Now that the holidays are over, if you’re like me, a diet is on the menu for the next several months. But just having just celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas, it reminds me of my youth and the amazing smell that would come from the kitchen as my mother prepared to feed our family in celebration of those events. Indeed, of all five senses, research has shown that the one that has the ability to conjure up memories best is smell.

But it is not just my mom’s cooking that I remember most but what these meals meant…a common bond of family, love, faith…togetherness.

Indeed, eating together can mean so much more than just stuffing ourselves to the point where we have to loosen our belts or change into sweatpants with an elastic waist…which I’ll have to admit to doing.

But I’d like you all to think about some important event in your life, your wedding day, graduation, perhaps when you were confirmed or when a child was baptized. Did you celebrate those occasions with food? Dinner? I’m guessing you probably did.

Actually, if you stopped to think about it, most if not all of our most important events are in fact celebrated with food. Birthdays have cake, newlyweds typically have a meal following the ceremony, not to mention occasions of sadness, such as a funeral, for those too, typically have a meal where people can gather together to express their love and concern for one another, and to share memories of their departed loved one.

Gathering together around food, as we can see, is an important part of our lives even if we don’t stop to think about it.

I’m bringing this all up because did you know that in the ancient world, meals were considered extremely important, and people actually did think about them. Who you chose to eat with was no small matter in those days, because it communicated to the entire community who you were willing to associate with. For instance, no religious leader such as a Pharisee would be caught dead having dinner with a prostitute, a foreigner such as a Roman, or some other “sinner,” which is why Jesus was seen as such a radical by the religious establishment…he’d dine with just about anyone. Actually, he did eat with anyone who wanted to spend time with him, and now after all this, I’ve reached the point I wanted to make. Christ invites us to dine with him weekly. Did you know that?

Even though we are all miserable, wicked sinners, Jesus wants to dine with us here at church and we do so in the Lord’s Supper, where our Savior gives us his very body to eat and blood to drink. It’s where he literally imparts himself to you to assure you that you are forgiven of your sins, to strengthen your faith and to assure you that you are at peace with God!

Thinking about the importance that the people of Jesus time put on whom they’d be willing to dine with, then you can see the supreme significance of our Lord inviting us to dine with him weekly!

Like I tell my confirmands, Jesus giving us Holy Communion to partake of was brilliant because we must use all five of our senses to confirm what is taking place at the rail. You taste the bread and wine, you feel them with your tongue, you can smell the wine, you can see the elements, and finally you can hear the words, “given and shed for you!”

As we embark on a New Year, please consider our Lord’s gracious invitation to you and strive to make one of your New Year’s resolutions to be in attendance weekly to receive the gifts that our gracious God gives to us in this place.

Until next month….

Pastor Roloff