“Table Manners ”

• Scriptural Reference: Luke 14:7-14
• September 2, 2007

I’m sorry for anyone who doesn’t have a country church somewhere back in his or her history. Which means I’m sorry for a lot of people, but then, they probably feel sorry for me for other reasons, and probably more reasons. Nevertheless, if you don’t have a country church in your background that had annual “dinner on the grounds,” well, I’m sorry, but you’re deprived. If for no other reason, you’re deprived because the “dinner on the grounds” that my dad’s Methodist church used to have modeled for me what dinner will be like in heaven.

Newton Grove United Methodist Church sits on a side road right off U.S. Route 13 not far from the traffic circle. It’s a red brick building under a little steeple with leaden windows in black iron casings. The parking lot is packed sandy soil interspersed with spiny Bermuda grass and dotted with pine cones from the innumerable loblollies. Along the back of the parking lot right along the edge of a field that has had tobacco, soy beans, and lately, cotton, there is a row of weathered wooden tables. Most of the year, they lie bare. But in October each year, or the last weekend in September, the ladies cover those tables with various table cloths and all manner of casseroles, meats, vegetables, salads, breads, pies, cakes, cookies, brownies – a true cornucopia. Usually, the Methodist church has an attendance of around 70 or 75, but on this Sunday, 250, at least, show up. About half of those are current members. Another quarter are family members who’ve come back – it is, after all, Homecoming – but fully 25% are people from the community because the Methodist church advertises that anyone who wants a good meal that day is welcome to drop in.

People get nervous when they hear a pastor say this, but I hated to go to church when I was a kid. And when they had dinners in the fellowship hall at that church when we’d visit, I always got in trouble. Because I never had the right manners. I’d wipe my hand on my mouth or on my trousers. I’d eat my chicken with my fingers (in the genteel south, you were supposed to always use knife and fork). Or I’d slump down in my chair, or drop my napkin on the floor, or discover that peas would go a long way when launched from a knife like a catapult.

But out there underneath those pines, the kids could get away from the adults. We would sit in the grass Indian style with the paper plates wedged in our crossed legs. We’d throw our chicken bones out in the corn. We’d shoot each other with watermelon seeds. And we’d run. At dinner on the grounds, there were no places of honor, no head tables, and no dour faced old ladies looking at you as if you were bound for truancy. Kids could be kids and the adults could do what they really wanted to do: mill about casually and catch up with friends, totally relaxed because they didn’t have to make sure that their kids were behaving. And everybody ate their chicken with their fingers.

In these verses from Luke 14, Jesus is essentially saying, “Hey folks, quit giving awards banquets and start having more dinner on the grounds.” You see, what Jesus was describing in Luke 14 was not the typical Greco-Roman household gathering for dinner. The type of dinner Jesus describes here is the power dinner, the kind of dinner that the masses only read about in the celebrity scrolls. Those dinners had a very strict protocol. Those dinners were given only secondarily so that people could get their day’s sustenance. Though the food had to be quite good, it had to be good so that people would be impressed, not necessarily nourished. There were places of honor, guests of honor, and the better the banquet, the more prestige the host would receive. Give a great banquet and you made your political connections and assured your upward mobility.

Likewise, if you were invited to such a banquet, you either accepted or turned it down depending upon the political capital you’d get by being there. And when you got there, the closer you sat to the place of honor, the more power you had when you left. Jesus got invited to these kinds of banquets on a regular basis, and the NT is clear that he rarely left with higher political capital. Evidently, he used those meals primarily to tell the truth and make enemies.

“Look folks,” he says, “If you’re invited to one of these political to-do’s, tweak ‘em when you get there. Do exactly the opposite from what’s expected. Everyone else there is going to be jockeying for higher position. You, instead, jockey for a lower position and turn the tables, no pun intended. When you do that, you’ll be illustrating how ridiculous their power games are.”

In other words, Jesus thought meals should be less about hob-nobbing and more about corn-cobbing.

You see, meals are for nurture. At the right kind of meal, you nurture both your body and your soul. The body is nurtured by the food, and your soul is nurtured by the fellowship around the table. The English word “companion” captures what this kind of meal is all about. It comes from two Latin words literally meaning “with-bread.” A companion is someone you share your meal with, someone who sees to your nurture, both body and soul.

In fact, having a meal with someone is one of the most intimate things we do socially. Family meal time should be a time when we come together, share the day, share concerns, share stories, and re-connect with one another. It’s no coincidence that when there’s anger or tension or disagreement around a meal that someone often gets up and leaves the table. (This, of course, has never happened at my house. And I’m sure it’s never happened at yours. I’ve just seen it on TV, so I know it’s happened somewhere.) When there’s anger or a grudge of some sort held against someone else sitting at the table, digestion becomes a bit difficult. All of this is because we know instinctively that sharing a meal is an act of fellowship and peace.

“Thou preparest a table before me,” says the psalmist. Wonder drips from the 23 rd Psalm, and not in small part because the psalmist knows himself to be an undeserving nobody, with no power or wisdom, and yet God has invited him into one of the most intimate exchanges possible. “Sit down at table with me.”

And that’s what Jesus is saying that we should do instead of throwing the awards banquet. Don’t call in senators or city managers or commanders of armies. Instead, prepare a table for the nobodies and the fools, just like God does for you. Draw into companionship, into nurture of body and soul, precisely those whose bodies and souls have been beaten down and abused.

Interesting, isn’t it? The people to whom Jesus ministered had the 23 rd Psalm as a part of their tradition. It had already been around about 800 years. Evidently, though, they misunderstood it the same way we have. They saw it as a description rather than an assignment.

A few weeks ago I got a message from George Fletcher, the pastor of FBC Winchester. Lucy Baker had died. Lucy had lived out her last twelve years in an assisted living facility in the Shenandoah Valley south of Front Royal and George knew that I had worked with a couple of church members back when I was pastor there to help Lucy find a place to go.

Lucy had never married. She stood about five-one and weighed maybe 90 pounds wearing a fur-lined overcoat, which she didn’t have. In winter, she wore an oversized raincoat she’d picked up from the Salvation Army thrift store and placed a plastic grocery bag on her head underneath her moth-eaten wool hat to keep the heat in – which it did to a fault. The sweat from her head pressed her stringy, gray-white hair onto her skull so that she looked as if a candle had melted on her forehead. Nevertheless, she greeted everyone with a broad smile which wrinkled her face so that the pointed, 1950’s glasses she wore twisted catty-wompus on her nose. And she’d stride into our fellowship with the cotton print dresses, of which she had two, billowing out around her skinny legs, at the bottom of which were sneakers lined with plastic grocery bags, again to preserve heat, which they did, the odor of which need not be described.

In fact, the faint odor of the garbage cans she searched through followed her everywhere she went, including into the Wednesday night supper line at our church. She’d go through the line and everyone would greet her warmly. When Sally Wood saw Lucy come through the door to the serving rail, she’d always place a little extra of each portion on her plate so that Lucy’s plate drooped until someone helped her get it onto her tray. Then someone always carried Lucy’s tray to an open place at some table. And people always made room for her, with the men often shoving their own chairs back in order to pull one out for Lucy.

Through the week, I’d often see Lucy pushing a grocery cart around town, or loping along carrying plastic grocery sacks full of stuff she’d salvaged from a dumpster somewhere. She lived in a rented room in one of the row houses in one of the less desirable neighborhoods where rusty cars parked half on the curbs.

I frequently saw Lucy walking on the mall in downtown Winchester and once was having coffee at the Daily Grind Coffee house with a local attorney. He’d asked to meet with me because the church wanted to build a parking lot on our property and this attorney was the representative from the local homeowner’s association which opposed our parking lot because George Washington hadn’t laid it out. I was beginning to feel the weight of the money and influence of this group and my own insignificance as this attorney described all the resources they were going to bring to bear against FBC at the next historical society meeting which would derail our parking lot plans. Right then, Lucy walked past the window.

She shuffled along pushing her grocery cart and stopped. She looked at her reflection in the glass. She took off her wool hat and rearranged the plastic bag on her head. She was completely unaware that she was doing all this only two feet away from where the attorney and I were sitting by the window. Then her eyes readjusted and she looked through the window and saw me looking back at her. Her face broke into a smile, which revealed her lack of dentistry, and she immediately left her cart and came into the coffee shop, right up to our table.

As the odor of dumpster surrounded the attorney and me, she said, “Hello, pastor! I’d sure love a cup of coffee.” I pulled out a couple of dollars and handed them to her, asking how she was doing, and that I looked forward to seeing her that evening (it was a Wednesday). She went and got her coffee and went out.

The attorney smirked. “One of your church members?”

“Yes,” I said as I watched her push her cart on up the street.

“I hope she takes a bath before she comes to dinner tonight.”

She didn’t. And you know what? Dr. Nelson Isenhour, the chief anesthesiologist at the Winchester Medical Center, wearing his usual tennis shoes, blue jeans, and flannel shirt, jumped up from his table when he saw Lucy coming, placed her tray down beside his own, pulled out the chair and helped her sit down. Across the table, Tom Malcolm, superintendent of the Frederick County School System passed Lucy the salt and asked her how she was doing. And as Lucy described her latest aches and pains, they listened carefully.

For some reason, the historical society ruled in our favor. We got the parking lot. For some reason, the historical society concluded that George Washington probably didn’t have an opinion about parking lots. For some reason, we never heard from the attorney nor the homeowner’s association again. It had to do with the hard work that Robert Palmer and his team put into the lot. But I think it also had something to do with Jesus. You see, the members of FBC didn’t demand that Lucy take a bath. They sat her down at the table. I think Jesus figured that he’d bless the efforts of a group of people like that, and if a parking lot was going to help them thrive, then they were going to get it.

Later, it became evident that Lucy needed to move out of her rickety old room. She needed to have more attention than scrounging dumpsters. So we put together a team of folks to figure out what we could do. Lucy opened all her records to us so we could help her and we discovered that she had about 80,000 dollars in the bank plus VA benefits. We were astounded. I said, “Lucy, why don’t you use this to help you live?”

She said, “Oh, I was saving it for a rainy day.”

I said, “Lucy, it’s raining.”

She said, “But this church has always provided me with shelter.”

Well, she died having been well taken care of. But I’ll never forget the image of an anesthesiologist, a leading educator, and a local university professor sitting at a dinner table, listening intently as Lucy described her trials and tribulations. There were no reserved places at that table. It was open to all. Those people knew it, and God blessed them for it.

So, when we come to communion, let’s be reminded that this isn’t an awards banquet. This is dinner on the grounds. Eat your chicken with your fingers. Shoot your watermelon seeds. Mill about and nurture your friendships. And don’t worry about whether or not you’ve taken a bath. The table has been prepared for you. All are welcome.