This is an insightful and challenging quote taken from Laurence Hull Stookey’s Eucharist: Christ’s Feast With the Church.
It is tragically ironic that for many earnest contemporary Christians, heaven is dismissed as something that distracts us from reshaping life on earth. In this view, heaven functions as an escape hatch, a refuge for those who refuse to deal with practical realities. This is a grievously debased understanding of heaven – and one alien to the New Testament teaching. For the first Christians, heaven was a hope to be instituted already on earth of the grace of God at work in the community of the faithful; for this reason the church perpetually prayed, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ The church still so prays without unceasing – but often uncomprehending of the meaning of the petition. These are no idle words spoken in between the affirmation of the holiness of God’s name and the petition for daily bread. They are instead a profound assertion of the coherence of divine righteousness and daily life.
The church that would proclaim true and enduring good news to the world necessarily first grasps the vision of the Great Feast in heaven and prays and labors endlessly for the effecting of feasts of love on earth, radiating from the Table of the Lord. ‘Labors endlessly’ does not imply we shall achieve this by human effort alone. Community is given by God, but it is never given magically or imposed upon the unwilling. Those who were compelled to come to the feast in Jesus parable (Luke 14) were not the ones who declined the invitation.
Laboring endlessly means, rather, this: So much in human nature seems to override commonality and to work for splintering that people of faith are called to resist deliberately and aggressively all inclination to isolate persons from persons, classes from classes, races from races, and nations from nation. Apart from conscious and courageous decisions to seek out and to extend community, nothing important or lasting is likely to happen. Just as the gracious God seeks us, luring us to a sumptuous banquet at a common board, so we are also called to embrace divinely given community by answering the invitation in order that God’s house may be filled – not merely by us, but by all whom God has made and longs to reunite in a feast perpetual.