One summer, my family and I rented a vacation 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 reading "NO tank tops for ladies, NO shorts for men."
The window sign was quite clear ----- you knew where you
stood. Most of society is not that candid. As Pastor Lillian Daniel
has written, "Groups of people have these 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 do not."
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 ate with really 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 and 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 that 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 it is the unspoken and unwritten rules
which often cause the most pain, and block us from trying to develop friendly
relationships with strangers.
Jesus turned the tables on that by sitting at the wrong
table. What makes it the "wrong" table? The "wrong"
people are sitting there. 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 gift to the Family Promise
Program. Many Central Church volunteers come together to make this work,
even spending over-nights with them. Briefly, we create a
"community."
Meanwhile, there once were grumblings about a homeless man
who had been encamped at the edge of the church parking lot for many months,
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
saying, "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
have to see one. And this attitude is not unique to Summit ------ it
pervades much of our privileged American culture.
To which, Jesus would have had a very clear answer, that
would not have satisfied some people. Jesus' answer might have been
this: "In the world, there may be assigned seating, but in the
Kingdom of Heaven there is not." If you and I believe this,
we ought to act on it, and practice it 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?
Suppose we were to sit down at a table with an unfamiliar group. By
trusting that the Holy Spirit will work through all of us, are
we going to grow more accepting, like Jesus? Isn't this how true
community begins? Isn't our church a fertile garden for planting and
nourishing "community"? Everyone is
welcomed. This is 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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