One summer, my family and I rented a house at the Jersey
Shore. Several nights a week we would eat out, so during the day, on our
wanderings through town, we would keep our eyes open for interesting
restaurants. One in particular was recommended to us, but it had a window
sign saying "NO tank tops for ladies, NO shorts for men."
This window sign was quite clear ---- you knew where you
stood. Most of society is not that honest. As Pastor Lillian Daniel
has written, "Groups of people have those signs in their heads, but
outsiders never see them. You just perceive that there are rules and an
order to things that some people seem to know and others don't."
I remember my first days at a new high school. I
entered the school cafeteria and froze. Where should I sit? Will I
be welcomed? Will I be ignored? I was the outsider, with no
welcoming place to sit.
Perhaps the desire to eat at a table with others has been
hard-wired into human beings. But there is an element of social status to
this as well. It is not just that we do not want to eat alone. We
do not want to be seen as eating alone. From our earliest nursery
school memories of snack time to the seating chart at the retirement dinner, we
know that these eating arrangements, formal and informal, mean something about whom
we are and where we are placed socially.
If Jesus had been a student at my high school, he probably
would have been actively discouraged from eating with the tax collectors and
sinners. But Jesus did eat with tax collectors and sinners,
breaking rules that were more rigid than those at my high school.
In Jesus' day, whom you eat with mattered. Where you
sat was not a casual affair. You were associated with the people you ate
with. If they were good, upstanding people and they invited you to eat at
their table, you were, by association, good and upstanding, too.
But, if the people were sinners, known to the community as
such, you definitely didn't want to eat with them. The only people who
ate with sinners were other sinners, the people who had to share the table
because no other table would have them.
At first, when I would sit down at any of those cafeteria
social enclaves, I was stared at as if I had made a mistake. But
gradually, I got to know different people, made different friends, and realized
that the cliques were not as homogeneous as I had led myself to believe.
There were smart students at the "pretty table", "jocks" at
the orchestra table, and interesting stories everywhere.
"NO tank tops for ladies, no shorts for men."
Most of the world just isn't that direct. But the unspoken and unwritten
rules are often the ones that cause the most pain, and block us from trying to
develop relationships with strangers.
Jesus turned the tables on that by sitting at the wrong
table. What makes it the wrong table? The wrong people were sitting
at it. Who are the wrong people? The ones who are not like us.
At Central Church we house the homeless during four
different weeks of the year. We call it our Family Promise program.
Many Central Church volunteers come together to make this work, even spending
overnights with them. Briefly, we create a "community".
Meanwhile, there were once grumblings about a homeless man
who had been encamped outside for many months at the edge of the church parking
lot, with all his possessions gathered in large plastic bags. Sometimes
he had homeless visitors. By camping so permanently where he did, one
could say that this long-term camper did not respect the "assigned seating
arrangements" in our affluent town of Summit.
It was as if, in affluent Summit there was an unspoken sign
that said that if you pay a considerable amount of money for your home, you
should not have to walk next to a homeless person ---- you should not even see
one. And this attitude is not unique to Summit, but pervades much of our
privileged culture.
To which Jesus would have had a very clear answer, that
would not satisfy some people. Jesus' answer might be this:
"In the world, there may be assigned seating, but in the Kingdom of Heaven
there is not." If we believe this, we ought to act on it, and
live it out here on earth. For Jesus and his disciples there were
no assigned seats at his table. All were welcome, particularly in
their brokenness. Indeed the church was born on the damaged consciences
and rotten reputations of tax collectors, sinners and people in need.
We will always be told that social barriers are there for a
reason ---- that the rules are there to keep order, and that if we will keep to
our own lunch tables, we will be better off. But the myth of that story
is to think we can keep all the sinners at their own table. Of course,
this is wrong and profoundly self-deceiving. Because, there are sinners
at every table. There is definitely a sinner at every table where I
sit, because it is me.
Perhaps we should try reading this story as if we were the
tax collector. We are looking over the tables, wondering where to sit
down, and who will have us. We want a way out of our past mistakes and
sins. We want to be a better person.
Is this too big a job for us to tackle by ourselves? IF
we sit down at a table with an unfamiliar group, and by trusting that the Holy
Spirit will work through all of us, are we going to grow to be more like
Jesus? Isn't this how a true community begins? Isn't our
church a fertile garden for planting and nourishing
"community"? Everyone is welcome because our church is actually
a school for sinners ---- not a club for saints.
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These thoughts are brought to you by the CPC Adult
Spiritual Development Team, seeking some spiritual growth for you this summer.
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