forest hill 
April 27, 2025
Second Sunday of Easter
Annual Congregational Meeting
A New Presence
This week’s Scripture is “the first supper.”
I don’t hear it called by that title very much – but essentially that’s what it was. The first supper that Jesus shared with his disciples after the resurrection.
The setting is Sunday evening on the first Easter. Cleopas and an unnamed disciple (maybe his wife?) are travelling from Jerusalem to Emmaus, grieving the death of Jesus and unaware of what the women had seen at his grave earlier that day, when they encounter a stranger on the road. They end up talking together about all that happened, and inviting the stranger to stay with them for dinner. It’s only in the breaking of the bread that they recognize the stranger was, in fact, the Risen Christ himself. It’s the first of countless meals Jesus has eaten with his followers ever since.
It makes me realize how much our whole religion is founded on eating together. Not just in memory of one fateful meal on Maundy Thursday … but remembering all the meals that preceded the “last supper”, and that followed “the first supper” of the post-resurrection era. This is a religion that’s awash in food! And in table fellowship. And in all the ways that eating together breaks down the barriers that keep people apart, and builds us up as community.
When we eat together, no one goes hungry. When we eat together, the distinctions between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, powerful and powerless, evaporate, and we all can delight in our common humanity, and the ways that our differences add spice and colour to the feast. It’s not for nothing that Israel so frequently imagined the end times as a humongous banquet, where even enemies put aside their differences, and there was enough and more than enough for everyone. Imagine the world being like that all the time!
The United Church of Canada, in honour of our 100th Anniversary, has kicked off a major press initiative inviting Canadians to consider what it means to have “a place at the table.” The picture has been the subject of lots of news stories in the secular press this weekend; You can see a copy of it here. It invites us to imagine a table where everyone is welcome, where no one is turned away, and where laughter and wonder abound.
Is that who we are? Is that who we want to be? Is that Christianity’s gift to a world plagued by division, conflict, injustice, and jockeying for power?
This Sunday is our Annual Meeting – an opportunity to reflect on the mission and witness of our own unique constellation of disciples at Forest Hill. Who comes to dinner with us? Who is missing from our table? What have we done to live out this vision, and witness to this experience, in our life together over the past year? And how will we be inspired and empowered to do that over the next 12 months?
Come join us on Sunday as we reflect on the place at Jesus’ table that awaits each of us, and the ways in which the community that forms when we break bread together changes us and the world around us.
