Scriptures: Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148 Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35
When I was in high school, what mattered from a socializing
point of view was my table – that is, whose table I sat at in the cafeteria for
lunch…or more like, who was willing to let me sit at their table in the
cafeteria. Jocks sat with other jocks,
cheerleaders with other cheerleaders, brains with other brains, stoners with
other stoners, and so forth. Since at
that age I had the social skills of a house plant, I generally grabbed a spot
somewhere off in a corner someplace and hoped nobody would notice my presence –
because when people noticed I was there, bad things happened to me, like I’d
end up wearing the lunch I’d intended to eat.
If I was lucky, that’s all that would happen to me.
The conversation in our reading from Acts reminded me a bit
of those long-gone high school days.
Peter had been out spreading the gospel, and now went to Jerusalem, to
the mother church, the main gathering of believers. And when Peter arrived, some of the more
conservative of the Jewish believers called him on the carpet. “Why do you go to the uncircumcised and eat
with them?” It sounds like a
conversation that belongs in a high school cafeteria…..”I can’t believe you ate
lunch with those stoners! Did one of them offer to roll you a joint?” But in that society, who you ate with was a
big deal. Jews considered themselves the
chosen people, and by and large tried to deal as little as possible with those
they considered un-chosen. They had –
and still have - lots of guidelines about what was ok to eat and what wasn’t,
when it was ok to work and when it wasn’t, and so forth And even though in his earthly ministry,
Jesus preached to and healed Jews and Gentiles alike, and was willing to heal
people even if the occasion for healing fell on the Sabbath, and didn’t obsess
over kosher laws around food – some of those who converted to the way of Jesus
still held to their long-held traditions.
And when they heard that Peter was eating with non-Jews, they were
scandalized.
And so Peter told them about the vision he’d had prior to
his visit to the Roman centurion Cornelius – a sheet lowered from heaven,
filled with all kinds of animals considered non-kosher, not ok to eat, in a
word, “icky”, and a voice from heaven saying “Get up, Peter, kill and
eat.” Three times the sheet was lowered,
three times the voice “Get up, Peter, kill and eat”, three times Peter
protested, “No way, I’ve always kept kosher, and I’ve never eaten anything
unclean”, and three times the voice responded, “What God has called clean,
don’t you dare call unclean.” And after
this vision, the emissaries from the Roman centurion Cornelius were knocking on
Peter’s door. Peter went to the house of
Cornelius, and baptized him and his household, and the Holy Spirit came on
Cornelius and his house just as had happened with the Jewish believers. Peter concluded, “If then God gave them the
same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to
hinder God?" When they – those who earlier had called Peter on the carpet
- heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, "Then God
has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life."
Tables. Whether was
in Jesus’ day, or in the high school cafeteria, tables matter. Who we’re willing to eat with matters,
because who we’re willing to eat with – or not eat with - says something about
us, about who we are as people. Jesus
envisioned the kingdom of heaven as a great banquet, and the history of the
church – the church at its best anyway - has been about reaching out and going
out into the highways and byways to invite people, even or especially the last,
the least, and the lost – to the banquet.
It’s worth noting that, in Mark’s gospel, the story of Herod’s banquet,
attended by his elite invitees, at which Herod’s daughter made the request for
the head of John the Baptist on a
platter, is immediately followed by the story of Jesus’ feeding the five
thousand. And that’s no accident; Mark’s
putting these two banquet stories side-by-side was very purposeful. Two very different banquets, with two very
different agendas.
Tables matter. In our
day, we have a responsibility, not only to invite others to the table, but to
care for the table itself – that is to say, our planet, our environment, from
which we get our food and water and air and everything else needful for human
life. I said “our planet”, but really
it’s God’s planet – as Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the
fullness thereof.” The planet is ours
only in the sense that it’s the place we live, not that it’s ours to do with as
we wish. God has put us here, not as
owners, but as stewards, to care for the earth.
And in our lack of care for the environment, we – the human race – are like
obnoxious houseguests who trash the host’s house. I was very purposeful in choosing our 2nd
hymn today, “Many and Great”, because the descendants of the American Indians
who were here before us continue to implore us to care for the earth, to
consider the effects our actions will have not only for ourselves and our
children, but to the seventh generation of descendants from those alive today. Many locations near us carry names given them
by the Lenape Indians – Conshohocken, where I live, Wissahickon, Manayunk – but
the Indians who named these places were killed or driven off the land, and
today live in poverty on reservations. (An aside: roughly 20 small American
Indian congregations of the United Church of Christ, mostly located in the
Dakotas and Minnesota, comprise the Council for American Indian Ministry[1]
– so these are our sisters and brothers within the UCC.) Even today, in the
Midwest and southwest, American Indians are threatened with being driven off
the small amounts of reservation land left to them, when mining interests want
their land, such as in Oak Flat, Arizona, where land considered sacred by the
Apache Indians in that area was transferred without permission to the
Resolution Copper Mining company, and the tribes are fighting to get it back.
Much closer to home, we have our own challenges. Fracking – using pressurized fluid consisting
of water, sand, and chemicals, to extract oil from shale formations, is a way
to provide fuel, but at considerable risk of groundwater contamination – water
used for fracking can’t be used for human consumption. Wells
near fracking sites have been contaminated with methane, and some homeowners
near fracking sites can light their tap water on fire. At the
same time, renewable technologies – solar and wind power – are improving and
becoming more affordable, and there are increasing calls, regarding fossil
fuels, to “leave it in the ground”.
We need to care for the table – for our environment – so
that we can invite others to the table. Our reading from Revelation was written
by John, who was exiled to the island of Patmos – one of Rome’s dumping grounds
for those the empire considered troublemakers, who, as the back of our bulletin
covers notes, were forced to work as slaves in the island’s quarry. John had been exiled from the table of the
Roman empire, but from his vantage point he had a vision of a different table: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for
the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea”….the sea
that separated John from all that he had known and loved….”the sea was no
more. And I saw the holy city, the new
Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them”
"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them”
John saw a new heaven and a new earth…..but this will happen
on God’s time. In the meantime, God has
given us this earth to care for, and our neighbors to invite to the table. May we be grateful to God for providing for
our needs, and show our gratitude by sharing with our neighbors. Amen.
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