Carney's preparations for serving in South America

Thanks for checking out our blog! Here is where we'll chronicle the "learning opportunities" God provides for us as we seek His will in partnering full-time with Christian Veterinary Mission in Bolivia

25 November 2013

As we Americans prepare for our thanksgiving feast, let us reflect a moment.

Luke 14:15 “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.”

     “In the kingdom of God” points to the future messianic banquet that the Jews thought would only be for them. Jesus, however, uses the parable of the Great Banquet to teach that the guests that were originally invited will miss the banquet(v.24) and will be replaced instead by “the poor, crippled, blind, and lame” and the outsiders (the Gentiles) found in the “highways and hedges” (vv. 21, 23).

     I think of this parable more this time of year than the rest of the year, I must admit, and probably not the way Jesus meant. We come together during the holiday season to sit down with our family and close friends to symbolically give thanks for what we have in the form of an elaborate dinner. But what about those other people around us?

     Christian community at the table also signifies our obligation to one another as part of God’s family. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to pray for “our daily bread”; it’s OUR daily bread that we eat, not an individual thing. We share our bread, just as we share the bread of the covenant we have with Jesus in Communion. It is in the sharing of our bread that binds us together, not only with our physical bodies, but binds us believers together in Spirit.

     The one bread that is given to us (Christ) unites us in a firm covenant!  Now no one must be hungry as long as the others have bread, and whoever breaks the community of our bodily life also breaks our community of the Spirit. Both our physical and Spiritual communities are linked together...

     So, why not invite others that may not have anywhere else to go? The college student that can’t travel home or the immigrant family that just moved to the area, or a homeless or less fortunate person in your earthly community. After all, there is only one community, one body, and one kingdom of God!

David