At our community meal this past Sunday, a man I’d never met held up his plate and asked me, kindly enough, “So what’s the catch?” He wanted to know when the sermon started, whether he’d have to sign something or sit through something to earn the pot roast. I told him the truth. There is no catch. Supper is the whole idea.
If you haven’t been, the Neighbors Fund Community Meal happens on the first Sunday of every month, 5:00 to 6:30 in the evening, right here at St. Dunstan’s. It’s a free supper. No sign-up, no questions, no forms to fill out. You can come hungry, or lonely, or simply curious about what’s cooking. All three count.
Still, his question deserved a better answer than my one-liner, so here it is. We don’t serve people in order to convert them. We serve because love is the point. If service is a sales funnel, it isn’t service; it’s marketing with gravy. A meal given with strings attached isn’t a gift, and our neighbors can tell the difference before the plates are cleared.
I say this as someone who spends his working life with the Gospels, the four accounts of Jesus’s life. What strikes me, every time, is how often the story stops for food. Jesus fed people first, and often. Thousands on a hillside with a few loaves and some fish, and no registration table in sight. He didn’t quiz the crowd afterward. As far as we can tell, most of them walked home fed and unconverted, and he seems to have been at peace with that.
They recognized him in the breaking of the bread.
Luke 24
That line comes from a story we love around here, two heartbroken friends walking to a village called Emmaus, joined by a stranger they don’t recognize until he sits down to supper with them. Notice the order of things. Not lecture first, then bread. Bread first. The understanding came later, at the table, the way it usually does.
If you ask us why, we’ll gladly tell you
None of this means we’re shy about our faith. If anyone wonders aloud why we do this, we’ll happily answer. We believe God loves this town without conditions, and the least we can do is pass that along. But you won’t find a pamphlet tucked into your grocery bag, and nobody will follow up on you like an unpaid invoice. Questions are welcome here; I’ve built most of my ministry on them. Doubt can pull up a chair too. In my experience it does its best work at dinner.
The people who make the meal happen are gloriously ordinary. There’s the crew that arrives at three to start the casseroles, the teenager from Wednesday youth group who discovered she likes washing dishes when the music is loud enough, the retired fellow who keeps the coffee coming without being asked. Rev. Marsh likes to preach about the mustard seed, the tiny thing that grows into shelter for the birds. A monthly supper is about that size.
So here is the no-catch version. First Sunday of the month, 5:00 to 6:30, a free supper behind the red doors at 100 Lakeshore Lane. Come eat. Come serve, if you’d rather be on the ladle end of things. Come once and never again, or come every month and never tell us your name. Any of those is fine with us. There’s a place for you at the table, and it was set before you asked.
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