The Cost of the Cloth

From the series: Making Space at the Table: The Slow, Holy Work

“Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
—Philippians 2:4 (NRSV)

There is a kind of hospitality that leaves everything intact. The table is set. The cloth is clean. The host remains in control.

And then there is the hospitality of Christ.

The Gospels are full of meals—but few are comfortable. Jesus eats with tax collectors, with sinners, with people no one else will touch. He allows a woman to anoint him with oil at a Pharisee’s dinner. He washes feet when no one else will kneel. And on the night he is betrayed, he breaks bread with the one who will hand him over.

This is not pristine, curated welcome. This is hospitality that wounds.

To make space at the table, we must ask: What are we willing to lose?

Because if we want a Church where everyone belongs, then something has to give. Power. Certainty. Order. Control. The price of welcome is not nothing. It is the slow surrender of comfort in favour of communion.

We cannot have both.

In the book of Philippians, Paul urges the Church to take on the mind of Christ—who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” This self-emptying (kenosis, in Greek) is not just Christ’s path. It is ours. To make space is to pour out. Not once, but again and again. Not metaphorically, but actually. Our time. Our assumptions. Our prestige. Our place at the centre.

Too often, churches attempt inclusion without cost. We say, “All are welcome,” but we do not re-examine who chooses the music, who holds the microphone, who decides what is beautiful, what is reverent, what is worthy. We drape a new cloth over the same old table and call it change.

But the fabric of our welcome must be torn and stitched afresh.

We must be willing to be disrupted—not as a gesture, but as a discipline. The needs of those on the margins are not obstacles to ministry. They are ministry. They are the testing ground of our love.

In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann reminds us that real transformation begins with grief: with the loss of old ways of seeing, knowing, and being.¹ We cannot jump straight to joy. We must sit in the cost. We must ask: What must die for new life to emerge?

Sometimes, it is our need to be right. Sometimes, it is our need to be in control. Sometimes, it is our image of what church should look like. And sometimes, it is our role as host altogether.

Because the truth is this: we are not the hosts. Christ is.

To “prepare the table” in his name is not to orchestrate a spectacle. It is to disappear into service. To blend into the linen and let love be seen. If someone takes your seat—let them. If someone breaks your rhythm—listen. If someone doesn’t fit the liturgy as it is—reshape it.

Not because they are the problem.

But because the shape of the table was never meant to be fixed.

The Eucharist is an event of radical reorientation. The last are first. The least are greatest. The broken are blessed. And the only way to approach it rightly is as a guest among guests.

If our worship never unsettles us, it may not be Christ’s table we’ve built—but our own.

To truly make space is to relinquish the need to control what that space becomes.

And this is not a one-time offering. It is ongoing. Because new people will come. New needs will arise. The table will stretch again. And we must stretch with it.

So we must ask again: What are we willing to lose for the sake of love?

The answer will always be: more than we thought.

But the promise will always be: more than we hoped.

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References

• Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress Press, 1978.