Perhaps it is the oddity that I am writing this on the Monday before Thanksgiving or it is my proclivity to identify food with each passing holiday that, as I approach these texts, I find myself thinking of another text from Psalm 23: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July and I am dreaming dreams of sugar plum fairies, turkey legs, chocolate bunnies, and barbecues. This is definitely a job hazard for clergy. Most congregations revel in putting together various feasts. Of course, I have it all wrong. This is an embarrassment. This is definitely not what the psalmist had in mind. Perhaps I should not be doing this after I have run six miles and before lunch. It does not help in fixing my thought on a more excellent way or to the higher things in life. Unlike Paul, I find myself all too easily looking to the things that are seen rather than the unseen.
Yet each of these lessons evokes the table that is prepared for us and how we react to it: in thanksgiving for both tables of the law, in acknowledgment that what we bring to the table might not be as important as who presides at the table, in recognition that perhaps the tables should be turned?
Of course, this had already come up in the Hebrew’s life together. “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” It came up in the Corinthian church as they made a mockery of the common meal: “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” Some of the strongest condemnation of Jesus in the gospels centers on his table manners and his ministry of the table: “And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ What manner of man is this?”
The table can be sumptuous, or it can be as sparse as a simple hot dog with your father at your first ball game. Either way, there is a sense that the meal can be either one in which we draw closer to one another and to God or one in which the distance between the dinners is barely overcome by civility. A few clergy meals lately have felt like the last meal of the condemned before controversy erupts around the latest blue state/red state theological battle. Many families will find only helpings of shame, guilt, and disgust served up with Thanksgiving turkey and Easter ham. I have known church Easter egg hunts to break down into a sea of tears when, despite the best adult supervision, the children act out the meaning of Matthew 25:29: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”
The stakes are raised whenever we talk of coming to the table. The mood changes and either tension mounts or relaxation sets in. At the table, either folks open up, clam up, become terribly self-conscious, or wonderfully conscious of the love of God in their midst. Our dining room contains the table and buffet that have been in my family for four generations. Having been made by a long forgotten manufacturer from Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, it will not be revealed to be a treasure of historic proportions on the Antiques Road Show. However, I treasure it because all of the extremes of human experience that have taken place around it. From time to time it has called into question why we labor for things that do not satisfy, reminded us that in our rush at life we have often eaten and drunk judgment to ourselves. Certainly, at times it reminds me of the certainties that need to be overturned in our lives. It has been a table in the presence of our enemies that has testified to God’s love through all the years. Each of the texts this Sunday, in their own way, brings us to a table that is prepared for us.
Exodus 20:1-17
Oh boy. Here it is — the big ten! Is it any surprise that going up this mountain we get a case of vertigo? How do we preach all this? Going down this laundry list results in moralistic excess. I think it is easier to preach ten sermons on each commandment than to preach one sermon on the Ten Commandments. One year, I volunteered to call the whole thing off if anyone could name the Third Commandment. The congregation lost the wager. Maybe it would be a good thing after all to drill them in marble and put them up in as many public places as possible.
The commandments seem a bit overwhelming at best. They are like the great meals that my mother would serve up at holiday season. It required an expansion of our dining room table by the addition of a couple of boards just to accommodate it all. Child of an only child, married to an only child, we never had to accommodate a horde of relatives. Overwhelmed by abundance, each meal carried me back to my childhood memories of the holidays. Perhaps the best way to preach the commandments is from a more childlike naive perspective than weighing in with all the training and learning that one has received over the years. Trying to get all that in may lead to a homiletical disaster.
The feast here to my child’s eye is clearly composed of two boards’ worth of table. God and people: If I have this right, you don’t come away from this table with much nourishment if you don’t have both. It looks like Calvin had it right after all. Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves... In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he or she ‘lives and moves’ ” (Acts 17:28). Welcome to the table. However, it seems that is precisely the problem in our time. Some come down on the side of God without much human understanding and sensitivity. Others of us come down on the human side of the equation, soft peddling the God stuff lest it offend. This seems to be a delicate balance at best.
I once attended a service of installation of a pastor in a black congregation. The preacher for the day at one point leaned over the lectern staring over his glasses and railed against those who opted for self-fulfillment over self-sacrifice as the basis of their belief. Since he was glaring at the contingent of mainline pastors in the room, it was pretty clear that he thought that we had gotten things out of balance. Pastor Dale Rosenberger tells the tale in Who Are You To Say of being ripped from stem to stern by a nurse who was repulsed at his injection of God-talk into the conversation of a hospital board of ethics, on which they both served. Following an Easter sermon, one astute, highly socially-committed and active parishioner asked, “You don’t really believe any of this stuff, do you?”
If nothing else, the commandments remind us that there is no nourishment from these tables if we do not keep both tablets in mind and seek to balance their offerings. It seems simple enough until you are slumping in your pew at an installation or serving on the ethics board, or headed for home after Easter service. I don’t like the translations that render the meaning of not taking the Lord’s name in vain as a matter of bad words. The truth is that my life is in vain when I don’t get my relationship with God in order. When I am stuck vainly looking in the mirror, the rest of my life becomes futile. Such ineffectual living tends to push the true God out of my life.
The commandments require us to hold both tables of the law together and not to put asunder what God has joined together. Any of the commandments can be an entrance into this truth. All of the commandments invite us to feast at the table of the Lord that requires both boards to hold everything.
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
In American parliamentary parlance, “to table” something is to put it in limbo, to put it off, to put it on the back burner. It is the opposite in Canada. To table something is to bring it into play. Of course in the holidays we want to bring as much into play as we possibly can. Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter is not the time to stint on anything. Bring it on. Needless to say, this means in most houses that someone will spend a great deal of time in the kitchen trying to cook up something that will win the plaudits of all the invited quests. I remember one church I served where the committees rotated meeting in various homes. The process seemed to dictate that we were all in some sort of perpetual game of topper. By the end of my first year, we were eating full-course banquets before we got down to business. This was not a good formula for doing business. In a church in Pennsylvania Dutch country, the plan was often for the hostess never to sit down at the table. As a matter of fact, no place was set for her. In many of the churches I served early in my ministry, years were taken off my life because of the way that the tables were piled high with the gastronomic triumphs of the parishioners. In a few congregations, the common meal has been made a mess of by the frenetic struggle to get it all right and serve up a seamless spiritual moment. Things must be served in good order, after all. On the other hand, the Corinthians seemed to have made a mess of things by letting the chaos of the secular order to break out in the shared life. Those who worked on flex time, the white-collar folks, came in and gobbled things up first before the blue-collar and the slave-collar folks showed up.
It seems that folks get into trouble here because of what they think that they have to serve up. We get the mistaken notion that it is our recipe for success that matters whether people are fed or not. Often, if things go according to our plans, a lot of folks will go without, while many will wind up stuffing themselves. I suspect that Paul’s experience with the Corinthians and what they had served up as church was in his mind as he wrote these words, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” The wisdom of the age, as it does in our age, left many with more than enough and others going hungry spiritually and materially. This approach to things in the American sense needs to be tabled.
The Corinthians needed to see that they were not the chefs nor was life according to their recipe. The wisdom of the world would only serve up disaster. They simply needed, in the Canadian sense, to table their lives. To place on the table of the Lord their joys, their failings, their sins, their triumphs, their common life, and their private experiences, that the power of God might transform these offerings into building blocks of the kingdom of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Of course, there are those who will seek signs and those who will find this all a stumbling block. They will say they have found the secret recipe — vote democratic or republican, plastics, intelligent design, mindless living, of doing your own thing, twelve ways to make chicken soup of the mind. Yet, our work is taking up the cross, of putting our lives on the table for God’s work, joining in the task of making sure all can come to God’s table — tabling, in the American sense, our own grand designs in order that God’s plan for us to grow in God’s wisdom and stature will serve up the meal that will satisfy our deepest hungers.
John 2:13-22
The gospels invariably bring us to the moment when the table that is prepared for is the one that is turned, even overturned, for us. It takes some serious believing that the son of Joseph and Mary who cannot even save himself from the cross is the one who will be able to destroy the temple and rebuild it anew. If anything, it seems that the world will do a lot more deconstructing of Jesus than Jesus does of the world. Then it came in the form of crucifixion. In the modern age, it seems we want to put him under our microscopes and dissect his intentions and motives. With all due respect to modern scholarship, to which much is owed, it seems that having once dissected him we then proceed to reconstruct him in our image: wise “Yoda”-like one, therapist, revolutionary, motivational speaker, medical specialist in diseases of the skin, humorist, and literary stylist. None of these are without merit in and of themselves. Yet, this text from John proclaims that if we do not understand Jesus as the one who first deconstructs and then reconstructs, then all of our understanding of Jesus will be seriously flawed. In a very uncanny way, Jesus’ encounter with the temple makes clear that his work is in alignment with the full body of scripture.
Walter Brueggemann points out in Hopeful Imagination, that scripture invites us into a world of relinquishing and receiving. We are invited to give up that which inhibits the kingdom so that we may receive what God will establish as his next line of brick in the “house not built with human hands.”
John sets the seemingly chaotic scene of stampeding animals, coins ricocheting, and tables crashing as ironically when the Passover that leads to sabbath rest is near. The hands on issues here involve bad economics as well as bad theology, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” What sends chills up and down the spine and challenges the mind is the realization that the marketplace mentality has, in our time, become a near god if not the only god. Many of us seem to have things backward here. Man is not made for the sabbath, but the sabbath is made for man. It has become common currency for many to imagine that there is nothing that the “free market” cannot fix. I am not against free markets, but when they become a god, as with any human creation being offered our undivided loyalty, then we are headed for trouble. What free-market incentive causes us to be brave enough to enter into marriages or trust enough to make churches? What calculation of self-interest lies behind those who found the best in themselves only by surrendering themselves to a love that was larger themselves? Are we saved by our calculations or our connections to one another?
When I encounter this scripture, I find myself wondering if my spiritual life has grown vapid. Is this when I have been most resistant to Jesus cleansing me by overturning the tables by which I calculate my life?
Application
One thing that has buffaloed me in life is table manners. It is not that if you sat next to me at a meal that you would have to endure a boatload of boorish behavior. However, you would find an anxious presence as I tried to sort out which fork and spoon goes in what order. It seems as of late that finer restaurants are adding all sorts of utensils to down a whole variety of new courses. The meals are prettier and there are whole new flavors and new cuisines from around the world that are making it onto my plate. Yet I feel discomfort and anxiety.
This is how I suspect a lot of lay people feel about much of the offerings of religious scholarship that are showing up in sermons, worship, and discussions. There are now feminist readings, liberation readings, gay/lesbian and transgender readings, and native aboriginal readings, to name a few. There is little doubt that we are all better off for these readings. Yet, they can be a heady mix for those who grew up with the only options being King James or Revised Standard Version.
Some advice on table manners from the lesson for this Sunday may be helpful if we are to enjoy the feast that God intends. Make sure you include both boards to expand the table so that it will include all. What does what we say about God say about people — not people in general, but specific people? When we make statements about people, how does that reflect our understanding of God? Furthermore, how does what we say of God relate to creation? It is not easy to hold these together. Then again, the clinical definition of death is the total absence of tension in the body.
When we come to the table, are we putting all our cards on the table so that God may transform what we bring? Some of us bring years of church experience, some of us bring the freshness of a recent conversion. All of us, “having come short of the glory of God” need the transformation of what we bring.
When you come to the table do not be surprised if things are turned or overturned. We might find ourselves ministered to by people we never suspected. We might find strengths for ministry that we never imagined.
There is a table prepared for us. Relax and enjoy the feast.
An Alternative Application
John 2:13-22. In my sermonizing, I know when I am most likely to have set myself up for a journey down a dead-end street. Interestingly enough, knowing this little gem rarely prevents me from often taking this unproductive journey. I think it has to do with the days when my belief in the resurrection is a little thin and a lot less open to understanding that Jesus is one that does walk and talk with me and tells me I am his own. Having been to college, seminary, and graduate school, I find myself all too often believing that I am dealing with texts to be examined more than a living presence to be encountered.
Paul writes, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” I know the answer. I often want a text to be something that I can be wise about rather than be something that humbles me. I love being the scribe — the pastor of record. In such moments, scintillating phrases come out of my mouth such as, “In my day, we...” or “We have always done it this way,” or “If you just had studied more, like I have, you would get it.” I love it when a text enables me to make points and run up the score on my enemies. I appreciate it somewhat less when the text moves me, or helps me, as David Buttrick puts it, to make the helpful homiletical moves.
I suspect that there is a bridge here between lay people and clergy. Whether we are in the pulpit or the pew we may have more of the answers to Paul’s questions than we realize. In sharing our answers I suspect that we discover the presence, in our midst, of the living Christ who has made foolish the wisdom of the world.