Grace Presbyterian Church
May 3, 2015, Easter 5B
Luke 15:1-2; 24:13-35
A Table That Rejects Rejection
“A riot is the
language of the unheard.”
These words,
spoken in an address by Rev. Martin Luther King in March 1968 (only a few weeks
before his own assassination), have gained fresh currency and citation in the
wake of numerous events in the past year, from the disturbances in Ferguson,
Missouri to this past week’s events in Baltimore.
The statement gets
at some truth; rioters in most cases don’t riot in expectation that anything will
change; quite the opposite – riots happen precisely because those rioting are
convinced that nothing will ever change. And they are convinced that nothing
will ever change because they are convinced that no matter what they say, no
matter how desperate their situation or how many promises are made, no one in
fact is hearing their concerns, no on is interested in their troubles; no one
listens.
In truth, though,
I’m not quite sure that this applies to all such situations. What were the
unheard cries of those who rioted in San Francisco last October, after the
Giants won the World Series? Or in Lexington, Kentucky, just a few weeks ago,
after the Kentucky Wildcats were eliminated in the NCAA Final Four in
basketball? Oh, I forgot. We don’t call those “riots.” We call those “unruly
behavior.”
For now city
officials in Baltimore are looking at weeks of not only pursuing charges
related to the riots or the police-custody death that served as the immediate
trigger (though by no means the underlying cause) of those riots. At the same
time, those same officials can no longer look away from the crushing economic
inequities that generate despair and anger, hopelessness and resignation, and
(when some triggering event occurs) violence. Promises made and forgotten can no
longer be deferred.
We have to
acknowledge, though, that “the unheard” do not always come to our attention
because of events like those in Baltimore. Unless someone in congregation has
harboring plans to climb Mount Everest, it’s unlikely that this congregation
has spent much time, collectively or individually, thinking about the nation of
Nepal before this week. At last report the death toll from last week’s
earthquake in that country had reached a horrifying threshold of more than six
thousand lives lost. Beyond that staggering toll, the loss to that nation is
incalculable; countless homes and other structures have been destroyed, and
numerous artifacts of Nepali culture – temples and artworks, for example – have
been lost.
It’s probably not
unfair to speak of the people of Nepal as “unheard” – though there may not
necessarily be any hostility involved, Nepal is simply a long way from the
everyday average concerns of most Americans, including most American
Christians. And let’s be honest; if it doesn’t involve us, our immediate
family, our local church, or our immediate community, we Americans are prone
not to think about it, whatever it is. And so the people of Nepal go unheard
until an earthquake devastates their country and their lives.
There is one other
example of “going unheard,” one that indicts us perhaps most strongly.
Sometimes the cries of others go unheard because we’re too busy yelling at each
other.
For the past
several years the Presbyterian Church (USA) has faced a number of disagreements
and controversies, hard choices and decisions that have caused some churches to
pack up their toys and go elsewhere. Now that the dust has settled, to some
degree, the churches of this denomination are awakening to a harsh and
startling reality; mission giving in the denomination has fallen so
precipitously that unless more funds come in, PC(USA)’s Presbyterian Mission
Agency, Office of World Mission, will be forced to call home as many as forty
mission workers from the field over the next two years.[i]
In this case, the cries of our own have gone unheard.
We need to face
this. We as a church universal and a church particular need to own up to our
own failure to listen, to open our ears to the world around us. I get it; it’s
far more comfortable to settle in among our own and enjoy the fellowship of
those we know. It’s comfortable, but it’s not Christlike, and that’s the
challenge that is put before us today as we come to this table.
The brief reading
from the fifteenth chapter of Luke speaks volumes about the Jesus we claim to
follow. It comes not in Jesus’s own words, but in the words of Pharisees and
scribes, religious leaders, observing Jesus’s teaching and the number of
“undesirables” who flocked to hear it. You know the type…sinners. Tax
collectors. Those people. And at the sight of all those people, these righteous types (you
can practically imagine them holding their noses or something like that)
couldn’t restrain their shock and offense. “This fellow welcomes sinners, and eats with them.”
This isn’t a new
charge against Jesus; as early as chapter seven Jesus is mimicking these same
religious leaders making this charge against him. In short, this is Jesus’s
reputation. Among other things, Jesus is known for eating with sinners, with those people.
Backing up to the
previous chapter we see that this very exchange is taking place in the context
of a meal; apparently Jesus had been invited by one of the Pharisees to a meal,
on a Sabbath day. On the way he had stopped to heal a man, a violation of
Sabbath rules in the eyes of some. Upon arriving and observing the jockeying
for position at the table, he had offered some trenchant observations on honor
at the table, suggesting it was wiser to choose a seat of less honor and let
your host bump you up to a more honored position. He then suggested that it was
better to invite the poor and paralyzed and generally outcast to your feasts,
and told a parable of a man whose invited guests bailed out on him, leading him
to do exactly that. A couple of random parables later, we come to the incident in
our reading. Right there in the context of the meal, Jesus is welcoming those
whom the good righteous folk don’t want to be next to or associated with.
It’s a small token
of a theme that gets bigger and bigger as our Bible goes on. As far back as the
prophet Isaiah, we’ve been told that the Lord’s temple would be “a house of prayer for all nations.”
Jesus would echo these words in the incident known as “the cleansing of the
Temple,” the one where he flipped the tables and let the sacrificial animals
loose. The book of Acts will continue to expand on the theme of expanding the
reach of God’s table, so to speak, as first the crowds at Pentecost, the
Ethiopian treasurer in Acts 8, the centurion Cornelius and his family, the Philippian
jailer, and numerous other Gentiles – those
people – are added to the church, sometimes to the great consternation of
the original, Jewish followers of Jesus.
The limits that Jesus’s followers set up, almost reflexively, keep
getting broken down, right after Jesus spent so much of his ministry “welcoming
sinners, and eating with them.”
This pattern, this
repeated and ongoing practice of Jesus, eventually became not only his
reputation, but also the way his own disciples would recognize him at what seemed
to be the darkest time they had ever known.
We are of course
familiar from this story at or immediately after Easter. Two disciples, identified as
“disciples” even though not among the numbered twelve, are walking from
Jerusalem to the nearby town of Emmaus on Easter evening, their world
shattered. There was that strange
report from the women in their group about the tomb being empty and angels
being there, but no one else saw that (the angels at least). The stranger appears and enters into
conversation between the two; they tell their story, and the stranger responds
with a staggering knowledge of the scripture, arguing that the events of
crucifixion they described were exactly what had to happen, which they’d have
known if they weren’t so foolish and slow of heart. With day fading, the two stop and entreat the stranger to
stay and be their guest, which he does.
The stranger then, surprisingly, takes the role of host: he takes the
bread for the meal, blesses it, breaks it and gives it to them. Then – and only then – did they recognize that the stranger was none other
than Jesus himself. When he
disappears, the two disciples rush back to Jerusalem to report to the others,
and to describe how, as verse 35 puts it, “he
had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”
We could evoke the
feeding of the five thousand, or to many other shared meals recorded in Luke’s
gospel. We can also recall, and do so at each observance of the Lord’s Supper,
that awful night, just a few nights before, the last night Jesus spent with the
disciples. The gesture of breaking bread to share was characteristic of Jesus.
What we need to remember when we come to this table is that this wasn’t some
esoteric, unusual event that Jesus chose to imprint upon his followers as a
memorial to him; it was something they had seen him do over and over again,
time after time sharing bread with them and with all manner of other
undesirable characters. If he
asked his disciples to “do this in
remembrance of me,” it’s at least partly because he had done exactly this
with them so many times in their years together.
But what is
fascinating about this Emmaus Road story, as well as a bit depressing for
preachers, is that it is this gesture, this breaking of bread, that opens the
eyes of the two disciples to see Jesus for who he is. All of that amazing expository preaching that Jesus
did? Nope. If you felt like reading the story
tongue-in-cheek, you could even say that all it did was give the disciples
heartburn. But the act of breaking
bread was one so characteristic, so typical
of Jesus that their fogged and shrouded eyes could no longer conceal from them
their Lord.
The message came
to these two disciples, not in a barrage of words and scriptural exegesis, but
in the rather simple medium of bread.
Stuff of the earth, harvested, ground into flour, mixed and kneaded and
baked into the most basic staple of the disciples’ diet. But in that medium indeed was a message
that had been witnessed and lived so many times by Jesus that it was one the
disciples knew by heart; a message of welcome, of hospitality, not just to the
good folks but to the worst sinners society could dredge up, even sinners like
us. And this medium of bread,
being broken, still shapes and forms that message even today, whenever we come
to the table.
On that Maundy
Thursday Jesus paired the breaking of bread, a token of humanity’s most basic
needs, with a cup of wine poured.
If bread represented the basics of life, wine no doubt served as a token
of celebration. The reading from
the Gospel of John reminds us that the very first sign Jesus performed in the
presence of his disciples was one of turning ordinary water into wine, a sign
that became the rescue and continuation of a wedding feast, one of the most
joyous celebrations that culture knew.
Bread broken, a
cup filled. These are still signs
of welcome and celebration to us today.
They still point us to a Life of welcoming and making welcome, a Life
that celebrated and rejoiced even as it grieved and mourned and got angry a
time or two. They point us to a
Life that was so dedicated, so insistent on bringing everyone in and
ministering to all, that it poured itself out in death rather than suffer any
one of us not to be guests at his table for eternity.
Perhaps the bread
and cup seem a curious choice of medium, but the message that bread and cup
shape for us in this sacrament is still one we need to hear, as many times as
possible. Christ calls us to come;
he welcomes us to the table; he bids us be his guest. Let us not be blinded to the message in this humble, yet
exalted medium.
The table is made
ready; Jesus our host bids us – all of
us, even those people – come and eat.
For the bread and
the cup, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns
(PH ’90): “God Is Here!” (461), “Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ” (514), “Now
To Your Table Spread” (515), “Draw Us In the Spirit’s Tether” (50
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