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This week, you can listen to the complete church service, or simply read Rev. Thomas' message! Enjoy! A QUESTION OF HONOR Jeremiah 2.4-13 I once heard about a little girl who was sitting at table with her mother and father and their dinner guests, and as they were ready to begin the meal, the girl’s mother leaned over and asked her if she would like to ask the blessing for the food. The little girl shook her head no and answered, “I don’t know how.” The girl’s mother smiled kindly and said, “Just say what you always hear your mother say.” So the little girl bowed her head, and shut her eyes tight and said, “Good Lord, why on earth did I invite these awful people over for dinner?” If you ever read the Gospels straight through, with their repeated instances of feasts, fasting, miraculous feedings in the desert, parables about wedding feasts and dinner parties, not to mention, of course, the climactic scene where Jesus has one last supper with his disciples, you can’t escape the idea that one of the central driving questions of the Gospels is just this one, the one that the little girl had perceived to be her mother’s downfall, and that is the question of who’s invited to dinner – and you also can’t help noticing that the surprising answer that Jesus so consistently gives is that it’s the awful people, or the so-called, presumably awful ones, who are invited. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was a daring, socially challenging movie in its time. But the moral of that story was nothing new or inventive for Matthew, Mark and Luke. Also in the Book of Acts, as some of you know from the Wednesday Bible Study, and even throughout the letters of Paul, the question of table fellowship, that is, with whom is a faithful Christian, someone who is trying to take seriously both the Law of Moses and the grace of Jesus, allowed to break bread with? Now, of course, we in the 21st century don’t share the qualms, quibbles and ethical dilemmas about keeping kosher, not mixing meat with milk, for instance, and arcane rules about avoiding certain foods, that troubled the church in the early decades as the Church grew from its Judean, primarily Jewish, Law-observant roots, into a pan-Mediterranean assemblage of predominantly non-Jewish communities. Instead, the question for us is less “Are we allowed to share our food with those awful people?” than it is “Shouldn’t we sit down and share a meal, or a cup of coffee with them?” And we see that this was also on Jesus’ mind, at least part of the time, for he urges his hearers to invite the poor and the lame, the crippled and the blind, to their wedding feasts and Christmas parties and Labor Day cookouts. Here’s a wild thought: what if all the money that we spend on wedding parties were given instead to a local soup kitchen, or a Veterans’ hospital in Texas or a flood relief agency in Pakistan? But here’s a less wild thought, and you tell me if I’m wrong. Most of you who’ve been coming here regularly for any length of time could walk into fellowship hall blindfolded about 15 minutes after the worship service was finished, and without looking, you could name, probably with 80-90% accuracy, which people were sitting at each table. It never changes. You just know who’s going to be sitting where, and with whom, even down, in some cases, to the seating arrangement at the particular tables. Tell me it’s not true. And I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong or evil or shameful or that you’re not going to get yours at the resurrection of the righteous on account of it. Because I also know, or at least I suspect, that it’s got something to do with the pre-historic evolutionary hardwiring in the amygdala or the hypothalamus or some other ancient part of our hunter-gatherer brains, that we are, at our roots territorial creatures. I get this. And, believe me, I’m as territorial as the next person. And I’ve jostled with others and jabbed elbows on more than one occasion, hoping to get the best seat, or at least my preferred seat, at some affair or other. And some of you will also tell me, and you are right, that this might be the only time all week that you get to see or spend time with this certain little klatsch of friends that you sit with in Fellowship Hall. And I certainly don’t begrudge that. And I understand that it’s not a question of places of honor or prestige or what-have-you – not, at least, until someone new sits down in your place, and they get completely ignored. I’ve seen that happen, too. I’ve seen it here. I’ve also seen it played out recently in the public sphere. You can argue all day and you won’t convince me that a strong, pre-evolutionary urge to claim, or reclaim, territory is not at work in places like the uproar over Cordoba House in Lower Manhattan or the theatrics of a political slash religious rally staged yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the very site, on the very date of the anniversary of one of the most powerful, prophetic, and transformative events of recent American history, the 1963 March on Washington, which culminated in Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech. It’s curious that the particular choice of venue for the one has evoked such outrage, while the profaning not only of the memory of the Civil Rights heroes and their struggle, but also the graven visage of one of our greatest presidents, with a craven made for television political stunt, has elicited very little public consternation. I spoke with the children a couple or three weeks ago about what I perceived to be a generational shift in people’s thinking about race in this country, so that now, 47 years after our greatest American saint espoused his dream for America, we can hope that our children and grandchildren are going to grow up in a society where people truly are judged, and derive opportunities for education, cultural achievement and career advancement, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I think this is a hopeful sign, and I think anybody you hear clamoring on the radio or yammering on TV about how the country’s going to hell in a handbasket needs to spend a little more time in church, or at least in churches like we have here in Iselin. But an even more hopeful sign is still farther off, I think, and that is the sign that’s envisioned by that community center and mosque that’s been the subject of so much debate recently. Actually, it’s a project that was praised and encouraged only a few months ago by some of the very talking heads and party hacks that are making political hay by trashing it now. But forget about the mosque. As it stands now, that’s still an anti-sign, which only serves to support my contention that we are still a few generations away from the hopeful shift in our children’s attitudes about different religious communities that parallels their healthy abandonment of the racial baggage that so many of us were taught to carry as children. But I also have a feeling that right here, on this spot - and in this I am praising you, I’m giving you credit - on a site where Hindu, Sikh and Muslim men and women meet daily to study and to learn and to prepare to be inducted as fully pledged and naturalized United States citizens, where we recently held a Christian memorial service for a deceased Hindu brother, and where, when October comes and the summer break is over, the Jain sisters will again be leading Sunday youth group sessions in our Christian Ed. Building, I have to believe we are on the leading edge of the religious accommodation that will be the harbinger of a new, vibrant, and forward-looking American spirit in the 21st century. This I take to be a hopeful sign, too, for I believe that it’s not too far-fetched, if a little more than half a century after the birth of the modern Civil Rights movement, children of every skin shade and background can go to school together and grow up appreciating each other, then one day, perhaps their grandchildren, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and others, will learn to worship together as well. If you think that’s crazy, or, alternatively, if you think it’s an enticing notion and want to get a sort of proleptic glimpse – that’s another high falutin theological show-off word that they teach you in seminary school, proleptic, it means a partial, fleeting, or imperfect glimpse of a reality that is to come into being in its fullness in the future – a proleptic vision of that reality emerging in yet a small way, come to the September 11 commemoration at Town Hall a week from Tuesday. “Can a nation change its gods?” Jeremiah asks, amazed and scandalized that his people have forsaken the fountains of living water, and have chosen instead the cracked cisterns that hold no water. And if this nation in which we are privileged to live has any guiding creed, it is that a man or a woman’s relationship to God, and how she or he chooses to worship, is a matter for her or his own conscience and independent determination. What that also means is that all are welcome here, just like it says over the doorway outside, that all may drink from our cisterns, and, yes, some may indeed find the water to their liking. We encourage that, of course, but we also expect that our guests may prefer to bring their own water. That is certainly fine, too. We may learn to appreciate its particular taste, as well. Can a nation change its gods? Not likely. But our concept of God, he who is bigger, more expansive, and also more daring and surprising than all of our concepts, ideas, images, and doctrinal formulations, can grow, and can make space at the table for others, who are also, like us, struggling to be faithful. You read through this book, the stories of the wanderings in ministry of this man, Jesus of Nazareth, and you begin to get the idea that he who ate with lepers and sinners, who forgave thieves in their last hour, who sat at noonday by a well and spoke with a Samaritan woman of living water, who allowed himself to be anointed by whores and who raised to life the sons and daughters of Gentiles and other aliens in the land, even representatives of the alien occupying force, seems to have had a surprisingly expansive idea of the concept of honor and what it is to be honorable, or to be honored, and who deserves honor or homage, a more expansive notion of these things, I’ll admit than I have. But when I remember that he also welcomed me, accepted me as I am, just as I am, and that, form time to time, he even chooses to use me, as he - I know because I have seen it - chooses to use you, I am both honored and humbled. The Samaritan woman who met Jesus by the well that day, and who asked him for living water, had arrived at the well equipped not only wither bucket, but with a strong sense of who she was and how her ancestors had taught her to worship. But she left that day changed forever, and she became the Gospel’s first missionary, when she went back and told everybody in her city about Jesus. Her story, and today’s Bible passages, have put me in mind of another story, one that some of you have told me over the years, and that others of you may also know. It has to do with a man who used to rise early each morning and make his way down to the riverbank with a sturdy pole and two buckets, one on each end. In this way he would fetch his family’s water for the day, filling the buckets and then hoisting the pole across his shoulders for the return trip to his home. As it happened, though, one of the buckets had a crack, and as he walked back up the path every day, water would seep out until by the time he reached his destination, he had only a bucket and a half remaining of the two buckets of water that he had scooped out of the river. After some time, the man’s neighbor noticed this situation and said, “Friend, why don’t you discard that broken bucket and get a new one for your pole?” The man only smiled, and answered his friend, “Have you notice the flowers by the edge of the path where my broken bucket spills its drops of water? If I got a new bucket I would have to go back down the path each day and water those flowers. As it is, the cracked bucket, which appears imperfect to you, is useful to me.” May we, too, in all of our imperfections, in honor and in dishonor, and in all of our associations, find ourselves, in surprising and unexpected ways, useful to our gracious Lord. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.Rev. Jim Thomas
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