"At the table"-Sermon for Proper 17, Luke 14:1, 7-14:
I want to share a poem that I wrote during my last sabbatical some 8 years ago called “Table Magic”. So here goes!
Lights dimmed
Calling all to attend to the moment
Like a gentle warning that the show is about to begin
Candles flitting that guide our gaze from plate to person
From person to plate
All senses onboarded
A scene set with textiles to touch
Patterned china like art
Utensils with which to play
Savory and sweet smells
Primordial parts of our mind switched on
That’s garlic for sure
Browned butter and citrus combined
Roasted meat whose chemical transformation
Is the lasting gift of the world’s first peoples
Earthen, hummus-like, scents from the garden
Bringing the outside in
Tender and crisp
Just a bit of fire releasing their God-made potential
And let us not forget the salt
It brings out the best in all
Grace is then offered
Like an ephemeral wooden spoon
That stirs together all that is set before us
With that which we bring to the table
Our own selves, souls and bodies
Hearts overflowing with gratitude
For the roof over our head
For the food we take delight in
For the hands that prepare it
For mother earth’s abundance
For the Beautiful Mind who thought the whole thing up
For the family to which the table calls us into together
For love shared and feasted upon
Then taste buds wake up as glory enters in
Delight in complexity and richness
In fat and marrow, grain and grape
That together make the heart glad
The very center satisfied
All of it singing in unison
Wake up and pay attention
This is magic in our midst
So, my stomach is now grumbling a little bit…I feel like I can actually smell the garlic simmering in browned butter and citrus…I’m getting ideas about dinner tonight! But, when I wrote this poem, believe it or not, I wasn’t actually thinking, or mainly thinking, about how much I enjoy food or hosting a good dinner party, as much as I do. Instead, I was thinking about what stands at the center of my own theological world view, which, as I have noted before, is table fellowship. There is no doubt that the table is my happy place. Indeed, I take great delight, as the poem suggests, in preparing food…but I take even greater delight in sharing food. As I like to say, food always tastes better when we share it. This is true whether at a quick weeknight meal with my immediate family or on occasions when we welcome friends and extended family into our home to catch up, connect, celebrate or, even at times, grieve together. Life just is more rich and rewarding, more satisfying and fulfilling…when we share…not just food…but the spiritual sustenance, the love, God’s love, that lives in us…with each other.
Thus, the table is for me a meaningful metaphor for sharing our lives with each other, serving each other with our words, prayers and presence, feeding each other with spiritual food…with the love we give to and receive from each other. So, theologically speaking, when I describe table fellowship, I am really not only talking about the tables that might sit in our kitchens or dining rooms…but in restaurants and at church potlucks and coffee shops and pubs and office breakrooms and school cafeterias…all of the places, many of which don’t actually involve food, where we share our lives with each other…all of the places and moments where and when we feed and fill each other with that deep and ancient magic that is nothing less than God’s never-ending love that heals us and make us whole. And, most of all, when I think of table fellowship, I think of this table that we call an altar and that sits at the very center of the life we share in this place…where God in Christ is both host and the heavenly food we receive that fills us with power, supernatural energy to be Christ’s own hearts and hands in and for the world…to be and become ourselves a sort of love-suffused, spiritual food to help feed one another and a hungry world.
And, if the various, metaphorical and literal, tables that we gather around in this place and beyond are, indeed, God-provided opportunities to discover intimate, life-giving connections with God and each other, to be fed and filled with love, to grieve, to celebrate…to be shaped more and more into bread to feed a hungry world…then I think it is important to consider both how we eat together, what I might describe as our tables manners, and who we choose to eat with, who we invite to dine with us, who might need a place at the tables we set? And, these are the very questions that I believe Jesus is addressing at the dinner party he is invited to attend in this morning’s Gospel lesson.
Now, I have heard this section in Luke’s Gospel referred to as Jesus’ commentary on “ancient meal practices and ancient social stratification” …but, friends, there is nothing ancient about these top down, insider/outsider practices…unless you mean they have been around for a long time. In fact, they feel quite contemporary to me. For instance, they exist in every school cafeteria in this country, where kids are left out and made to feel unwelcome at certain tables and often end up sitting alone. And, I don’t mean to pick on our young people…for this is learned behavior…taught and modeled by grownups…every time we participate in producing a pecking order…every time we make room for some but not others…every time we form a relationship to provide ourselves some sort of social or professional advantage…every time we speak with animosity toward those who look, love, live and believe differently than we do. Make no mistake…our kiddos are paying attention. And, though, I believe we are trying really hard and more times than not…not all the time…but more times than not succeed in practicing good and Godly table manners at St. Julian’s, churches are, like all human organizations, often as exclusionary as any gilded age dinner party…sorely divided by race, socio-economics or political persuasion.
So, to return to that dinner party in our Gospel lesson, at a surface level, it may seem that Jesus, doing his best Emily Post impersonation, is simply trying to suggest the finer points of proper dinner party etiquette…regaling first the guests and then the host on the social advantages of practicing a sort of half-hearted humility that, in the end, brings ourselves honor…leads us to the best seat at the table…lifts us up to the top. But, friends, if willing to dig just a bit deeper, we see that Jesus is actually seeking a radical reversal of top down, insider/outsider relationships. And, he does so by inviting us to use our God given agency to make different sorts of choices about how we practice table fellowship and who we practice it with. To the guests at the dinner party, he suggests that those who humble themselves will be exalted. But, please note, Jesus is talking to all of the guests not just some. He is hoping they all are listening…that all will practice humility. And, what then logically follows is…if all do…all will also be exalted…all will be lifted up. Jesus is seeking to set us free from the chains of cultural contests of power and esteem, set us free from insider/outsider relationships and the barriers they create. For if all, including all of us, are choosing humility…that is recognizing the inherent dignity in each person created in God’s image, recognizing that we are all broken and beautiful, recognizing that we are all made from the same dust, recognizing that every person present belongs and has something to offer…then…then table magic is manifest…as authentic, life-giving connections are made between equals…as God’s love is freely shared and feasted upon that lifts everyone up, without exception, which is what it literally means to be exalted.
And, to the host Jesus suggests that what makes a guest list glitter is found in the generosity that it represents…in who it includes and not excludes. If asking first, in a spirit of generosity, who really needs to be included, who really needs to eat, who really needs a place of welcome and seat at the table…and then extend those invitations, we just might find our tables entirely transformed into a community that resembles more closely the rainbow colored people of God…and then, once again, table magic is manifest…as bread is broken, as new connections and friendships are made and as love is shared across difference and diversity…across disagreement…and hope and healing are made possible…all eat and are fed. As Henri Nouwen writes, “When we break bread and give it to each other, fear vanishes and God becomes very close.”
Friends, the Gospels are full of stories of Jesus at table. Including the story before us today, just the Gospel of Luke includes ten meals in his telling of Jesus’ ministry. That’s about a meal every other chapter, and those meals where with all sorts and conditions of people, including, his friends and followers, those considered outcasts and sinner, and those who considered him a threat or even an enemy. And, of course, all four Gospels end Jesus’ earthly ministry with the story of a meal, what we call the Last Supper. And, at that meal, which was a celebration of another meal that sits at the center of Jewish religious life the Passover feast…but at that meal…the Last Supper…Jesus instituted this meal that we share every Sunday in church…what we call the Lord’s Supper, or Mass, or Holy Communion or Holy Eucharist…or what I like to call our family meal. I will also note there are stories in two Gospels of Jesus eating with his followers after his resurrection from the dead, and, lastly, when Jesus spoke of life after death he often used imagery of a great heavenly banquet where there is no sorrow or pain only life, deeply connected with one another, from everlasting to everlasting. Oh, and he did call himself bread…or the Bread of Life to be specific.
Which is all just to say, I think that Jesus cared about table fellowship a whole lot…and cares a whole lot about how we eat together and who we invite to eat with us. And, I think this is because when we gather at the table and lean into each other…with God’s love being the true food shared between two or more people…heaven meets earth and earth meets heaven. As Nouwen says, “[F]ear vanishes and God becomes very close.” For, in such intimacy shared over such heavenly food, the hope of heaven, God’s people, all of them, standing shoulder to shoulder reconciled across difference and disagreement begins to emerge…and the heavens sing…wake up and pay attention…this is magic in our midst. Amen.