The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” ~ Luke 5:30
Many years ago on a snowy spring night, I drove to Cortez for a volunteer shift at the Bridge Shelter. When I arrived, I banged on the back doorway and a cheery volunteer opened the door as blowing snow swirled inside.
“Hello! Welcome! Come on in before you freeze to death out there.” “What a storm,” I said as I walked on by the woman. “We have some fresh soup down the hall on the left. Help yourself.”
I slowed down as I pondered her words. She thinks I am a homeless person, and that I’m here to spend the night. Then I thought, “Why am I offended? Would I be offended if she thought I was a social worker on call? A doctor checking up on residents? Should I tell her I’m a minister volunteering?”
I walked down the poorly lit hallway and turned into the kitchen area where two guys were eating bowls of soup on a plastic table covered in cracker crumbs and splatters of soup. I opened the fridge to see if there was enough Kool-Aid for the night.
One guy with food in his beard said, “The soup’s good tonight. They didn’t just open a few cans and warm it up. This is homemade chicken noodle soup like my mom use to make.” “Better get a bowl before it runs out, or you’ll be eating jail sandwiches,” the other guy said.
I did not want to be rude, so I grabbed a pink plastic bowl, a spoon, and I dished out some chicken noodle soup from the crock pot and poured myself some cherry Kool-Aid.
There was only one table to sit at, so I sat down next to the wayfarers. “It’s cold out there tonight. I’m glad we have this place.” “Yes, it is nice,” I said. I looked at their dirty, stained hoodies with frayed ends on the arms and around the hood. They wore grungy jeans with holes, and they had multiple socks on their feet.
I looked at my grey “Mancos Bluejay” hoody with hot sauce and ketchup stains on it and tattered ends. I should have washed my dirty holey jeans weeks ago. I had not shaved in four days. I looked like them, except I kept my shoes on. Why did that bother me?
“How’s the soup?” the man with the beard asked. “It’s good,” I said, but I was struggling. I wanted to distance myself from my table companions.
Who do we eat with and who do we not eat with? How big is our table? The church’s table? Society’s table? As people of faith, we must constantly ask, “Who did Jesus eat with?”
United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon writes, “One of the things which angered Jesus’ critics was his choice of dinner companions. The way Luke tells it, his friends were a motley crew: tax collectors, Pharisees, harlots, common fishermen, assorted women. The Pharisees kept telling Jesus, ‘You’ve got to be careful whom you eat with. You’ve got to be careful.’”
“Will you hand me that pepper?” the man with soup in his beard asked me. Where was my fear coming from? I needed to be careful.
I grew up in a very nurturing, loving church and community, and I am forever thankful for the foundation they gave me. There was always someone to sit next to in the school cafeteria or in church who looked like me and thought like me. There is comfort in the familiar.
I remember my senior year in high school taking a recruiting trip to a college in Louisiana. When I ate lunch in their cafeteria, very few of the students looked like me. I was visiting a majority minority school, and I wanted to go home. Where did my dis-ease come from?
“The great spiritual call is not to be different from the other, but to be of the same substance and being as another, to be at one with others. We are called to go to the center (the table), where we realize our solidarity with others,” says Nouwen.
The barriers, the walls, the illusions of “other” are built in the cement of hate and fear over time. Walls maintain the social order, so chaos doesn’t reign we say. Or to paraphrase Robert Frost, “There’s something in us that likes a wall.”
Father Rohr says, “Jesus’ most consistent social action was eating in new ways and with new people, encountering those who were oppressed or excluded from the system.” He inaugurated a bigger, inclusive table and the powers to be resisted. We need to be careful.
Who is welcome at our table, and who is not?
In flashes of heaven, pure glory, we stand and we eat in solidarity with the human race. Walls come tumbling down. Distinctions between male or female, young or old, married or single, white or person of color, homosexual or heterosexual melt into the Grace and Peace of God.
“We need not make comparisons and judgments about others: I am not like him or her or them, I am more, I am better, I am different from others; on a deeper level, we can realize our common humanity,” says Nouwen. No one is excluded from God’s table.
As I ate my chicken soup, I asked the man, “Would you please pass the salt?” He did. A small gesture, but the walls started to crack. “The dinner table is such an intimate, holy, transforming, mysterious place—you’ve got to be careful whom you eat with,” writes Willimon.
May we open our hearts and tables to the Spirit of God’s Love and Grace.
Blessings and peace,
Craig