King David said, "Mephibosheth, your master’s son, shall always eat at my table." (v. 10b)

Are you a people watcher?

I am. The most interesting thing about going to the State Fair is the chance to watch people. In fact, I find them more interesting than the livestock. Except for size and color, every cow looks and acts like every other cow, and every pig looks and sounds like every other pig.

But that’s not true with people!

I sat one day for about ten minutes waiting for a dental appointment. There were three other people in the waiting room. One was a middle-aged man who was evidently reading a business report or a research paper, for his lips were moving as he absorbed the contents. He never looked up. A young man kept flipping through the pages of some magazines stacked on a table beside him, glancing shyly around between pickups. An elderly woman tried to avoid looking at any of the three of us; maybe because she felt outnumbered. I sat there and did three character studies.

I do this same thing when I read Scriptures: I watch people. The list of names is interesting when you dream about the personal history that may be behind each name listed. For example, in the last chapter of Philippians Paul pleads with Euodia and Syntyche, two women in the church at Philippi, to please try to get along with each other. That is all he says, but just sit and watch those two women in your imagination, and you can almost see some of the enmity (maybe unfounded) they had for each other.

The Bible is not just stories about saints. It is full of personal histories of folk exactly like us. That’s the reason it is a grand place to people-watch.

There is a man mentioned in the Old Testament whose story always makes me think of the Lord’s Table and the privilege each of us has in being invited to that Table. He is mentioned four times in the second book of Samuel: when he was five years old, when he was a young man, when someone misinterpreted his actions, and when he was given an inheritance. His name was Mephibosheth.

We have to know something about his father and his grandfather in order to know and understand his circumstances. His grandfather was Saul, king of Israel. His father was Jonathan, Saul’s beloved son. The Israelites were at war with the Philistines. Saul and Jonathan, and two of Saul’s other sons, went out to fight. The Israelites lost the battle and there was a wholesale slaughter: the king and his sons were killed.

When the news of the defeat got back to the capitol, the nurse of Jonathan’s five-year-old son took the boy and fled from the city. As she was running, she dropped the child and the fall permanently crippled him in both feet.

David was made the next king of Israel, and since Saul had threatened David’s life and pushed him into exile, Mephibosheth’s nurse was fearful that the new king might destroy any remaining member of Saul’s family. So she kept the boy in hiding and she told him, as he grew older, that he lived under a threat.

Because of his diplomacy, David was able to establish peace. Israel was no longer at war with any of her surrounding countries. And one day David began to wonder if any member of Saul’s family was still living. He discovered, through one of Saul’s former servants, that there was a grandson: a crippled young man living in obscurity in a little town about twenty-five miles south of Jerusalem.

David sent for Mephibosheth. The young man was frightened. He thought his life was in danger. So he hobbled into the king’s court, expecting to hear the death sentence. But instead he heard: "Mephibosheth, you shall live here with me as one of my sons, and eat at my table."

Mephibosheth couldn’t believe what he heard. "You are going to be kind to me?" he asked the king. "Should a king show kindness to a dead dog like me?"

"Yes," answered King David. "You shall sit at my table." And Mephibosheth did. "From that time on, he ate regularly with the king, as though he were one of his sons." (2 Samuel 9:1-11)

I watched this story re-enacted some years ago. A thirty-year-old Presbyterian minister received a call to become the pastor of a local church. He had already served two churches in our state since graduation from seminary. There were some marital difficulties which resulted in separation and finally divorce. Richard resigned from the church he was serving when this happened, and for the next three years worked as a salesman. But he yearned to return to the ministry and let that yearning be known in the Presbyterian circles.

A church in Louisville, Kentucky, interviewed him but felt it could not accept a divorced minister. A church in Tennessee gave him a call, but the Knoxville presbytery turned him down because of the divorce. And then a church in North Carolina found him acceptable, as well as the presbytery in that area. Richard had felt as though he would never again be acceptable because of the failure of his marriage. The church to which he was called gave him an assurance that he was, and he discovered that he had been invited to stay with the King and eat at his Table once more.

All of us are invited to stay with the King, and to eat at his Table. It should be a surprise to each of us to receive such an invitation, as it was a surprise to Mephibosheth, because most of us are crippled in some way: maybe in spirit, maybe in morals, maybe in commitment. But we are still treated as a child of the King.

Each time I take the bread and the cup in Holy Communion I am awed by the symbolism of that Sacrament. But what surprises me even more was the Master taking the towel and the basin that Thursday evening and washing the feet of those "crippled disciples." His acceptance of Judas with his greed, of Peter with his impulsiveness, of Nathanael with his questioning, of Thomas with his doubts, of James and John with their impulsive behavior - all make me aware that he accepts me even though I am often crippled in spirit.

I was standing in the emergency room of a hospital some years ago with an injured child when my eye caught a sign over the nurse’s desk. It read: "I know I’m somebody ‘cause God don’t make no trash."

We are somebodies ... somebodies who are invited to eat at the King’s Table regardless of how crippled we may be.

- Wallace H. Kirby