Table Manners
(Free Version): Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost- Jeremiah 2:4-13; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14
Find this week’s readings here. This week, in our “Deep Dive,” we engage Walter Brueggemann and Abraham Joshua Heschel on the Jeremiah text as well as Jerome’s anagogical reading of the passage. I also share an anecdote about eating at restaurants with big groups.
Our readings this week have a particular eucharistic (communion) shape to them. There is so much that is about giving and receiving, hospitality and sharing.
In our Old Testament reading, God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 2:4-13) a song of lost love. The songwriter has lost his wife (Israel) and is baffled as to why. We are quickly awakened to the fact that this songwriter is no ordinary lover, but God himself. This is the God of the journey, the God who has a history with Israel. He led them through wilderness places, through drought and longing, and on to a good place. Yet, God’s people still reject his hospitality (free gifts). They have rejected their source of living water, of true life in favor of a life in cisterns which the can hold and control. And even those cisterns are broken.
In this reading, each of us may hear the ways in which we have seen the consistent faithfulness of God through seasons of wilderness, drought, longing, and plenty; and yet, we are still drawn away by gods which amount to “nothing,” “vapor,” “mere breath.”
Our Hebrews reading (Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16) points to the new world which has been brought about in Jesus Christ. In this new world, the members of the church are bound together. We are one. This is a family characterized by love for one another, hospitality to strangers, radical solidarity with prisoners, faithfulness in the sacrament of marriage—which is a signpost of God’s love—, and a radical trust in God. This radical trust is set against a radical trust in money which so often defines the world. These behaviors are only possible because God is with us and he will never leave or forsake us.
Jesus defines it all. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, the center of our story. Only through him can we offer praise to God as we share what we have with the world. Just as Jeremiah reminds us that we often trust in gods that are “nothing,” Hebrews reminds us that, in Christ, we are part of a new world. This new world is not “nothing.” It is everything!
In a world where so many are looking for the best seats, Jesus challenges his hearers to take the lowest place (Luke 14:1, 7-14). In Jesus, there is a reckoning. Those who think that they have it figured out, that they do not need a doctor (or that they think that they are the doctor!) will find themselves humbled. While everyone is clambering for the best seat before God, Jesus has taken the one furthest away, inhabiting space with the outcasts, those of ill-repute, who know that they need something to change.
Perhaps we ought to take Jesus’ advice and invite these folks to our parties, to extend hospitality in radically inclusive ways. In this, we are also prepared to receive hospitality, knowing that it is in the “cheap seats” where the kingdom is found. What if we weren’t concerned about future invites, status or repayment?
The message here is not: If you are humble, your business will grow, you will get a check in the mail, or everyone will love you. That would be playing by the rules of the old world. No, the good news is that the new world is made up of new stuff. We are not blessed because we humble ourselves. The blessing is found in the humbling, at the low end of the table, in giving up the better seat. Who needs to know that they are welcome at our table? Who are we prepared to welcome?
There is so much to explore this week: the counterfeit, hollow gods which often run our lives; the ways in which we seek to control the situation and reject our life source; the ways in which we are invited into a new reality characterized by unity, love, and hospitality; and the ways in which that love is expressed in humility and acknowledgement of our need for God. The good news is that Christ meets us here.