Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

21:46 Will you join your hearts with mine in prayer? God of abundance, bless our gathered hearts. Put our hungers to good use. Fill us with good things for your glory. Amen. In this summertime season of cookouts and potlucks, beach picnics, and enhanced coffee hours, your clergy are inviting you to pull up a chair here at Christ's table, imagining together what we learn about the Christian life, what we learn about who Christ is, and what Christ hopes for our world around the tables we share and through the gospel stories of breaking bread. And this Sunday we get to imagine this through our scripture, yes, but we also get to practice it as we set the table of Christ to share in our communion feast.

22:56 This summer's series has brought us through many chapters of the Gospel of Luke, showcasing the care and importance that this gospel places on the power of sharing a meal. In Luke's gospel, eating together is nourishing, celebratory, revitalizing. It offers life-giving connection and reflects religious convictions. For Jesus blesses bread and breaks it. Jesus invites those to the table who have been given no place before. In this morning's gospel story, Christ shares a meal in the home of prominent community leaders with a group of religious elites who were both curious about Christ and committed to their own upstanding in their society's rules and structure. who invited you they might be wondering as they take their places of honor around the banquet table who invited you they might be whispering as christ begins to challenge their worldview before they've even tasted the meal so let us listen now for how this echoes to us through the Gospel of Luke chapter 14 beginning with the seventh verse. But first a quick note on translation here. This passage's translation includes words that have been used to harm and separate people into categories. Know that Jesus used these descriptions not as judgment of people who are disabled but to name and include groups previously excluded from community gatherings like this one.

24:39 The gospel reads,

26:17 Thanks be to God. Have you ever invited folks over for a meal or a dinner and thought about where each guest would sit? Maybe you've spent time meticulously placing seats for a wedding banquet or run the New York gauntlet of where all eight or more people will sit at your reservation at a crowded table. I bet you've given some thought to the guest list or where the seat of honor might be who should sit where. Maybe you're hosting family and you know that a certain great aunt can't hear on her left side so that's where you seat the rowdy newborn. maybe you're having a dinner party and you hope that two of your single friends hit it off so you invite them both and sit them across from each other so they can gaze lovingly into each other's eyes well in the ancient world invites like these would not have been to sue the rowdy newborn, but instead to maintain complex social standings with seats assigned according to hierarchy and attendees expected to reciprocate in kind. If you sat higher than your rank and the host had to ask you to move, as Jesus describes in this story, imagine or maybe remember the shame of carrying your tray through a middle school cafeteria, realizing you accidentally sat with the wrong group.

27:54 Or imagine inviting a carefully constructed list of people to your holiday party with hopes of joining theirs, only to receive no invitations back. Ouch. yes jesus suggests we form these exclusive these seat selecting parties at our own peril that the worship of the honored seat was yet another mode of social exclusion when the invite list is constructed only within circles of comfort and with transactional benefit it forms another division of power that our host of hosts came to upend. And Luke's gospel makes sure we notice whose invitations are most important to Christ, whose presence around the table practices resurrection, practices righteous action.

28:54 those called lowly those who can't repay in kind those we might not have much in common with we think or those we might be embarrassed to sit by or for those of us excluded from prominent chairs maybe we imagine the challenge of being hosted by those who intimidate or exclude us maybe we're not sure we want to sit next to those inviters.

29:29 So how does one practice resurrection around the table, practice the abundant welcome of God that breaks down all of those wonderings? One of my favorite restaurants in my hometown of Minneapolis has been in the news a lot this spring. It offers the kind of home-cooked food and neighborhood atmosphere that makes me go out of my way when I visit, whenever I go home. And during the surge of ice activity in Minneapolis this winter, this restaurant decided to upend the model of their restaurant, to change how they were setting the table in protest of the government's violence against their neighbors. So they stopped putting prices on their menus, they turned their employees into volunteers so they could implement a tax protest, to refuse to rescind their revenues, to fund federal agents who were removing immigrant children and families from their homes and schools.

30:31 And what happened in the short term was really surprising. They simplified their menu. Anyone could come and eat for free, and with this wellspring of support from the neighborhood and donations from across the country, they were actually more profitable in a pay-what-you-can non-profit than the traditional model. And I had the chance to visit this restaurant in June when I was home for my college reunion, and what I saw and felt there was really remarkable. It resembled less of the restaurant I knew and more my experience serving our clients meals outside our doors at a place at the table. This restaurant, now calling itself post-modern times, estimates that 85% of their customers are people experiencing homelessness or addiction with limited access to cooked food in general. And the folks who were running the counter were doing so much more than offering a meal. They knew everybody's name. They made sure to say, are you sure you don't want that donut, sweetie? When someone forgot their beverage, they chased them down in the restaurant to make sure they had it with them. When people were overwhelmed or frustrated by the length of the line, they worked to calm people with compassion, making sure that those who were typically excluded from a restaurant or a shared community space had an experience of dignity. And the day that we visited, there was such a long wait for a table that we couldn't sit down.

32:14 in the beginning the hopes of this radical shift were for a restaurant space that served all those typically excluded from a restaurant setting sitting alongside neighbors in the spirit of the all our welcome mission we share here at fifth avenue though this week i learned that this restaurant has decided to temporarily close to re-envision their model and to rest for a few weeks from the energy it's taken them to serve good food to all people with dignity, to rest from the concentration of need coming through their doors. They've come to this threshold to close because when 85 percent of their customers are people who are struggling, they say it means they haven't built an integrated table. They are inviting the groups of marginalized people that Jesus commands, but they have not yet found a way to build a table where all kinds of people can eat side by side.

33:20 Though meeting people's deep needs is in itself a powerful model and one we emulate here, this one restaurant doesn't have the people or financial power to keep going at this rate. It made me imagine if there were 10 of these models around different neighborhoods, it would allow for more integration, for more people to be served in need, and for more kinds of people to share a meal with their neighbor.

33:50 So how do we build a table where all can sit and eat? Where the seat of honor is one of humility without, as Jesus commands us, the expectation of being repaid. maybe you're thinking preacher i don't own a restaurant or most of us don't live in minneapolis what can we do maybe you're already supporting ways to feed people who are homebound or food insecure like our team at a place at the table and meals on heels or maybe you're the one who's longing for the invitation, thinking how good it would feel to share a meal with a neighbor. and yet we do indeed need more volunteers at a place at the table. You can be inspired by the youth of this church on the back page of your bulletin this morning. We all have the opportunity to expand our circle to someone new. Perhaps your trivia team this morning after today's service could be a place to make a new friend. When we think there's not enough, we rush to the front of the line. We imagine we need there to be a seat of honor when we think there's not enough honor to go around. Instead of blessing those who go ahead of us, instead of widening the table trusting more will be served we think who invited you but we meet a Jesus who is making room for us telling us the place of honor you think you need to belong is not necessary saying come and sit beloved where you are loved and claimed

35:56 come and sit in this seat you thought was not meant for you The owner of Postmodern Times, Dylan Alverson, was recently interviewed about this restaurant's decision to close. He said, I've never regretted feeding someone. What we learned this winter is that if people come out of their homes and try to do something good side by side, it makes a difference. And that's what this was born out of. This restaurant is doing the good that is theirs to do. And they are inviting us to find our own sphere to do good within. It's just one road map of how to be the church, where we practice together heaven on earth. It might not be what we expect it might be a little uncomfortable and yet Jesus instructs us to do so not because we can repay or be repaid but to repair. To repair our imaginations of whose invite we might be waiting for. To repair our invitations of where we belong. To repair our anxiety that there will not be enough to go around. Yes, we have to set the table a little differently to share this meal with Christ.

37:28 Ooh, and we will set the table a little differently this morning, folks, during our communion service. Are you ready? Yeah! Each of you, having received the bread, will take the plate and turn around to serve the one behind you in line. Repeating as you have received, this is the bread of life for you. This might take us a little longer. We might forget what we need to say. We might be nervous or happy to serve each other, but trust that we set this table together this way to invite in the presence of Christ. Seated beside us is the one who tells us we will be blessed by what we cannot repay. We will be blessed by what we try, even when we're not sure it will succeed.

38:29 We will be blessed when we cannot identify the return before we decide to invest. Turn to today's bulletin cover with me. This vision of possible futures painted in 1971. This was Faith Ringgold's first public art commission. Maybe you know her mosaics or her quilt art. The city paid her to paint a mural at the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island. and she painted this mural based on interviews with the women who were incarcerated there. They said, I want to see a road leading out of here. It imagines futures not yet lived. Women are doctors, bus drivers, police people, professional basketball players, construction workers, all professions that were not freely open to women, especially women of color.

39:31 in 1971. These lives had not yet been lived. They're also musicians reading, mothering, contributing to good in the world, imagined by women who were incarcerated. They saw these futures as roads out of the hard place they'd come.

39:54 And you can visit this incredible mural on loan at the Brooklyn Museum. I urge you to go. it's powerful, it's larger than life. It encourages us to imagine futures we cannot yet see, ones we need to hear in stories or experiments by restaurants or risks we take to know even when we know we won't be repaid. so today let us set the table jesus calls us to set pulling out the dusty leaves to add to the table adding more plates putting some cushions on the floor for seats bringing over that friend to your trivia team this morning preparing before we know who will arrive preparing before we know how the meal will go. Trusting that in risking this courage, we join our host of hosts. We bring new life to the table. So friends, who will you invite?

40:59 Amen. Will you rise in body or in spirit and join me in the prayer of the day? Printed in your bulletin or seen on your screen. Servant, teacher, we thank you for preparing a feast for all at your table. We share this meal as your guests even when we would rather be your hosts. Teach us how to set your table so that all are fed. Let it be a banquet of hope and grace. Meet us in our discomfort and sit beside us as we try our best to live for your glory. Amen.