Repurposed | Table

FBCGSO Sermons

Sunday’s sermon continued our summer sermons on Jesus’ parables – “Repurposed” – remembering that in describing the Kingdom of God, Jesus never asked people to leave their world. He imagined it in ordinary and everyday things, repurposed to make known the Kingdom. Read or listen to the sermon below.
https://fbcgso.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/09-04-2016_sermon.mp3

Luke 14

Throughout the Sundays of this summer, we have been listening again to the parables of Jesus, with an ear especially for the ways that Jesus takes the ordinary, everyday elements of our world and re-purposes them to tell us something about the extraordinary Kingdom of God – this realm where God’s love is known fully. And Jesus keeps telling us that we don’t have to leave our world to know it. We don’t to go someplace else. It is near to us any time we live our lives with that purpose of the kingdom – we can know it in baking bread, or planting seed… we can know it in our family relationships, or in the work of our hands… we can know it on familiar roads… we can know it sitting around a table.

It’s as powerful an image as we have of our life together as a church – and of the invitation into the life of God. The table. At every turn through the pages of Scripture you find it. The Passover meal in Egypt was eaten around a table. Many of Israel’s grand, dramatic stories occur around tables. The disciples of Jesus gather around the table on their last night with Jesus. And then, some days later, when they thought it was all over and wondered if he would keep his promise and make it back to them, two of his disciples have their eyes opened to a risen Christ while breaking bread with him at a table.

–The Best Supper by Jan Richardson

It is at the table that we meet Christ and find one another. And we know this as we gather at the table of our Lord for communion. But also we also know it at other tables, at the literal tables of our church, seated across from one another. Tables that are set up and reconfigured. Just today, we sat around tables in Sunday School; we gathered in the atrium as we came around a table set with coffee as we met our new Pastoral Resident. Tables are set up under the trees for lunch after worship, and as we prepare for the fall schedule, tables wait to be set for our weekly community meal, or youth snack supper, or community meetings, or handbell rehearsal, or a bereavement meal, as a grieving family are embraced by this congregation, or for a mission fair, as we remember the many ways we seek to love our neighbors, or for a monthly staff lunch, as our ministers and staff join together in the work to which we are called, or a committee meeting, as we dedicate ourselves to the care and growth of this congregation.

At these tables we come to know Christ and one another, and we can think of all those we see as we gather there, but this parable this morning is also about those we don’t see.

I had a college religion professor who would enter his classroom each day and, before taking the podium, carefully grab a chair and place it at his teaching table. Each day the same routine: enter the room, grab the nearest chair, place it at the table, and proceed to the podium. He was an active teacher, always pacing and scribbling on the dry erase board, never one to sit. In fact, the semester continued without the teacher ever sitting down in the chair.

So one curious student – one of those students on the front row (you know the type) – finally raised her hand to ask a question that many students had thought to themselves: “Professor, we’ve seen your routine each day. You always place a chair at the table but you’ve never sat down. Why do you need the chair?”

The Professor answered, “I’m glad you noticed. This chair stays empty as a reminder to us. It reminds us of all those absent from this room. We talk about scripture and theology, but there are so many that will never come through that door, so many perspectives we will never encounter, so many voices we will never hear. This chair is here to remind us of all those absent from our table.”

The host in our parable today had arranged the chairs just so. He had been clearly schooled in the ways of hospitality that many of us know.

I’ve been to some of your homes, and I know how well you have perfected this art.

You’re the kind of hosts that wait expectantly and watch from the window so you can greet your guests before they even make it to the front door. You know how to arrange the table with spectacle and grace and fine place settings. This sanctuary is full of the kind of hosts that refuse to sit down until all guests are satisfied, and even then sit at that seat nearest the kitchen, ready to make a swift move if anyone runs out of sweet tea.

Maybe you’re the host in charge of planning the family gatherings. You set the table with a centerpiece and cute little placecards – placecards decorated with a little turkey or an evergreen that matches your “motif.” Everyone has their spot. You put the rowdy child at a seat within his mother’s reach (that’s where I always sat), and the uncle that likes to talk politics is put down on the end next to the aunt that knows how to handle him. The seats are arranged just so.

That’s hospitality.

Jesus is seated at the table as he tells the story; it’s where he spent much of his own time.

In Jesus’ day, the table was not only the setting for eating and drinking. It was also a site for symbolic communication – what anthropologists call “the language of meals.”

And nowhere does Jesus speak it more clearly than in the gospel of Luke, which has more meal-time scenes, more tables set, than any other gospel.

It doesn’t matter whether the eating happens in Emmaus, an Upper Room, or the fields along the road (plucking the heads of grain); in the home of a despised tax collector (Levi, in chapter five) or even those of respectable religious leaders who invite Jesus to join them: like Simon the Pharisee, in chapter seven, and here, in chapter fourteen, another, unnamed leader of the Pharisees who offers Jesus hospitality for the Sabbath dinner.

The table was a symbol of social relationships. The word for “banquet” that we find in our text literally means “an act of acceptance.” So when Jesus sat down at table with someone, it was a way of saying to that person “I accept you” and a way of telling others, “I associate with this person…she’s one of my people…if you see him in the marketplace you can ask him about me.”

I found myself this week in a place I have not been since 1998 – the Principal’s office. I had a visit with Assistant Principal and First Baptist’s own Ryan Moody at Grimsley – it was much more pleasant than my last visit to the principal, and it was great to see some of our First Baptist students walking the halls between classes.

Our prayers have been with all of our students returning to school this week amidst the rigors and challenges of school – but between the classroom and the lockers there is that most difficult of schooltime challenges – the cafeteria tables.

One of the great existential crises of my life was at age 12, coming to the end of the line my first day of middle school: “Where will I sit?”

Lunchrooms can become mini societies, and they remind us how easily and naturally we huddle together with those who remind us of ourselves. Those like us, who share our level of privilege, or power, or possibility; we have a symbolic communication of our own.

Now a more strategic Messiah might have played things a little differently – might have teamed up with movers and shakers,schmoozed with the well-connected that could make things happen for him. But Jesus seemed to find his way to tables filled with broken people. The kind of people we hear about in Luke chapter 7, verse 22, when Jesus is summing up his ministry to the disciples of John – “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.” Poor, crippled, lame, blind…these were some of the people with whom Jesus was inclined to gather, yet they’re the last the host invites in the parable today, but they’re always present at the table Jesus imagines, because they were with him throughout his life, seated across from him. He opened bottles of wine with these people and listened to their stories late into the night.

And so, when we find Jesus in Luke 14, you can almost picture him shifting uneasily in his seat. Here he is, at a private party, in the home of a well-connected leader. He seems to be enjoying the food, he’s on his second glass of grape juice, he seems happy. Then he addresses his host.

“Good party, friend…great food, fine wine…but why am I seated here next to your rich neighbor and your favorite uncle? And why all these empty seats? Where are my people? Were their invitations lost in the mail? Don’t you know, when you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends and relatives or your rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”

If you invite Jesus to a banquet, he shows up with a guest list in his pocket.

Don’t be strategic. Don’t go for reciprocity. Be extravagantly, forgetfully generous. Invite the most unlikely, most unexpected of guests into your home and share that most necessary, most enjoyable experience of eating together.

And the message is this: why have we not organized ourselves like this? Why isn’t that what is natural for us?

“The poor, lame, crippled, blind…”

When we read the guest list, we’re almost tempted to change the venue. I admit, I would be much more comfortable if Jesus had said, invite these people to your Soup Kitchen, your food drive, or your Christmas giveaway. These are the things we do well–feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give water to the thirsty. But we should also hear Jesus say to us your mission is bigger than these things, more powerful than food and water, more demanding than a toy drive. It also involves sitting down, looking across, lifting our eyes, at a table.

This is not the guest list for a benefit…it’s the guest list for a banquet. An intimate, face-to-face gathering. A meal of acceptance, where we declare something about ourselves and our associations.

Everywhere else we are separated by class, status, physical ability, but at the banquet, we are seated at the same table, side by side, face to face.

Our world is not set up for banquets. We’re too busy, too preoccupied; we have too many excuses.

We don’t see it in our lunchrooms, or in our churches, or in our places of work.

So often hospitality just becomes domesticated, confused with comfort, a kind of eco-system of inviting that keeps the welcome circulating among those we feel most comfortable around. Our relationship to the stranger often comes in the form of generosity offered from a distance, rather than relationship up close and personal.

But in fact the Greek word for hospitality means “love of the stranger”. Hospitality is ‘love of the stranger’, and at some point, when you sit down together, the stranger is no longer strange. And maybe that is the Kingdom of God.

Because if we look closely, we will realize, we don’t make the seating chart; we don’t offer the invitation; this is not actually our table after all.

And the invitation has already been sent out: “come all you who are weary and heavy burdened…come all you who are thirsty…all you that hunger come.”

And that’s you…and that’s me! See, we’re on the list. And at some point we experienced the invitation of Jesus, and have encountered that grace in our lives that said wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, you’re welcome here. You’re home; you’re safe; you can be new, and perhaps we’re even experiencing it here and now in a new way.

And one day we will arrive at a banquet, and before you even ring the doorbell, the door will swing wide and the arms of the host will welcome you. You will be shown to a table spread full with food and drink and a seat saved for you. And on one end sits your neighbor, and down on the other you see your favorite uncle. But as you sit down, you notice the seats around you, to your right and left and across the table, are not yet filled…only placecards mark the spot. So you stretch to read the names. You’re curious to see who’s sitting next to you. But I have a hunch you already know what these placecards say. They say, “poor, crippled, lame, and blind.”

Oh God, let this kingdom come on earth…on earth…

Amen.