Believe it or not, when the Capital Campaign Committee
chose the ending date for the “Pull Up a Chair to the Welcome Table” Campaign,
we did not look at the lectionary readings for this Sunday. But there it is in the gospel reading, in our
hearing and our sight, a dispute over who is welcome at the table
Luke the Gospel writer, our Luke, has been hammering away
at this theme for a good long while now, and he will continue to do so. We have witnessed over the past two weeks the
inclusion in the faithful followers of Jesus a Roman Centurion, and a widow at
the end of her rope. And now we have a
woman with a reputation.
And the question before us is very simple and stark. Which kind of religion do you want? The kind that says,
If this man were a real prophet, he would know who
this woman is who is touching him.
Or this kind,
So I tell you, her great love proves that her many
sins have been forgiven.
Which kind? “Look
out for sin and avoid it at all costs, even if it is but a rumor.” Or, “Deeds of love are the seeds of
forgiveness.”
This table, this altar, for us is a powerful symbol,
perhaps the most powerful symbol in the room. It is sometimes, wisely, said
that a church building is simply a convenient way of sheltering an altar and the
people who gather around it. A “symbol”
is composed of meanings that are “thrown together” (from the Latin sum and ballo), and when these meanings are thrown together, new meanings
are made.
Here we have a human table, the place of relationship and nourishment. Here we also have a divine altar, the place
of sacrifice and pleading. But these
meanings are freighted by more meanings from the Gospel message. The human table becomes the divine table in
the practice of Jeus, who never seems to have met anyone with whom he could not
sit down and eat. The divine altar
becomes the human altar where the only sacrifice required is thanksgiving and
where pleading can be replaced by praise.
When all these realities are put together, add a fresh
batch of human beings willing to have anybody pull up a chair and a God that
just won’t get up from the table at all, and you have the living heart of all
that is truly Christian. The complete
and total union of God with God’s people.
The gifts of God for the People of God. Holy things for holy
people. A place, at least one place in
this frequently troubled world where each one of us is “worthy to stand before
[God]” and be reconciled just for having stood there.
St. Paul puts it this way, in a verse and a half I was made
to memorize in my brief time as an evangelical.
I have been crucified with Christ, and It is no longer
I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.
And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave himself for me.
Somehow the woman in the Gospel story knew that this was
true. She knew it so clearly she did not need to hear it from his lips or
anyone else’s. She knew whatever she was
and whatever she had done did not matter in the eyes of this man, and the
miracle was that the eyes of this man were the eyes of God. The only thing she could do was be grateful.
Somehow she got herself in that house and next to Jesus. If she had been an assassin he would have
been dead. But she was not an assassin;
she was a grateful woman made worthy only by love, a love she had neither
earned nor deserved.
In the midst of the struggle against apartheid in South
Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was often heard to say that the biggest mistake
the white rulers made was to let the populace keep their Bibles, because if
they read them, they knew they were free, already free, and they knew the end
of the story already, that tyranny, in their case the ultimate tyranny of
exclusion, cannot survive.
So it was with me in my evangelical group making me
memorize that verse of Paul’s from Galatians.
I took it to heart. This was a
promise that I could hold onto and that eventually would save my life. Galatians has always been my favorite letter
because of it. And I learned the next
verse also.
I do not nullify the grace of God; for if
justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.
Can anyone deny the spirit of graceful inclusion that
permeates these readings? Can anyone
deny that this inclusion is at the heart of the Gospel? Can anyone deny how much unlike the world
around us this is when we actually practice it?
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, now retired, wrote
these words:
The Church is a community that exists because
something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification
irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have
appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have
worked the transformation that only God can perform, told us what only God can
tell us: that [God] has already dealt
with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labor
anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God. The church’s rationale is to be a community
that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experienceable.[1]
Our reason for being is to be a community that practices
life as people who do not need to justify themselves, save themselves, or make
themselves worthy. To experience this
gift from God is to experience life transformed, a life of value, dignity and
love that no one can take away from us.
And that transformation takes place and is renewed every
time we say to another in word or deed, “Pull Up a Chair to the Welcome Table.”
[1]
Rowan Williams, Where God Happens:
Discovering Christ in One Another (New Seeds Books, 2005), pp. 26-27.
No comments:
Post a Comment