Breaking Bread, Making Friends

On Tuesday night I sat down at a table with a few deacons from First Baptist Church and a few from First African Baptist Church. We were at the Golden Corral on Gaskins and Broad, squeezed into a small, private dining room after filling our plates to overflowing at the mind-boggling buffet. Someone said a blessing and we began to eat, and then we began to talk, and then we began to laugh.

Which was precisely the point of the evening.

Earlier this year Pastor Rodney Waller of First African challenged us to “show Richmond what true racial reconciliation looks like.” I was inspired by that challenge, and added that while Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors, we cannot love what we don’t know, and suggested that we spend some time getting to know each other, preferably over dinner.

We looked at that picture of the early church from the end of Acts 2, where it says that the believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (vs. 42). A few verses later it says “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts” (vs. 46). Breaking bread was apparently a high priority in the early church, and so we decided to get together and break some bread.

Do you know how hard it is to get 14 people together for a meal? Bob Palmer does. Bob has been talking to me about First African since I came to Richmond five years ago. He has kept up a relationship with Deacon Booker Jones from that church for much longer than that. The two of them have been hoping and praying that our churches could be more closely connected, so Bob was a logical choice to make the arrangements, but it took six weeks and twice that many attempts to get us all together.

Still, I think we would all say it was worth it.

After dinner we divided into small groups where we were challenged to tell our life stories in five minutes or less. I was amazed, as always, by the way those stories make us human and help us discover how much we have in common. In twenty minutes’ time, at my table, strangers became friends, or at least became a lot more friendly. It turns out that each of us had suffered some hardship, had some disappointments, taken some chances, had some successes.

Life is like that, and it’s like that no matter what color you are.

It was good to be reminded of that on Tuesday night. As we were leaving the private dining room I asked Rodney Waller to let me know how I could pray for him and he said, “All right, and you do the same.” “Well,” I said, “You could pray for my dad. He’s in hospice, and he seems to be getting pretty close to the end.” “Let me do that right now,” Rodney said, and then he asked for everyone to join him and—right there at Golden Corral—he prayed for my dad.

See, those early believers didn’t only break bread together. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42-47).

May it be so here…and now.