The following excerpt is adapted from Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King. ©2026 Hannah Miller King. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
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In the early church, the Lord’s Supper was a fairly serious affair. Persecution hung in the air as both a threat and a memory. Christians gathered for worship sometimes with fresh grief after the imprisonment or martyrdom of a friend. Perhaps in part for this reason, the earliest eucharistic liturgies all begin with an invitation called the Sursum Corda, which the officiant would extend to the congregation: “Lift up your hearts,” or more literally, “Hearts up!” The congregation would then respond, “We lift them up to the Lord.” Ancient Christians believed this sacred meal transported them, mysteriously, to a heavenly realm that remained out of death’s reach—a realm that one day would be fully present on earth.
This belief even led them to celebrate the Lord’s Supper on the graves of martyrs, partaking of the feast that they’d one day share again with their departed loved ones. It wasn’t a denial of their grief, but a commitment to look beyond it. It was a subversive joy that both enraged their persecutors and contributed to the church’s rapid growth in the first three centuries.
Coming to the Table doesn’t diminish the heaviness in our lives. But it does lift us beyond it, to taste for a moment the joy and lightness for which we are headed. This joy then strengthens us to face whatever grim realities we must endure in the meantime.
In his first miracle, Jesus modeled something very similar. By providing wine at a wedding feast, he began his own ministry with the end in mind. Before turning his face toward Jerusalem to stare down the challenge of the cross, Jesus sponsored a party. In his sermon “Lord of the Wine,” Tim Keller said, “By turning water to wine Jesus reveals the whole purpose of his ministry. It’s as if Jesus is telling us, ‘Yes, I’ve come to do self-denial and to suffer and to be humbled, and you will too if you follow me; but those things are means to an end. The end is the feast.’”
In the long struggle of faith, it is easy to forget that God is not a taskmaster—he is a banquet-master. Keeping the feast at the center of our worship helps us to remember. When we come to the Lord’s Table, we practice “lifting our hearts” again and again, until the ritual of joy gives way to its reality. It’s our dress rehearsal for eternity, and eternity begins now.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of giving my friend’s five-year-old daughter her first Communion. We met the week beforehand to talk through the meaning of our special meal at church. She wiggled in the wrought iron patio chair outside Starbucks as she told me how the bread reminds us of Jesus’ body and how she wants to follow him. The following Sunday, I invited her and her family to the front of the church to receive Communion ahead of the rest of the congregation. She pranced forward, resplendent in a light pink ball gown and glittering ballet flats. I wondered if she might be nervous in front of so many adults; but she beamed at me as I put the small wafer in her hand. She showed us all what it looks like to begin with the end in mind.
As I study the shameless joy of children, I sometimes envy them. I assume that stoicism is an inevitable aspect of maturity; that what I must have known intuitively as a kid is lost forever, and rightly so. We grow up and realize that the world is not a playground. People aren’t always nice, and the good guys don’t always win. Relationships can be irreparably broken. Poverty and racism persist. With adult eyes we think we see the unvarnished truth.
But there’s a reason Jesus told his disciples that if they want to enter the Kingdom, they need to become like children. Because God’s new world operates differently than ours does. It requires us to unlearn what we think we know, so that we can apprehend what is now true in light of Jesus: The dead are raised. The lame walk. The blind see. Wars cease, captives go free. My kids have no trouble believing this stuff. Every night at bedtime, my six-year-old prays that he’ll be able to fly tomorrow. Though I always add to his prayer a special request for protection from false starts, there is something of resurrection in his quest. He understands that with God, nothing is impossible. And though his prayer remains unanswered, he seems undeterred in his hope that one day, he might fly.
In his fictitious Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis suggests that activities we might consider childish or frivolous are actually the best analogy we have for understanding the character of heaven: “While we are in this ‘valley of tears’ . . . certain qualities that must belong to the celestial condition have no chance to get through, can project no image of themselves, except in activities which, for us here and now, are frivolous.”
He admits his own difficulty with this, as one who “never enjoyed any game and can dance no better than a centipede with wooden legs.” Nonetheless, he argues that we tend to assess things according to the wrong values in our “upside down” world. He says “that which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
I respect Lewis’s honesty. And I would have liked to see him dance. If he’s right about joyful play as the “End of ends,” I imagine I will see him dance one day. In the meantime, his words challenge me to welcome celebration with as much reverence as I might practice lament.
I’ve watched a handful of women grieve a death in their family while caring for young children. On the one hand, they had to fight for space to feel sad, to rage, to get quiet with their thoughts. On the other hand, they also had to continue playing hide-and-seek, cooking dinner, and taking the dog for a walk. To sit with death while stewarding life is to live in two worlds. It can feel like being torn apart, or like being asked to lie half the time. But if we give ourselves to the tension—if we apprentice joy even as we grieve—we might become more whole as a result, not less. When we embrace what might feel frivolous or false in the moment, we stay tethered to a truth that will outlast the moment. For grieving moms, this is an opportunity born of necessity. For the rest of us, it’s a discipline.
The church calendar helps with this. Since at least the fourth century, Christians have organized their worship around the story of salvation by retelling it in church throughout the course of the year. Staying alive to the whole narrative requires that we commit to seasons of both fasting and feasting. However, the year’s longest season of fasting is punctuated by an even longer feast. Lent’s forty days of penitence gives way to fifty days of Easter to remind us—whether we feel like it or not, we are people of the party. Our faith is ultimately ordered toward celebration. The feast trumps the fast.
And in case we forget this truth in the long dark of Lent, every Sunday leading up to Easter is a feast day, a whisper of the resurrection that waits just around the corner. (A friend of mine went through at least two rounds of Lent before being notified of this. She felt robbed, in retrospect, of all the chocolate she could have eaten on those Sundays.)
Authentic Christianity forbids us from diminishing sin’s gravity or its effects. We are compelled to grieve and cry out for rescue. But even more so, we have reason to rejoice because that rescue has come. Right now, our rejoicing might feel a little bit like play therapy. We go through the motions, acting out what we’ve heard about the good news even when it seems disingenuous. We are training for the serious business of heaven.