I get asked this question often. It seems strange to contemporary folks to center worship around a meal. And while what follows does not exhaust the issue, it helps, I think, to anchor our way of thinking about worship within the Biblical Story:
The Gospel is a story about the overcoming, never-stopping, never giving-up love of God in creating the world, redeeming the world, and recreating all things in Christ Jesus. Sacramental worship is a kind of drama in which we tell that Story. Central to this story is the Feast (the Eucharist Meal) which God prepares for His people. Worship, according to the biblical pattern of God’s Story, always centers on feasting. In the beginning
God gathers Adam to Himself, breaks the man (carving a rib from his side), transforms him (brings forth Eve), sets them to feast and commune with Him in the Garden, and then sends (or ‘gives’ them) them into the world to cultivate and create and make anew.
This pattern continues even after the Fall (which was, itself, centered around ‘feasting’ of another kind): God meets Noah and Abraham and the Patriarchs in shared meals called 'sacrifices'; in the worship of Israel at the Tabernacle God gathers his people to Himself, “breaks” them with the words of His mouth, which cut like swords, transforms them, feasts with them at His Table (for all altars are in fact tables... the words for these things in ancient languages are interchangeable), and then sends them out into the world (the Gentiles) with a mission. What mission is that? To gather the nations to God’s Table, so that all people might do the thing we were created for: Feasting with God forever.
When God-Incarnate comes to earth His ministry is marked (and mocked) by his singular focus on food and drink: Fishes, loaves of bread, wine from water casks, eating with disreputables –these are the signs of his
ministry. He raises Jairus' daughter and when the shocked crowds ask him what to do he tells them "make breakfast of course!" It’s as if every time He did something messianic His first directive to the bewildered crowds was “Okay, now let’s eat!”
He eats with us because that is what YHWH has always done. When the religious leaders condemn Jesus for eating and drinking his response of anger is due to the fact that they have forgotten who YHWH is, they
have forgotten him. "Of course I eat all the time" Jesus could say, "I am the Creator God who made the earth, and created Adam as a hungry being, and gave it to mankind as a meal saying 'take and eat', I am Lord of the Sabbath Feast, I am the God of Manna and Quail-rain, I am the King of the Land of milk and honey."
It makes sense then, as He concludes His ministry, that Christ reaches for bread and wine to establish the sacraments of the Church. We are told “this is my Body… this my Blood…” The same commandment given to Adam is given to His disciples "take eat". For in Christ the Master of the Feast, the great Creator-Host who has
hounded and chased us and invited us to dine and fellowship with Him, has Himself become the Feast, and bids us do the same: His life for ours, and ours for His This helps make some sense of Peter vision fo the cloud of unclean animals where he is told "take and eat", and it helps make sense of why Paul's letter to the Galatians is all about who can eat together --- it matters because that's the center of our theology; because that is what the people of God do in His Kingdom.
And let us not forget the way God's Story ends in the book of the Revelation of John: "Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb!" For this reason, the worship of God calls us to participate in speaking, thinking, singing, kneeling, raising hands, standing, sitting, eating, and drinking both at church and in our daily lives, raising-up to God all of our creaturely moments as moments of meal-fellowship
with God.