Setting the Table

For a while, I worked in advertising, before I made the slight career shift to ordained ministry. (Some say I’m still in advertising.) Some have doubted there could be transferable skills from the first career to the second. But I’m grateful for what I learned: the importance of communication, the power of focus on a single idea, the importance of team work. One of my bosses said that there were really only two motivators for consumers: fear and love. That will preach.

The fact is, there are lessons for the spiritual journey that come from all kinds of fields. St. Paul wrote to early Christians and compared the life of discipleship to training in military service, or preparing for a long distance race, or being in the construction business (what foundation will you build on?), or agricultural work (also a favorite of Jesus’).

My gifted cousin and her husband are about to open a wonderful café here in North Carolina. I can’t wait. To guide them in their work, they have turned to a book by restaurateur Danny Meyer. The book is called Setting the Table. It’s a book focused on hospitality, on how we prepare to welcome people. In the past, I’ve used this book to learn about what it means to be church. In that book, Mr. Meyer identifies five core emotional skills which guide his work, and will guide my cousin in her new endeavor:

• Optimistic warmth: genuine kindness, thoughtfulness and a sense that the glass is always half-full.
• Intelligence: Not just smarts, but an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning.
• Work ethic: A natural tendency to do something as well as it can be done.
• Empathy: An awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel.
• Self-awareness and integrity: An understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment.

Those five skills led to remarkable successful restaurants in New York and around the country. Can those skills be translated into Christian virtues, spiritual practices? Let’s give it a try:

• Optimistic warmth: Sounds a lot to me like hope.
• Intelligence: What is a disciple but someone who is always learning, and who knows, especially in the spiritual journey, that we’re never done?
• Work ethic: A mentor used to tell me that we seek to make worship our most excellent offering. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect or that we become perfectionists. It does mean that we do what we do with care, as an offering to the God we worship for the glory of God. Should we offer less?
• Empathy: Just another word for love, or perhaps, compassion, the common virtue in all faith traditions.
• Self-awareness and integrity: it looks a lot like humility to me.
• Setting the table: That’s what the church is about, getting ready to welcome people to God’s feast. That’s what the individual spiritual journey is about, as we relate to those around us in a world so hungry for a greater sense of authentic hospitality.

This Monday, this Lent, how can we set the table with hope and love, in a spirit of worship and humility, as disciples who are always learning?

-Jay Sidebotham

Contact:
Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

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