COME TO THE TABLE
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14
This week’s focusing theme from our Seasons of the Spirit resource is “Open Table.” This title brought back fond memories of a good friend and colleague. Ellen Sims was a seminary student at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio when I was interim pastor in Granville. Ellen is a gifted preacher, pastor, writer and singer. Before entering seminary, she had taught English at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Born and raised Southern Baptist in Mobile, Alabama, Ellen had come late to her calling to ministry. Still, the call was clear and powerful and right. In my second year in Granville, Ellen, along with her friend, Gini Lohmann Bauman, a former attorney, who also accepted her call to ministry in mid-life, served as interns at First Baptist, Granville. Along with Heather Rittenhouse, our very part-time pastoral associate, we had a wonderful staff team, more than a church that size could ever have afforded professionally.
What made me think of Ellen was that her field education project was to develop a ministry for the church with the students at Denison University. Did I forget to mention that Ellen was a fine cook? Well, she and I reasoned that the way to a student’s heart was through the stomach, so she devised a program of free dinners to which all students were invited. She named this ministry “Open Table” and indeed it was. Delicious dinners were laid out for students – who, of course, did not come down from the hill to sit and eat in the church parlor. Eventually, we decided that, if the students were not going to come to us, we would take the meal to them. Several times during the course of that year, we took dinner up the hill and spread the open table for the gay/straight alliance at the University. Did that lure the students into our vaulted Victorian sanctuary on Sunday mornings? I can’t say that it did. Was it a program of genuine Christian hospitality? It was.
Ellen may have been a little disheartened by the results of her efforts, but a vision of radical hospitality took root in her. When she and her husband, George, moved back to Mobile, Ellen, who had been ordained in a moving ceremony in Granville, believed that she would be unemployable as an ordained woman in that deeply conservative, Deep South community. Surprisingly, the pastor of a suburban Southern Baptist church, offered to hire her as an associate. This in and of itself was an act of radical hospitality in that setting. In fact, it got that church kicked out of its local association and the Alabama Baptist Convention. Some of you may remember praying for Ellen and her congregation when they were going through that turmoil.
Unfortunately, the pastor’s hospitality only reached so far. He was 75 years old and had been called from retirement to pastor this church. In many ways he was old school and could not see his way clear to letting Ellen exercise the full range of her many gifts for ministry. He kept her under a tight rein and severely limited what he would allow her to do in the church. Eventually, Ellen became so frustrated she decided to do what she always thought she would have to do in Mobile – start a new church.
Since there seemed to be no progressive congregation of any sort in the Mobile area, it was ready for the planting of a church that would meet the needs of spiritually hungry people who did not find their needs met in the more traditional congregations. What I like about this new church start is that it is called Open Table and its doors are truly open to whomever will come. In a setting in which welcome has been denied or only partially offered, Ellen is trying to provide a ministry that is radically inclusive. According to their mission statement, Open Table is to be a “community of faith…that follows Jesus’ Way. Its ministry will be marked by Christian love, biblical hospitality, grace-filled inclusion, and a commitment to God’s peace and justice” – hard words to hear in Mobile – and many other places where people claim to be Christian.
I think this is precisely the kind of challenge that Jesus brings to his audience in today’s ancient word, the challenge of radical hospitality. It is a challenge the writer of Luke takes up a generation after Jesus and lays before the emerging church as it struggles to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. And I think it is a challenge that comes down to us today as we wrestle with knowing the sort of congregation that we are called to be in our own setting. We have identified hospitality as a core dimension for a Christian community of faith, but we also recognize that it is not easily practiced in a rather apathetic and sometimes hostile environment.
Luke says Jesus was going to the house of a leading Pharisee for dinner – again! This is the third such incident in Luke’s gospel. None of these are very comfortable experiences for Jesus. In each case, it seems that he is invited to provide a sort of perverse “entertainment” for his hosts. “Let’s bring this upstart into our lair and see if we can’t trap him into betraying himself as the heretic we believe he is.” Actually, there are scholars who see Jesus as having more affinity with the Pharisees than any group operating in Israel at the time. It is not clear how hostile these encounters were, but clearly Jesus refuses to conform to expectations. He may have had Pharasaic leanings, but he was not about to embrace their agenda at the expense of his own vision of the reign of God.
The tables would have been arranged in a U shape with the reclining guests facing inward. Part of the point of this dinner would have been the repartee around the table during the meal. The most important guest, the focus of attention, the “star,” if you will, would have been the at the very center, much as we see Jesus in DaVinci’s famous painting of “The Last Supper.” Here though, Luke seems to think that the Pharisees have invited Jesus in order to humiliate him publicly. His statement that they were “watching him closely” implies a hostile bent.
Of course, Jesus never shies away from their traps. Before they can even sit down to dinner, he heals a man, even though it is the sabbath. His challenge to them – “Is it lawful to cure people on the sabbath, or not?” – is met with silence. They have no easy answer for him. They know that healing the man, sabbath or not, is both common and popular practice. Jesus has demonstrated that “if a person needed healing, then the Sabbath was actually the most appropriate day for performing it” (Richard B. Vinson, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary: Luke, p. 481.) None is so pure as to take him on.
It seems a curious thing to find the guests now scrambling for the best seats at the table. Surely a proper host would have already assigned the seating in accordance with social standing and, in Jesus’ case, notoriety. For whatever reasons, this host allows a somewhat egalitarian scramble, as the pride and vanity of the guests comes out full force. Jesus’ commentary on the scene is full of irony. It’s not exactly a parable, but what he says turns the table on their shameful behavior.
It is absurd to think that the one who had grabbed the best seat would willingly give it up to be sent to the lowest place. If a host were to so shame his guest, that guest would likely leave in embarrassment and anger. And no one would take the lowest place in hopes of moving up. This would not be true humility; it would be hypocrisy. “Oh look at me. I’m so humble, I’m sure to get a better seat, when every notices my humility.” What Jesus is really doing here is poking fun at the whole shame and honor system. “Do you think God really gives a fig about who sits where at God’s table? It’s not about status, friends. It’s about who is present and who is absent. Yes, you can invite your friends or family or rich neighbors. Yes, you can create a whole exclusive social network of reciprocal dinner invitations. But that’s just not how it is in the reign of God. It’s the poor, crippled, lame and blind who find themselves seated at God’s table.
God’s table is an Open Table. Improbably, “the wolf [sit] with the lamb, the leopard…with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together…The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall [dine] together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox” (Isaiah 11:6-7.) All sorts of riff-raff – sick, homeless, unclean, inadequate, marginalized people will find places at that table. And, friends, if you want to partake in the feast, you better grab a chair wherever you find one and not worry about who’s on either side. You may even be surprised to find what a blessing that strange, welcomed guest is to you, that one you thought not good enough, not worth your time or energy, too disgusting to engage. That’s the challenge Jesus is laying out for his dinner hosts. That’s the challenge he’s laying out for us. Come to the table – this table, God’s open table, the one where all are welcome and the honored are the neglected and forgotten. Come to the table where it’s an honor just to have a place, where it’s enough just to be, to be you!
We wrestle with this invitation, don’t we? We have definite ideas about church. We know the kind of people we’d prefer to associate with. We’re OK with sending our mission money. In fact, we’re pretty generous on that account. But it’s difficult to practice radical hospitality when our neighbors are billionaires and we’re surrounded by privilege and luxury. It’s a challenge when we don’t have the energy or wherewithal to be out and about. And, when we are, the needs we see seem enormous, overwhelming. But Jesus doesn’t shy away from the challenge. And we’re not allowed to shy away either. Taking up this challenge is part of the cost of discipleship. We’re called again and again to live into this reality, this ever-emerging reign of God. What is eternally good for news for you and me and all the world is that the invitation goes on – and on and on – come to the table, God’s open table. No one is turned away; there is still room for us all. Amen.