From Scratch 2025: One Table

One table: our theme this year. What do you hear when you hear that phrase? Hopeful? Cautiously optimistic? Or maybe even suspicious? I’ll be honest with you: sometimes I worry a tagline like One Table comes across as some pie-in-the-sky fluffy ideal that is simply impossible and unrealistic.  But I know that’s not true.  

I know that’s not true because of what I’ve seen at Shobi’s Table. The One Table we set each week is more a culture than an actual single folding table with chairs around it.  It is a culture of openness that provides radical access for people of every background and every reality to come together and be fed together in body and soul, prioritizing those who know real hunger all too well. 

I’ve seen the radical, mutual nature of hospitality at Shobi’s One Table. When I look out in this room, I see it here too – at these tables tonight. 

It isn’t radical unless we know why it’s so odd, so out of place . Widening divides are natural, making us feel protected and safe.  Stepping into the places where differences co-exist is radical. It is where someone who can pay for their meal shares a table with someone who cannot, and both walk away knowing the richness of mutual generosity.  This is far from fluffy idealism. This is what our world is desperately hungry for. 

We come because we’re all hungry.  Whether we’ve known the hunger that comes from constantly wondering where your next meal will come from, or even the hunger that simply comes from being human and needing to eat.  Hunger that not only rumbles in empty bellies, but cries out from lonely hearts and craves connection for sustenance. 

We see it every week at Shobi’s. People’s hunger that comes in the shape of trying to make a life here as an immigrant, navigating new culture and language.  Hunger that takes the shape of broken bonds, leaving people without the support of family and friends. Hunger that pervades the lives of those who struggle with addiction and having a consistent roof over their heads. Hunger that makes a body grow weary with the constant trial of meeting your basic needs. 

The radical hospitality and richness of One Table culture invites us to recognize our own hunger and the hunger within someone else.  It chooses to listen,  even if it is hard to hear and understand. It chooses to stand up for and with one another.  It invites us to actually know one another. 

There aren’t enough One Table spaces like this in our world, our country, our city, our neighborhoods.  We have each seen first hand the dominant culture pushing us further and further apart, making it harder and harder for those who truly need to be fed in body and soul to  find their next meal. 

Tonight, we are here in this room to stand together for the radical nature of hospitality. Shobi’s Table can’t do this without people like you, One Table culture can’t exist without you.  Let’s fill the table tonight.  Yes, you’re giving tonight to fill empty bellies and create connections. But even more, you are changing our culture from one of divide to radical hospitality.  

I’ll be honest, I don’t like talking about our people at Shobi’s Table as marginalized, as if they are less than or to be pitied, and we must save them.  I’ve received too many riches from their presence at the One Table to consider them apart from me and the world I want to inhabit.  The riches happen because we come from different walks of life, because our day-to-day existence does not match, because we are different people – and yet, we come together to be fed.  

 no matter what politics we agree or disagree on, what life experiences we have lived, whatever riches we have or have not – we believe in inhabiting the same space, sitting at the same table.