THE WELCOME TABLE
Ms. Kara Reagan, preaching
November 4, 2007
Texts: Mark 2:16, Luke 14: 15-24
Second Baptist Church, St. Louis
Food. Eating. It is a necessity of life, but often it
is overlooked as a practice. I was raised in a small Southern Baptist church in
the country. Every time there was a major church event, we had a big feast. If
the family had something major occur, we'd eat. We still do.
Never did I so focus on food as when I went off to
college and was cut off from all the familiar foods I'd known my entire life.
Those first years of college, I always went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas,
so I never managed to miss a major family meal until second semester. So, my
freshman year of college, I sought a place, outside of the dreaded campus
cafeteria to spend my Easter dinner. I was an active member of the local Baptist
Student Union, and they had said they were going to have a meal on Easter. When
I arrived at the United States Air Force Academy and Colorado Springs Metro
Baptist Student Union, I saw the ping-pong table bedecked with plastic cups and
paper plates, mayo-based coleslaw, wonder bread, some sort of bean dish and
tuna. Not even really tuna salad, it was un-drained, canned tuna with a scant
smidgen of pickle relish--on paper plates, served on a ping pong table. This was
the highlight of our meal together. Me, sitting by myself whilst all the cadets
paired off together. Although I had been welcomed to this table by their
invitation, I did not find much welcome when I got there, not by the people and
most certainly by the focus of that invitation, the Easter dinner of scummy
tuna.
Flash forward a year later. By then, I'd been
introduced to the Colorado College Catholic Community. I was working on getting
a grant from the Catholic-based fund on campus and given that I knew next to
nothing about Catholicism, I began to partake in the CCCC's weekly activities.
It was in this process that I discovered the beauty of daily evening prayer and
that, ironically, the Catholics had the best Bible study on campus. The main
focus of our week, however, was the Thursday night community supper. Melissa,
our campus minister, was famous for her food, which, at its most decadent,
involved a great deal of butterfat. I was, by Easter of my sophomore year, a
regular member of the CCCC and had learned in those few short months in their
midst that I'd be a fool to chance another Easter with the Baptists.
I was not let down. That fateful Easter occurred
almost 9 years ago and I still remember what we had for dinner. My friend Mike
had been put in charge of preparing the pork loin, of which he had been given
two. One he surrounded with potatoes and carrots and seasoned with rosemary and
other spices, the other was stuffed with figs and apricots with a raisin,
apricot, fig glaze. Fresh fruits and sumptuously prepared vegetables awaited the
honored place of side dish on our plates and all this was capped off by dessert.
Leave it to a woman with a love of butterfat rich desserts who has spent the
previous 40 days fasting from those indulgences to produce a worthily, wonderful
Easter dessert. It was not one, there was a plethora. The whole meal up to that
point had been a experience of excess and the dessert was no exception. Of
every thing proffered, the one that stands out was the chocolate mousse cake. At
some point in this festal celebration, I had recounted my meal of the previous
year and that meal soon became legendary in the CCCC--it became the embodiment
of the antithesis of what it meant to gather together as a community and break
bread together. Every time we gathered together, it was hard to get left out of
the conversation--and the food? Well, it wasn't always Easter, but even when we
ordered pizza or in Lent when we dined on simple soups for our Thursday meal, it
was good food offered in love, and it brought us into communion.
Oddly enough, it was at Communion--in the weekly mass
that we celebrated together--that members of the Catholic Community managed to
find exclusion. In the one meal, meant to remember the dismembered
body of Christ we, as a community found dismemberment. It broke the heart
of our community, but it did not break the community. I respect the teachings of
the Catholic church in this matter. I respect the fact that theologians have
prayed over and deeply considered the bounds of inclusion at table fellowship in
the mass. I know that the teaching comes from the desire to have the Eucharist
"not bring condemnation" to a person. But for all this, I must respectfully
disagree.
Today is the first Sunday of the month and here at
Second Baptist, that means it is the day we celebrate, we remember Christ's last
supper with his disciples. But that "last supper" was not the only supper.
Throughout the history of Christianity, there has been
a tendency to focus on the bookends of Jesus' life--his birth and his death--to
the detriment of his lived and preached gospel that was the focus of his
ministry. When we look at Jesus' ministry, we see that it was built around the
table--built around "the Welcome Table"
As my seminary friends can attest, we spend a lot
of time discussing table customs in ancient Israel and Palestine and Jesus'
radical hospitality. For the rest of the world who is blessed not to have been a
part of all those long conversations, the best way to clue you in is to turn
your attention to the movie Mean Girls. In the film, the new girl at
school, who up to this point has been homeschooled in Africa, is trying to
assimilate into a suburban American high school. And one of the first things
she’s given by her new friends is a map of the lunch room. Each table has its
assigned group—the jocks at one table, cheerleaders at another, a. v. geeks, a
listers, z listers. Each group is distinct, and the bounds of those groups
cannot be crossed unless one is invited to the table.
Tables define community—intentionally or not.
Intentionally, here at Second, we form our worship community around the table.
Not the choir, not the windows, not the preacher or the lectors who stand to
either side—but the table is the focal point of this sanctuary. Unintentionally,
here at Second, we manage to exclude people from our table at coffee fellowship.
When we sit at the tables downstairs, we create mini-communities, and it can be
difficult to break into one of those small table communities. I doubt it comes
from intent, but it happens. We exclude others from our table fellowship by
simply not seeing them—by being too focused on our own matters to see the other
standing by us, longing to join in.
In our focus text for today, Christ is welcomed into
the home of Simon, a Pharisee. While they're at dinner, a "woman of the
city"--in other words, a prostitute--interrupts them by cracking open a jar of
very expensive ointment and anointing Jesus' feet with the oil and with her own
tears, wiping his feet clean with her hair. Anointing Jesus' feet, the
bare nasty feet that have trod through filth and refuse. One of the filthiest
parts of Jesus body is being cleaned by one of the dirtiest women in the
city--naturally Simon is affronted--this whole scene is an assault on a plethora
of social taboos—like an a. v. nerd going to the varsity jocks’ table—her very
presence brings shame to both Jesus and Simon and Jesus doesn't care.
To get a feel for just how uncomfortable this scene
would have been, has anyone here seen the movie Borat? In it, there's a scene
where Borat, the Kazakhstani journalist gets invited to a nice, genteel
upper-middle class home for dinner. When he shows up at the door, the family
tries to hide their shock when they realize he's brought a prostitute with him
to dinner. They try, throughout the course of their time together to be polite
and hospitable to Borat and his "friend" but by the end the family and the
viewers are left with the most profound sense of discomfort. By the conclusion
of the scene, the family is at wit's end. It's a painful scene to watch, you
find yourself wanting to strangle Borat for being such an inconsiderate clod.
And yet, this is what Jesus did. This is what Jesus invited people to--a table
where "saints" and "sinners" eat from the same bowl, drink from the same cup. A
table where social distinctions are forgotten, where the clean associate with
the unclean, where the line between righteous and sinner is erased.
Look at the parable of the wedding feast in Luke 14. A
great feast was prepared, and the host invited his guests, but those who were
first invited refused the invitation. So the host sent out again, looking for
people to attend the feast. Eventually the invitation is extended to any and
everyone who will simply show up. With such an open invitation, there’s no way
of knowing who you might be seated next to. Maybe an “honorable” person--a judge
or doctor or a cleric. Maybe a “sinner”—a loan shark, a murderer, a homeless man
who lives on the street and hasn’t bathed in months. The invitation is for
everyone—regardless of what they’ve done, good or bad; who they’ve married,
woman or man; who they’ve divorced or who has divorced them—all are
invited.
According to the gospel of John, Christ began his
ministry with a miracle at a wedding feast. In Cana, Christ turned water into
wine. But it's not just any wine, it's not the 2 Buck Chuck you serve to a bunch
of drunks who won't know the difference--the people at the wedding feast had
been partying for days and Jesus turns the water into fine wine. It
doesn't matter to him that it will largely be wasted on a crowd who's, well,
largely wasted. He gives them the best there is to offer. In the parable of the
wedding feast, he taught that all one had to do was accept the invitation to the
feast. In this act, this miracle of turning water into wine, we see that the
feast is not a bare-bones meal of scummy tuna, it is a banquet.
One of my favorite stories in the gospels is at found
at the end of John. After the resurrection, Christ meets his disciples by the
shore, blessing their fishing endeavors with an overabundance. Their nets are
literally bursting with fish, but they fail to recognize that it’s Jesus calling
to them from the shore until he invites them to “Come have breakfast!” And once
he says that, they can't get back to the shore fast enough. There is no
discussion of who is invited. There is no discussion of whether or not Peter
should be allowed to join in given his threefold betrayal. Christ takes them as
they are and invites them all to the table. And who comes to the table first?
It's Peter, the one in most need of righting his relationship. Like the woman
with the jar, it doesn’t matter that she’s breaking the social code, it doesn’t
matter that Peter has water and waves to contend with—they’re desperate for the
relationship they find at the table. The other disciples waited semi-patiently
in the boat, but Peter jumped out and swam to shore. Peter, who so adamantly
avowed his unwavering loyalty, Peter who denied Christ three times in one night,
Peter who until this point in John's gospel had not made amends for that
three-fold betrayal, Peter is the first one welcomed to the table. When we
gather together at table in the bond of Christ, there is no outcast. Indeed, at
Christ's table, not only are we fed by the elements of the meal, but we
ourselves become nourishment for one another by our shared presence. The
community created at the shared table feeds us as much or more than the bread
and cup of which we partake. A friend of mine, Father Andrew Ciferni once put it
this way,
" All creation is called to the table and
all are offered the same food and drink. . . . There is a radical conversion
in accepting membership in an assembly of strangers who become friends not
because we get to know one another's face, names, histories and socio-economic
ranking, but because Christ calls us friends and makes us food and drink for one
another. To be called into and to accept membership in that widest of
circles is to be freed for banqueting that cannot but be expressed in the
fullness of human celebration whose form is food and wine."
We will always be faced with disagreements—in our
groups, in our communities and in our churches. It is an unfortunate
manifestation of our separation from one another and from God. Nonetheless,
Christ calls us as we are to love and serve God and creation. All have equal
access to Christ’s banquet, they need only to respond to the invitation and
"Come, have breakfast!"
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