October 5, 2003 - Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
    NRSV KJV
Mark 10: 2-16
    NRSV KJV CEV

“A Table Community”

There is nothing in the world like the community that is built around a kitchen table. My family ALWAYS gravitated to the kitchen. That’s where we ate, we talked, we argued out family decisions, and we played endless games of euchre or ‘crazy eights’ or ‘uno.’ We laughed and we cried around that table – and on more than one visit home after I entered ministry, we celebrated the Lord’s Supper at that table. It was around that table that I learned what it means to be “in community,” what it means to be in intimacy and oneness with one another.

When I read the numerous reports and diatribes on the state of the American society and the American family, I note that not eating together is among the chief symptoms of our problems with communication and togetherness. I guess that’s why certain fast food places have come out as the promoters of togetherness and there are now public service promos on prime time television encouraging us to spend time together around the table. In a way, I’m glad that those reactions are happening, because it is true – we learn and become family around the table. After all, eating is one of the basic necessities for human life. As my father-in-law so sagely declares, “You gotta eat!” How right he is – how true it is for us as human beings and even more so for us as the people of God.

It is no mistake that the most basic celebration of Christian life is around a table. Theologically we say we are spiritually fed at the “tables of Word and of Sacrament.” The ultimate sign of our oneness as Christians involves what we do around this table. We say that we are “in communion with” one another. We are, then, a table community and should never forget it. Saint Paul said it well, “when we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” And Jesus did command, “Do this for the remembrance of me.”  Gathering around this table, as a community, is one of the ways we come to know who Jesus is and who we are as his followers.

The writer to the Hebrews uses some very high-flown language to describe who Jesus Christ is for the Christian community. At root what he’s telling us is that God desires to know creation intimately and to know humanity supremely so. For that reason God has become one of us in Jesus the Christ, so that God can share love and life with us in a way never seen before. I remember the words of a hymn that Rosaleen O’Sullivan wrote, “How brightly deep! How glory sprung!” that speaks of God’s desire to know creation in an intimate way. In one verse she sings, “He came to walk our restless winds, to watch our flowers grow, to hear our colors laugh and sing, to rub our sunset glow. Our wheat and dawn, our hands and hours have known his touch and oh! Our briefest life could cup the call unbounded ages know.”

Jesus has participated fully in our human existence and knows the fullness of our joys and of our sorrows. He knows what it means to suffer, to be broken, and to be disappointed. Jesus takes up all of humanity in himself and then sits down at the table to show how God wants to draw us into God’s life. That is a springing forth of glory and it’s why Irenaeus would utter those words, “God’s glory, human beings fully alive!”

What we do in communion isn’t an end in itself, then, No, it’s a means, it’s a participation in a living reality and an ongoing incorporation – embodiment – into God’s life. What happens here is that the bread broken and the cup poured out counter the brokenness in our lives. The hurt we feel in relationships gone sour, the pain we feel through a divorce is symbolic of the divorce, the alienation that humans feel from God and from one another. Communion is a living reminder, a visible Gospel, which speaks to us of God’s desire for us to be whole. God doesn’t want us to be “strangers and aliens,” rather God wants us to be joined together in love.

Jesus may have been talking about an ethical issue in Mark’s Gospel, but he’s actually speaking about that far larger, far more serious problem of the divorce I just described – the divorce from God and from our true sense of self, and from each other. The fact that there are churches where people are excluded from the table, forbidden from sharing the sacrament, on this World Communion Sunday testifies to the work that is yet before us. It is the ongoing task of Christians to overcome, to be the source of reconciliation, and to be the living sign of this table community that draws all people – indeed all created reality – into its welcoming embrace.

What we do at this table is what we are to become for the world – Eucharist, thanksgiving. Like Christ, we are to be broken and shared, poured out and consumed so that others may experience fullness of life, reconciliation, and healing. That’s what Augustine meant when he said those words I quote so often, “You are what you eat.” We are drawn into God’s life through Christ and we, in turn, become Christ for our world. You and I, my beloved sisters and brothers, may be the only experience of God’s love that some people ever feel. It’s an awesome responsibility and an incredible privilege – God want us to continue to invite people into God’s embrace.

I invite you to come to this table this morning with a new understanding and appreciation for what we do and what we receive here. As one of our Puritan forebears said, “This is no dumb sign.” Something goes on here that is more than a snack of a little piece of bread and a sip of juice. What happens is that a table community is formed here that can change lives, that can change the world, because in this moment, in this place, in this action God is present.

So come to this table with all of your brokenness, as well as with all of your joy. Come to it and experience that intimacy that is offered to God’s children. Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, a number of communities that cares for special needs people in remarkable ways, gave a profound description of intimacy. What he says, I think, applies to what we do, what we encounter here. Vanier would cup his hands as if holding a small, wounded bird and ask, “What would happen if I opened m hands fully? The bird would flutter its wings, and it would fall and die. But what would happen if I closed my hand? The bird would be crushed and die. . . An intimate place is like my cupped hands, neither totally open nor totally closed. It is the place where growth can take place.”  When we gather here in worship, around this table we are to feel God’s embrace, not restricting our growth, but enabling it. And that is what a table community should be. A table community is a safe place, a loving place. It is a place where growth can happen and you and I can become what God dreams for us to become. Ultimately, that’s what this church is to be, you know, a table community. After all, “You gotta eat” and where better than with God’s people gathered around God’s table. “You gotta eat.”