“Am I Welcome Around this Table?”

Listen to the sermon here.

Sometimes we may wonder if we are invited, wanted or worthy to be around the table of God?  Are we too new to the congregation?  What if we didn’t grow up in the church at all?  We might look or act differently than some others.  Maybe we come from a different denomination or country or speak a different language.  Or have a different relationship.  Or maybe we have doubts about the whole religion thing.  Or are tired and don’t thirst for God or hunger for righteousness anymore.  Or maybe we have done something we regret and wonder if God will accept us as we are.

You are not only invited, but wanted at this table.  You are needed here.  The good news, friends, is that the only criteria for being at the table is that we are open to being fed. 

Let us pray.  Spirit of the living God….

Luke tells us that Jesus was at a dinner party once at the house of a Pharisee, a leader in his day. It wasn’t a great fit. The guests questioned Jesus about healing on the Sabbath.  Jesus told the guests not to be too quick to take the best positions around the table.  He told them not to invite the well-of to dinner, but rather invite the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.  Then Jesus told a story about a man who held a similar dinner party.  He planned it and had the food prepared.  Then he called his guests to eat saying, “Everything is ready now.” But interestingly, the guests did not show up.  They made excuses not to attend.  The host was disappointed.  His response was to recruit instead the kind of people who rarely were invited to such a gathering —the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  The kind of folks the society, including the religious leaders, often excluded.  When there were still a few empty seats, the host sent his servants out saying, “Compel them to come in”—meaning, take the excluded people by the hand and lead them to their place at the table.  Connect with those folks and make sure they come to the table so that the house feels full.

Jesus makes a powerful statement here about what the table in his father’s house would be like in the kingdom of heaven. About what the kingdom of God on earth could be like. 

It’s good news. A place for everyone. Even those who normally are excluded have a place around the table.

Of course the host to whom Jesus was telling the story probably did not consider it good news. Jesus’ story was no doubt taken as a criticism by him. Our society could receive some similar criticism too. For we create or allow barriers of class and race and national origin. Our government reflects a divided electorate. Our economy reveals great inequality. Our denominations disagree and splinter.

Yet Jesus has a vision of a place at the table for everyone. As has been the way for many eras in many places, the table can be a place of unity. Food, drink and mealtimes have a way of bringing people together. 

Such is the spirit of World Communion Sunday. World Communion Sunday is broadly shared in the global Christian community, but originated in the Presbyterian Church in 1933. The hope was to share with the world the idea that the church is or ought to be united around the unconditional love of Jesus Christ, and that Christian congregations and people are interconnected with one another. 

I have been excluded from enough communion services in other denominations to know that one can’t take inclusion for granted. 

Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, writes of her family of origin, “I was the child of a Roman Catholic mother and a Presbyterian stepfather. A “mixed marriage” some of my mother’s side called it.  What they meant was that we were right and he was wrong. We had the truth and he did not. We would go to heaven. He?  At best uncertain.  But …deep down inside me, even then, the justice of that statement went begging.”[i]  Her stepfather was a good man. “What kind of God,” she found herself asking, “would burn the good because they belonged to the wrong church?”  “God save us from the smallness we practice in the name of religion,” she concluded.[ii]

I read her story and thought about my own children, born to a mother who grew up Catholic and a Presbyterian father.   Yet Bridget was part of a high school youth group at an evangelical Presbyterian church in California and I spent two years in a Catholic community in Connecticut, even helping serve communion.

Ours is a congregation with many people who grew up Presbyterian and many who did not. Many who grew up in another country and many who grew up in America. Many who were once Catholic and many who are married to someone Jewish. Some who are straight and some who are gay. Some who are Asian and African and white and Hispanic. Some who are conservative and some who are liberal. 

A meal where all are welcome is very Presbyterian. We have a chancel and a table around which to eat a meal with our Lord, not an altar. Altars are often used in churches where priests have special responsibility for the transformation of the elements. 

Presbyterians focus less on the transformation of the elements than of the people. To participate, we don’t have to adhere to a belief about what happens to the bread, we come to communion open to being spiritually fed. In communion people experience God in a way that is different from hearing scripture or reading or singing. The authority is not in the priest, the focus is on Christ as the host. He invites us all and all are included and empowered by his presence. Communion is not meant to be distant, it’s meant to be accessible and personal; connecting and unifying.  

Such feeling is needed in our world. Much like in the parables Jesus told in Luke’s Gospel, where the poor, the cripple, the blind and the lame, we make or allow our own categories of inclusion and exclusion. 

A history professor friend tells me that historian Martin Marty tells the famous story of a convention of historians years ago where one of the presentations was on Protestant clergy in the South in the mid-19^th century. It read, “They were moral, devout, learned, caring, and generous preachers. And to a man they defended slavery, claiming that it was biblically mandated and the will of God.” “How could they have been so blind?” the historians asked, until a wise one among them suggested that each write on a piece of paper, “What would make people a century from now ask of us, ‘How could they have been so blind?’”  The historians were unanimous: for us it’s poverty and the poor.  We live in a world of plenty where a billion people live on one dollar or less a day.  It is appropriate that World Communion Sunday is a time when we receive the annual Peacemaking Offering to share what we have with the world.

The Secretary General of the U.N. declared before the General Assembly a few weeks ago that the world seems on fire. Russia on the march. Ebola needing to be contained.  Gaza still a wreck. War in Iraq and Syria.

The first decade after its founding in the PCUSA, World Communion Sunday didn’t receive a lot of attention.

Then during World War II, the world was on fire,  people were just trying to make it through, just “trying to keep the world together,” as the son of the founder of World Communion Sunday put it.[iii]   World Communion Sunday took off and become popular not only in the Presbyterian church but all through Christendom, because it symbolized the effort to hold things together.  It emphasized that we are one in the Spirit and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”[iv]

Religion can unite but it also can divide.  The Hebrew Bible was full of laws which determined who was in and out.   The Book of Joshua contained ethnic superiority.  Underlining the Hebrew Bible is a sense of Israel as God’s chosen people.

Yet within the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Isaiah criticized society in the 8^th century.  He provided a vision of Heaven in Isaiah 25 writing, “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines….”  God’s feast is for all people, not just chosen people.   Even amidst a people who focused on a special identify is a sense of inclusion.  God makes all in God’s image, sustains all by God’s spirit, loves all with God’s grace, and invites all to God’s feast.

Henry Britton, a pastor in our Presbytery has written a wonderful book on welcoming based around another passage from Isaiah written a few centuries later after exile where God’s “House shall be a house of prayer for all people.” 

We seek to live out the words of Isaiah here at Bradley Hills.

Many churches have rectangular communion tables.  We have a circular table at BHPC, not a lot of sharp edges, always room for one more, no head but equal places for all. 

All are welcome in this place.  Yesterday, Bethesda Jewish Congregation had 600 people in this room celebrating Yom Kippur.  October 19, Rabbi Schnitzer will be preaching here as I preached at BJC in May.  On November 16 our two congregations will be joined by Idara e Jaferia mosque worshiping as three faiths together.

Historians tell us that in the earliest church all were welcome.   Women were treatment respectfully in ways they did not in the rest of the culture.  Slaves were welcome.  Jesus had dined with sinners and robbers.  Children were given special treatment.  Yet as Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire, the legal and organizational structures of the state took over.  Women were excluded from the church in ways that are only recently being corrected.  The church drew lines of exclusion based on sexual orientation which has finally been erased. 

Even as that important issue is finally being settled, the PCUSA risks becoming theologically, politically, regionally and numerically much less diverse unless it finds a way to keep those with more traditional views at the table.  On the other hand, our outreach as Presbyterians is allowing us to become more ethnically diverse. 

Jesus’ statements at the party in Luke’s Gospel were meant to encourage those who could dine with him to make room at the table for all.  Jesus we know had said: “I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me will never be hungry.”  For our global community to survive, we must be able to make room for those who are different from us.

In a world where religious wars in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, battles over who is chosen to live in certain land or conflicts about who can have enough to eat and drink tear people apart, where our denomination tries to heal from important, but costly battles, where our country approaches elections next month and where too many families split apart, what could be a more valuable focus for us as people of faith than the issue of how to make room to include each other.

We don’t get to invite and disinvite people to the ultimate heavenly banquet.  For the truth is someone could find something wrong with you and me as well.  If he wanted to exclude us, our host could come up with a million reasons you and I aren’t worthy to be at the table either.  It’s only God’s gift of grace which allows us to be here too.  None of us are worthy to be around this table.  But all of us are invited.  So, as a good friend reminds me, our task is to practice good table manners.  And leave the guest list to God.

Theologian William Barclay suggests that when Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “In my father’s house there are many rooms,” one interpretation is that he means that in heaven there is room for all.[v]  Barclay writes, “An earthly house becomes overcrowded, an earthly inn must sometimes turn away the weary traveler because its accommodations are exhausted. It is not so with our Father’s house, for heaven is as wide as the heart of God and there is room for all.”[vi]

There is nothing more basic to the human condition than food and drink. Our Lord invites all who are willing to be fed to his table; to his heavenly banquet. For the host will only be satisfied when his house feels full. May it be so. Amen.