The #1 shaper of vocabulary in younger children, even more than any other family event, including play? “Frequent family dinners.”
• The #1 predictor of future academic success for elementary-age children? “Frequent family dinners.”
• One of the best safeguards against childhood obesity? “Eating meals together.”
• The best prescription to prevent eating disorders among adolescent girls? “Frequent family dinners” that exude a “positive atmosphere.”
• The variable most associated with lower incidence of depressive and suicidal thoughts among eleven- to eighteen-year-olds? “Frequent family dinners.”

If you want kids with “fewer emotional and behavioral problems, greater emotional well-being, more trusting and helpful behaviors towards others and higher life satisfaction,” then you need “more frequent family dinners.” In short, better to eat toast and jam together than ham tetrazzini alone.

In the memories we make and recall, in the stories we tell and retell, in the family recipes we eat and repeat, there are things we learn at the family table we don’t learn anywhere else. There is a reason Jesus made eating a sacrament.

Jesus ate all kinds of food around all kinds of tables in all kinds of places with all kinds of people. To be a disciple of Jesus (then and now) is to love to eat, no matter what Jesus cooks and no matter where he sets the table.

Jesus redefined what it means to “be family,” just as he redefined what it means to “break bread” together at table. When Jesus fed five thousand people on a hillside, all of them became his “family” and the hillside became his “table.” When he cooked along the shore after his resurrection, Jesus’ disciples became his family, and some stones around a fire his table. Jesus ate the Passover meal in the Upper Room not with his biological family but with his new family: his male and female disciples. When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he was really saying, “Do table in remembrance of me.” Whoever “does table” where the Jesus story is remembered is part of the Jesus family.

Jesus’ family includes marrieds, singles, widows, orphans, lepers, sinners, even animals. After all, Jesus’ bassinet at birth was a food trough for beasts. For Jesus the home is not what defines the table; the table is what defines the home. Whether a single, working mom or an elderly man in a nursing home; whether a four-year-old child or a teenage athlete; whether a married couple or a homeless woman with her dog: We are all invited to Jesus’ table and into Jesus’ family.

The table is necessarily communal. And for Christians, there is a Trinitarian component to the table. Even when only two are gathered together, three are always present. Wherever we break bread together, Jesus is always at the table. And we are to re-member him, bring him to life in every heart. Because the life of your table becomes the preeminent art of your life. You “become” a disciple to the Master Artist through your time spent together at Jesus’ table.

It’s time to look up from our tablets and distractions and notice our neighbors, our loved ones, our Lord.  Learn More about From Tablet to Table & Buy Now

Excerpt Taken from From Tablet to Table by Leonard Sweet Copyright © 2014. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.