We cannot talk about food without talking about life, and we cannot talk about spiritual food without talking about spiritual life. This is because life is the only thing which can make any use whatever of food.
A dead man cannot be raised or restored with a good meal. When spiritually dead people congregate in churches, it does not make any difference how good the cooking is. Send the best chef in the world down to the morgue, and you will get no miracles.
The amazing thing is life itself. Life turns things in the world outside it into food. Life can eat, and can by eating animate the world. Food does not give the gift of life. Rather life gives the gift of food.
So this is why it is so important for the Church to be constantly focused on the one who gives life, who is God the Father, the one given who is that life, who is the Lord Jesus, crucified and risen, the one poured out, who is the Holy Spirit, the ground established for life, which is the gospel, and the instrument appointed to apprehend and grasp this offered life, which is God-given faith. This is what we center on—the Father, the Son, the Spirit, the gospel, and the evangelical response of real faith.
When that happens, the bread and wine here are useful for food. The Table is set. Without that happening, the Table is still set—but a corpse slumped in a chair cannot partake of it, cannot make any good use of it.
But you are the living children of the living God. Because this is what you are, you have been invited.
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.