Welcome to the Table: An Invitation to Authenticity 7-24-11

THE READINGS (The Inclusive Bible ©2007))

First Reading: I Corinthians 10: 1-4

I want you to remember this: our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; by the cloud and the sea all of them were baptized into Moses. All ate the same spiritual food. All drank the same spiritual drink—they drank from the spiritual rock that was following them, and the rock was Christ.

Gospel Reading: Matthew 26: 16-18, 26-30

On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came up to Jesus and said, “Where do you want us to prepare the Passover for you?” Jesus told them to go to a certain person in the city and say, “the Teacher says, ‘My appointed time draws near. I am to celebrate the Passover in your house.’”
During the meal, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to the disciples. “Take this and eat it,” Jesus said. “This is my body.” Then he took a coup, gave thanks, and gave it to them. “Drink from it, all of you,” He said. “This is my blood, the blood of the Covenant, which will be poured out on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins. The truth is, I will not drink this fruit of the vine again until the day when I drink it anew with you in my Abba’s kingdom.” Then, after singing the Hallel, they walked out to the Mount of Olives.
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Welcome to the Table: An Invitation to Authenticity 7-24-11
God, our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, You invite us to participate in Your reign of justice and peace. You never fail to say “welcome”. Grant us the grace to always say “yes”. May the words of my mouth and the reflections in all our hearts please you this day. Amen
I want to take you back to 19th Century Denmark, to an impoverished village inhabited by poor, but religious people. Two sisters, daughters of the town’s only pastor, live and serve the poor folk of the town, almost as Protestant nuns, even after his death. A French refugee, named Babette, arrives one day on their doorstep and begs them to take her in. They do not know her or know anything about her, but following their father’s teachings, they allow her to stay. She works with them for a while and then two things happen at very much the same time. The sisters decide that they wish to have some sort of party to commemorate what would have been their father’s 100th birthday. And Babette discovers that she has managed to purchase the winning lottery ticket. Babette begs them again, this time to allow her to prepare the feast for the party. They are skeptical, after all she is a French Catholic; they are staunch protestants with a puritanical bent. But they agree. The day of the feast arrives. And although the townsfolk have already decided that this feast will not be something they will like, they grudgingly arrive for the party. Babette has worked for days and begins to set the feast before them. “Welcome to the table!” she says. Plate after plate of the most delicious food they have ever eaten is placed before them. Soon they have forgotten their pledges not to enjoy this feast and all are talking and partaking in the party atmosphere—loving and laughing, and forgetting , for a time, that they live a subsistence life in a dark and dreary village. One of the villagers has a visitor, a nephew from Paris who is used to the finer things of life. He announces, “Only one time before have I tasted such amazing food and that was at the finest restaurant in Paris!” Finally Babette acknowledges that, before political persecution drove her from Paris, she was the top chef at that very restaurant. In all the time she had been with them no one had ever guessed that she was a famous chef who lived as social royalty in Paris. This, of course, is the story of “Babette’s Feast” an international film that came out in 1987. I suspect that we can learn just a little from Babette’s feast as it relates to our introduction to our series of Sundays where we will speak of the Communion Feast. Welcome to the table, oui?
I wonder if we, like Babette’s guests, are sometimes caught off guard, not expecting this Table, spread before us, to contain the richest blessings God has to offer. Or how often we come determined not to let God speak to us through the breaking of bread and sharing of the fruit of the vine. Or sadder still, how many times are we are so pre-occupied with life, that we come—go through the motions—and leave, allowing the experience to have no impact at all. But in the movie, the blessings get the better of them and they find themselves in great joy and fellowship in spite of themselves. And while here is where our comparison to French food must necessarily cease, the question is a good one: what if we allow God’s blessings to get the better of us at this Table? What if we make a conscious effort to bring our whole selves—the saintly, the not-so-saintly and the just plain, well, ugly—parts of ourselves to this Table, this morning? Think about it.
Some of us come from traditions where communion—this Lord’s supper—is rarely celebrated. And some of you come from traditions where the Eucharist is the center of all worship and faith. When asked why MCC churches celebrate communion each week, there is one common answer. Rev. Troy Perry, when he founded MCC, wanted to make sure that no matter when you arrived on the doorstep of an MCC church, that communion would be available. This is the surface answer, of course, there is much more behind Rev. Perry’s reasoning. When we are denied communion, and many of us were, we are cut off from what is literally the lifeblood of the church. We are separated from what makes us God’s community—not by God, of course, but by those who would seek to exclude us. And so, as we understand more and more about the centrality of the coming to Table in the worship experience and the life of the believer, we come to understand why the invitation to the feast must be offered every time we meet. And, even more importantly, we come to understand the meaning and depth of our participation in this sacrament with all those others who are gathered with us this day and every time we meet to worship.
Now I admit that the history and tradition of communion has not always gone smoothly. Churches have divided over theological debates regarding the nature of communion –some of you feel very strongly about those debates and the theological arguments in them. Some of you have never given it a thought, and the vast majority of us are somewhere in between. For me, this day, there are two fundamental questions that I need to know the answers to when I accept God’s invitation to the Table. Those would appear to be simple questions. Alas, they are not—but for me, I need to know these two things: Who is this God who invites me to feast and who am I as I accept the invitation.
Now I could preach for another 90 minutes on “Who is God at the Table?”. Relax, I have no intention of doing so, but we will return to this question time and time again throughout the next few weeks. The second question would not take me so long to answer, but would take a lifetime to live into. So who is God? God is not only our host, God is our creator, redeemer and sustainer. Hear what Paul tells the Christians at Corinth about the Old Testament Israelites in their journey in God. They ate the same spiritual food, and drank the same spiritual drink from a rock that followed them everywhere they went. And who was that rock? That rock was Jesus Christ who is sustaining the wandering Israelites with food and drink. Not only is it important for Paul to link ‘the Christ’ to the spiritual food and drink given to the Israelites by God, it is important that this spiritual food and drink be the same for all who partook. So, our God is an historical God—a God who has and who will feed us for all time—and all with the same food.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus reveals more about God and the gift of the feast. Body and blood, only human beings have bodies and blood. And there sits Jesus, the incarnation of our God, talking about his body and blood. His body given for us, and his blood “poured out for the forgiveness of sins”. And he calls us to a new covenant—a covenant born out of his sacrifice. Jesus becomes the great Paschal lamb, freely and fully, giving himself in our place. God’s gift to us of grace and freedom is made possible with this sacrifice of Jesus, dying and rising again.
This God, comes to us in the flesh, walks with us and talks with us and shows us how to live and, finally, calls us to celebrate the memory of this earthly Jesus—and to participate in the mystery of God’s redemption in real, physical ways. God calls us to incarnate the divine act of redemption. So this God who invites us to Table, is here with us, present in the fellowship, present in the meal. And we present ourselves as guests, fully open to partake of God and fully open to accept and love all the others also present at Table in the feast. This is where the Christian life becomes its realest of real—its authenticity, if you will, is part and parcel of our experience when we accept the invitation to the Table.
I am coming to the end of my time and I told you there were two questions of importance for me. We will spend much more time in the next three weeks looking at both questions but, especially, the second question: Who am I as I come to the Table and go from the Table? As a child of God I have been welcomed into the Family of God—I am perfectly acceptable in God’s sight. How do I know this? Because God has issued the invitation. And the invitation that I have answered is to participate in something much larger than myself—to be wholly God’s child seeking all that God has to show me regarding this living in God, this be-ing in God, this growing in God. I pray that, today, coming to the Table is the beginning of something new and wonderful in our lives and in the life of this church. Amen and Amen.