The Tablecloth Under Every Plate

For the volunteer stacking two sets of trays and quietly counting the distance between them.

You've washed up after this service for six years, and you've never once said what you think about the trays.

There are two sets. One belongs to the main congregation and one to the group that meets in the side room at four, and they've been separate since before you started. Different cupboards, different cloths, different little numbered cards taped inside the lids so nobody mixes them.

You stack them carefully, because that's who you are. You've noticed, over six years, that you handle one set slightly more gently than the other, and you've never worked out which way round that goes or what it says about you.

Tonight the hall's been cleared for a wedding, so the long table's out with the good cloth on it, and both sets of trays are sitting on top of it waiting to be put away. Two sets of trays, one piece of linen underneath the lot of them, running the whole length of the room.

You stand there with a tea towel over your shoulder for longer than the job needs.

Under every plate in this building there's one cloth, and it was laid before anybody counted the trays. The written Word calls the bread and the cup a communion in Christ rather than in a room, and the Holy Spirit keeps that true in the hall you're standing in tonight.

Six Years of Not Saying It

There's a particular weight that belongs to the person who does the washing up.

You're in the room for everything and part of nothing. You hear both groups at their most relaxed, which is when people say what they actually think, and you've heard each describe the other in ways that were kind and not quite accurate. You love people in both. You've never said that out loud in either, because it isn't the sort of comment a person makes with a tea towel in her hand.

After a few years that silence stops feeling like tact and starts feeling like homelessness. Welcome everywhere, belonging nowhere, and the only honest room in the building is the one with the sink in it.

And somewhere in there you picked up an idea nobody handed you, which is that standing between two cupboards means you'll eventually have to decide which one is right.

What the Communion Is Of

Here's the sentence that sits underneath the whole question, put as a pair of questions by a man writing to a church that had split itself into parties:

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?1 Corinthians 10:16 (KJV)

Read what the communion is named as being of. Not of the congregation. Not of the agreement, or the tradition, or the group that's worked the practice out most carefully over four hundred years.

It's the communion of the blood of Christ and of the body of Christ. He's writing to people who were, at that exact moment, doing a poor job of being one anything, and he doesn't ground the bond in their unity. He grounds it in His body.

You're joined to Christ Himself before you're joined to anybody's arrangement about Him. The written Word ties that bond to His own body rather than to a consensus, and the Holy Spirit keeps it live in you at a sink on a Tuesday.

Nobody Argues About the Linen

Here's what I'd carry out of that hall if I could take a single thing away with me.

Every dispute in the history of eating together happens above the cloth. Who sits where, which tray is whose, which cupboard the numbered lids belong in, who gets served first and who waits. All of it is surface traffic, and all of it is visible, and all of it is what people mean when they say a church is divided.

Nobody has ever had an argument about the tablecloth. It runs under every plate in the room, one continuous piece, and it's been there since before the trays were counted and it'll be there after.

That's not a metaphor I'm imposing on the evening. It's what you're actually looking at with the tea towel on your shoulder: two sets of trays, and one cloth underneath both of them, and not a soul in the building who'd think to dispute it.

What holds this room together has never been in dispute, only unnoticed. The written Word grounds the bond in Christ's body rather than in the arrangements above it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping that single piece under every plate.

I'm Not Ruling on Either Cupboard

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I refuse to write it.

I'm not telling you which group has understood Him better, and I'm not hinting at it either. Both are full of people who love Christ and who've held that bread carefully for a very long time, and the care itself is love even where it leaves a distance you feel every week.

I'm also not telling you where to go up or where to stay seated, and I'm not suggesting anybody mix the trays. That belongs to the people who use them, and nothing in this message is a ruling on anybody's practice.

You can leave every arrangement exactly as it stands and still know whose table it is. Scripture settles the ownership without settling the practice, and the Holy Spirit gives you rest about the first while you keep honoring the second.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Imani This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.