Foothill Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ Labor Day Sunday

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94022 September 2, 2007

LET’S BE THE CHURCH

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14

Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of summer. I know school has started already for some, and many of the retired are about to take their vacations now, but Labor Day usually gets us thinking of changing gears as we enter the Fall season. Are you planning to do something special this weekend? Have a picnic? Invite family over for dinner? Make reservations at an air-conditioned restaurant if it stays warm? Isn’t it interesting how all our special moments are usually surrounded with food. Celebrate a birthday and you have to have a cake. You can’t have a wedding shower without food. And the most expensive part of the wedding itself is the reception. Graduation calls for, at least, a barbecue. All the passages of our lives are marked with a feast.

Equally important is table etiquette. Not how you hold your fork, or whether you eat with your mouth open, or burp after each course (which is polite in some cultures), but who is invited and who is not, where one is seated at the table and who has to stand on the edge the crowd. Invited guests are given places of honor, those less well known are assigned seats further out, while those serving often stand in the kitchen and grab a bite between courses.

I’ve always found it fascinating that the first restaurants to be integrated in the United States were lunch counters where people ate standing, and the last places were the exclusive clubs where you still have to be invited to eat.

To be welcomed at the table is an ancient tradition. It is part of our social DNA. Tim Condor (Christian Century August 21, 2007, p. 18) writes that “In the ancient Eastern world , the symbolic and instructional reality of the table was exponentially expanded because the gathering and preparation of food was the day’s primary task. In Arabic, the root word for bread and life is the same (esh). This unbreakable link between the table and one’s survival was clear – a reality often forgotten in our fast-food-restaurant-on-every-corner world, where food appears on demand.”

Every moment one gathered to eat was, therefore a sacred moment, because it might very well be your last – or at least, your last for a long time until the next harvest comes in. So sacred was the table that it was required to offer table hospitality to strangers, travelers, those on a journey.

The writer of Hebrews encourages the church to keep the tradition. Let love be genuine. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it (1-2). The writer is referring to the story of Abraham and Sarah who are visited by two strangers. They are told they will be blessed by God with children, sons, though Sarah is 90 and Abraham “as good as dead” so the text says.

In this context, we should note how much of Jesus teaching was given while sharing food: Wedding in Cana; Mary and Martha; feeding the 5,000; Zachaeus; at least four dinners with the Pharisees including today’s gospel lesson; the Last Supper; the dinner at Emmaus on the day of resurrection; and, another post resurrection story, eating with the disciples on the beach. At the end of Matthew we have the image of the Great Banquet which is Jesus’ parable of God’s great, inclusive welcome of all the peoples of the world. This is what it will be like. We will all be welcomed to the feast.

Given the importance of food in both symbol and substance, it is not surprising that so many of Jesus’ teachings were at the table, because the table was an expression of his culture’s deepest values. Life is to be celebrated. Thanksgiving is to be offered for our many blessings. Survival, the gift of today is not to be taken for granted. The table is the place where we are encouraged to act kindly, do justly, walk humbly with our God, as the prophets taught.

The welcome table is a call to open our hearts to the sojourner on the way. It is a call to become vulnerable to the unknown other, who just may end up being the person we need to know. Lewis Donelson writes: “This openness to another necessitates a willingness to share more than food and shelter, a willingness to share one’s own self. Instead of wary guardedness, we Christians are called to open our hearts, simply and humbly, and trust God about what happens next.”

This means taking a risk in a world of risk management. Shouldn’t we control the invitation list? We don’t want just anybody coming to dinner, do we? This may be fine if we are holding a party for our two-year old, or we want to control our teens graduation party, but when it comes to the church we have to ask, “Who is the host?” This is not really our house, you know. It is God’s house, and Jesus has sent out the invitations.

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, wrote a wonderful short story called “The Welcome Table.” (In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, pp 81-87).

“The Welcome Table” tells the story of a nameless, old black woman, “the color of poor gray Georgia earth,” who has been worn down by old king cotton. Dressed in shabby, raggedy clothes she makes her way one Sunday “down the road toward the big white church,” a church that is white in many ways.

The good church folk are shocked. The reverend reminds her pleasantly that this isn’t her church, “as it one could choose the wrong one.” She brushes past them all and finds a seat near the back. Inside it is very cold, colder than usual. She ignores the request of an usher that she leave, but the ladies finally insist and their husbands hurl her out. She is stunned, bewildered, and starts to sing a sad song.

Then she spies a familiar face coming down “the long gray highway.” She grins toothlessly and giggles with joy. For it is none other than Jesus, and he is walking toward her. When he came close, he said, “Follow me” and she “bounded down to his side with all the bob and speed of one so old.” The two of them walk on together. She tells him her troubles, and he listens kindly, smiling warmly. Under their feet the ground becomes like clouds, and they walk on without ever stopping. They are home.

The people in the church never knew what happened to her. Some said they saw her jabbering to herself and walking off down the highway alone. “They guessed maybe she had relatives across the river, some miles away, but none of them really knew.” That’s how the story ends, “none of them really knew.”

This story of church in the segregated south may seem a little foreign to us, until we ask ourselves who have we excluded from the table. It may not have been as explicit as throwing someone out the door, but more a question of benign neglect. We forgot to send the invitation. You know, I am not sure they would be comfortable here.

Somewhere I picked up the quote “a God who picks and chooses is no God at all. It is an idol to human hubris.” We have the tendency to make our God look like ourselves, and when we worship ourselves we fall into idolatry. We mistake the fragment of God we choose to see from the whole of God’s reality.

Walker’s story “The Welcome Table” never mentions a table except under the title it quotes an old spiritual:

I’m gonna sit at the Welcome table…

Shout my troubles over…

Walk and talk with Jesus…

Tell God how you treated me…

One of these days!

We are welcome at the table and we are enjoined to welcome others. This is an open table and all are welcome here “of every ability, age, ethnicity, family or economic status, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief and ethnic origin.” We are an inclusive church that affirms the right of each person to be here as part of the family of faith.