NO STRANGERS HERE

October 4, 1992
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture

Isaiah 25:6-9
Luke 14:15-24

"...GO out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come
in, so that my house may be filled" -Luke 14:23 (NRSV)

The Bible is, happily, very serious about eating, and it
takes very seriously what happens when people eat together.
There are, in the Bible, stories about breakfasts on the beach,
ceremonial meals, large outdoor picnics,. pot luck suppers, wed-
ding receptions, grand banquets, and intimate evening meals for
three. On the very night of his arrest, the night before he
died, he carefully arranged a meal; and later, after the resur-
rection, he invited them to breakfast, built the fire, cooked the
fish.

"You prepare a table before me in the presence of my ene-
mies" - a beloved sentiment and a precious image which we recall
and recite together before we figuratively sit down at the table
of communion.

And because it is so committed to meals ‘and eating, the
Bible also pays attention to the food, God's gifts - the menu!

"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for
all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-
aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of
well-aged wines strained clear."

The older translation read:

"A feast of fat things" - which is, given what we now know
abut the subject, probably much more accurate. Life is full, it
seems, of "fat things."

Robert Farrar Capon is an Episcopal priest, theologian and
gourmet cook, who loves God, his family and good food. He has
written a combination cook book and theological commentary enti-
tled The Supper of the Lamb. In it he observes:

"...it was God who invented dirt, onions and

turnip greens: God who invented human beings with
their strange compulsion to cook their food."

In what could well be a commentary on Isaiah 25 and that
banquet full of rich and fat things, Capon rhapsodizes:

"Food these days is often identified as the enemy.
Butter, salt, sugar, eggs are all out to get you,
And yet at our best we know better. Butter is...
well, butter. It glorifies almost everything it
touches. Salt is the sovereign perfecter of all
flavors. Eggs are, plain and simple, one of the
wonders of the world. And, if you put them all
together, you get not sudden death, but Hollan-
daise ~ which in its own way is not one bit less a
miracle than the Gothic arch, the computer chip,
or a Bach fugue."

Food and cooking, Capon Says, not only stop us dead in our
tracks in wonder, "Even more, they sit us down evening after
evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables,
they actually create our humanity." [Preface, p. VII, VIII} We
do our celebrating around the dinner table. When we are looking
for romance we go to dinner with candlelight. When the business
meeting is a little more than business it's over lunch. After

the wedding we eat together; brunch after baptism, and after the
funeral we eat together.

In point of fact, food sits us down less and less it seems.
The particularly unattractive but description "grazing" fits,
sadly, the eat-on-the-run-while-standing-at-the-counter habits of
Many of us. Because life is too full of "fat things," some gulp
down a Slim Fast instead of a heavy lunch. Starbucks has even
developed an invention which allows you to sip hot coffee while
striding to work listening to your Walkman in a cocoon of isola-
tion. Having a cup of coffee is something you used to have to
sit down for and therefore a social act designed for sharing.

Isaiah's ancient wonderful vision of the heavenly banquet,
of God preparing a meal of rich foods, assumes that something
good happens when people eat together, something true is affirmed
and celebrated. And the radical and, at the time, stunning thing
about his vision of God's banquet was that it was for all people:
not just the chosen people, not just for the racially pure and
religiously orthodox, not just for the physically and socially
acceptable, but for all people. The community formed at table,
eating God's gifts of rich and delicious food, is radically
inclusive.

—> But - several centuries after Isaiah's, the vision had
become radically exclusive. You have heard about archeological

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research around the Dead Sea, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the
religious community at Qum Ran, which became the quintessential
expression of Judaism in the first century and the definer of
orthodoxy. The image of the heavenly banquet was very important
at Qum Ran but by the first century it had become again an elite,
racially exclusive banquet. Only the good folk are at table.
There are surely no Gentiles there. And there are no imperfect
people present, no blind, lame, deaf or poor people. It is a
very clean, orderly and well-to-do company of like-minded and
like-looking friends.

So one day after he has committed two consecutive social
faux pax - by healing a man on the Sabbath and then criticizing
the way people scramble for prominent places at the table - he is
sitting at table at a proper. and elegant meal in the home of a
prominent man, one of the guests proposes a toast, "Here's to
eating together in God's kingdom!" And Jesus tells them a story
which surely left everybody squirming.

A man gave a dinner party and sent out invitations. When
his guests accepted, he made arrangements, slaughtered the ani-
mal, prepared it and started to cook it. Then, according to
custom, he sent word back to his guests. "The meal is almost
ready. Come now!" That's how it was done: invitation - re-
sponse - preparation - and a summons to the banquet.

But in this story the guests who have already accepted the
invitation start to drop out. In Semitic culture that is simply
not done. In some places, not to honor an invitation you have
already accepted is tantamount to a declaration of war. It is,
everywhere, an insult. The excuses are absolutely ridiculous. No
one buys a piece of real estate sight unseen, or a team of oxen,
and no one accepts an invitation to a dinner party on his own
wedding day.

The host is rightfully deeply offended. But his response is
curious. Get more guests. Not the kind of people I normally
have to dinners. In fact, invite the very people who never get
invited to a dinner like this. When his servant fulfills the
peculiar demand, there are still empty seats. Go get more. Go
out on the highway and compel people to come in. An interesting
detail: No one accepted after one invitation - particularly if
you were from a lesser social class than the host. A second,
more urgent invitation was normal. The messenger is instructed

to compel, to urge them - literally to take them by the arm and
lead them in to the table.

There is a very different picture of God's kingdom here and
a radically different notion of how God's people are related to
God and to one another.

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Strangers become guests: outsiders are insiders: all
people are welcome at the banquet of heaven. There are no barri-
ers of race, gender, physical capability or incapacity. There
are no barriers of genetics, or religion or ideology or sexual
orientation or morality, none. There is a banquet of rich food
and all are welcome and every seat must be filled. It was a

radical critique of the way people thought in his day and in our
own.

The tenor of our time is not all inclusive. In fact ethnic
and racial exclusiveness has taken on a terrible new reality.
"Ethnic cleansing" - is there an uglier notion in all of history

than that? Do you read that term — which Serbian Christians use
to explain why they are bombing defenseless Muslim families in
Sarajevo - and find yourself wondering is this really happening?
Why is this happening? - a mere fifty years after another ethnic
cleansing project produced Auschwitz and Dachau, after which we
said, "never again?"

I heard a professor of history at Columbia University, James
Shanton, deliver a lecture, "Race and Ethnicity, An American
Dilemma: A Worla Dilemma," in which he suggests that the great-
est threat to the peace of the world in the years ahead is the
renewal of ethnic pride and the exploitation of that pride for
political purposes. The terrible events in what used to be
Yugoslavia document his analysis. More urgently, Professor
Shanton suggests that, with the majority rapidly becoming a
minority in this country, with that day clearly in sight, when
European-Americans will no longer be a majority, and in a time
characterized more and more by open hostility between European-
Americans, African~Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Ameri-
cans, our biggest challenge as a nation will be to find a common
humanity which transcends race and ethnicity - something we have
not had much success at doing.

Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here, spoke
yesterday to our tutors and said that contact between white
people and black people is decreasing and is substantially less
than when he wrote the book five years ago.

In fact, the momentum is in the direction of separate -
private - away from any sense of the community, the public.

Parker Palmer, a Quaker theologian, has written a book with
the intriguing title, The Company of Strangers in which he sug-
gests that while the Christian religion teaches hospitality to
the stranger as a virtue, increasingly we regard the stranger as
the source of personal danger and threat. our basic stance
toward the stranger is suspicion and we reflect it by retreating
to privacy every chance we get.

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Palmer feels that suburban malls are an expression of our
fear of public places, replacing public behavior which used to
happen in the public squares — visiting, greeting, gossiping,
with private, impersonal, pure shopping. JI think that is part
of the charm of the summer farmer's markets. It's not only good
produce, but a kind of community is formed. If you go more than
twice you get to know the growers and inevitably you see some
friends and everyone seems to be enjoying a sense of public
relatedness.

Two popular journalists have written recent editorials which
Support Parker's thesis that the weight of the culture tilts
toward the private instead of the public.

Bob Greene was reflecting ona Sunday morning walk he took
through the section of Columbus, Chio, called Bexley, where he
grew up and where I lived for a dozen years. It was a nostalgic
reminiscence, until the end when he noted that "in the nicer
sections of town the homes were still lovely, but very few had
the names of their owners displayed on address signs in front,
the way they used to. Instead, the signs on the lawns bore the
names of security firms, announcing to would-be-burglars that the
homes were wired and connected to the police station." Greene
editorialized, "It's like this everywhere. Don't let strangers
know your name: just tell them you are wary and well protected."

And Ellen Goodman, in a column entitled "In the 90s: Keep
Out of Touch," observed that the venerable game of telephone tag
has been altered fundamentally by the answering machine and voice
mail. You win in the 1990s by "reaching out and touching tech-
nology. Only the losers end up talking to real people." Effec-
tive players wait till after five to return the day's calls, and
end up talking to six answering machines in ten minutes instead
of six people which would take thirty minutes. "A growing number
of Americans have come to prefer voice mail to voices," she says.
"A hundred years ago the telephone was invented to allow people

to talk to one another. Now it's being used to help people avoid
talk."

Hospitality is one of our oldest values. It does not mean
being polite and inviting friends over for dinner on Friday
night. The technical meaning of hospitality is love for the
stranger and it is a radical and healing word in a world increas-
ingly divided and fragmented by race, ethnicity, and religion.

And it is based on a radical vision of the human race as a
unity, as a single family - related because of the unity of the
creator. Hospitality - the stranger, the poor, lame, blind and
outcast not as recipient of charity, but as dinner guest.

The church of Jesus Christ has a job to do. our task is to
proclaim and then model that vision to the world: not merely to

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reflect the exclusivity and privatization of American life, but
to contradict it, to be the kind of public community which wel-
comes aS an equal, as a guest at the table any man or woman who
comes. It is a very precious vision which we celebrate on this
Sunday, remembering that Christian people of every race and

nationality come to table today and together, ina bleeding,

divided world, bear witness to the oneness of the human family.

"Go out on to the highway and compel them to come in," the
host commanded. He had to do that, not because they didn't want
to come in but because no one was going to believe that the great
banquet was, in fact open, that there was a place at that table
for everyone. :

Grace is always unbelievable. You mean he wants me? I'm
invited? You must be mistaken. I don't deserve that.

God is that host, obviously. It's a lovely image of God,
tugging at your Sleeve, taking you by the arm, guiding you to the
banquet table, .

I believe there are many people who don't come to church
because they don't feel like they're good enough; people who long
for friendship and fellowship but Stay at arm's length because in
their heart of hearts they don't think they belong.

And you and I - it is unbelievable, isn't it? Goad wants us
at the table. There is a place for you.

So come —- no matter who you are. No matter how you have
distanced yourself, no matter what there is about you that has
made you feel unacceptable, unworthy, undeserving.

Hear the words of our Lord.

Come - the food is prepared. Come - there are no strangers
here,

Come - all is ready.
$F + + + fF 4 4
Lord of all, you welcome us as guests...
Lead us to table and turn our hearts
so that we reflect your love, your grace,

your hospitality in our life together;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen,

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