Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
June 5, 2005
Matthew 9:9-13; 18-26
Fred Craddock, New Testament professor and one of my favorite preachers, told this story one night in a church in Springfield, Missouri. He said, “Many years ago we were in Germany, studying for a year. I had been down to Zurich in Switzerland, several days away from my family. I was overwhelmed with a sense of melancholy. I was lonely. I boarded a train to return to Germany and grabbed a sandwich. On the German trains I would usually try to get a place in a compartment where there were already several people so I could just be at the fringe of the conversation. My German was not very good. Trouble was, on this train all the compartments were full, one after the other. Except in the last compartment, where there was one elderly woman. I figured that if I went in there, only two of us, that would give me 50 percent of the conversation. Could I handle it? I had no choice. ‘Is this place free?’ She nodded, so I sat down. She was staring out the window. ‘Nice day,’ I said. She turned and smiled.
“I worked up another German sentence, a real profound one like, ‘Will we get there tonight?’ Again, she turned and smiled. I grew more bold and said, ‘I’m going to Stuttgart. Where are you going?’ She said, ‘Rostach.’ Rostach? Rostach was in Communist East Germany, the DDR, the other side.
“I asked, ‘Are you a Communist?’
“’No,’ she said, ‘I am a Christian.’
“I said, ‘I’m also a Christian.’ Then I added, ‘I’m from America.’
“She said, ‘Yes, I know,’ and we began to talk.
“I asked, ‘What’s it like to be a Christian in East Germany?’
“She asked, ‘What’s it like to be a Christian in America?’
“She had a music box she’d bought. You twisted it and as it unwound it played, ‘Silent Night.’ She twisted it, it began to play, and she sang in German. She said, ‘You sing a stanza,’ which I did. We had a wonderful time.
“I had that old sandwich I had bought and my stomach was growling. I was hungry, but didn’t want to eat my sandwich in front of her. Finally I thought, I can at least share the sandwich. Then I ran up against another problem. It was a German sandwich and the bread was extremely hard. You probably know about German sandwiches. I couldn’t break it in two. I’m hitting it over my knee, trying to get it into two pieces I can share. Finally, when it broke, I handed her a piece. I hadn’t noticed, but in the meantime she had peeled an orange and was extending me half, even as she received half the sandwich. Half a sandwich; half an orange. We talked of being a person of faith in East Germany; we talked of being a person of faith in America. We got to Stuttgart.
“’God go with you,’ she said.
“’And God go with you. ’ Says Craddock, “I could have sworn that we had communion on that train. Since I shared that train compartment with her, I have been in 200 churches, I suppose. The first thing I do when I go to a church is check the menu. I find it’s the same in every church: one-half sandwich and one-half orange. It’s the Christian way. I think of her often. In fact, I thought of her so much that I began thinking how far it is from Springfield, Missouri, to Rostach, Germany. Do you have any idea how far that is, how many thousands of miles? From Springfield to Rostach? (or from Sebastopol to Rostach?) Do you know how far it is? I checked the atlas. It’s just across the table. Half of a sandwich; half of an orange. That’s how far it is.”
It’s amazing, isn’t it? When people set aside their fears, their prejudices, their stereotypes, and really take the time to care for each other, to listen to each other, to reach out to each other, it is amazing how small this big world of our becomes. For Fred Craddock on that train, half a sandwich and half an orange proved to be stronger than an iron curtain of suspicion and misunderstanding.
But Craddock isn’t the first to discover that the distance separating us is really no farther than the width of a table. “And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. (tax collectors – hated collaborators with Rome; sinners – anyone who did not keep the religious law and did not observe the various purity rituals) When the Pharisees saw this they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’” When does Jesus get into the most trouble? I think it’s when he suggests that there is room around his table for everyone.
We cannot understand the radical impact of Jesus’ action unless we understand the significance of table fellowship in first century Palestine. I’ve mentioned this before, so I won’t dwell on it, but the guest list at a dinner party was not something to be taken lightly. In fact, I suppose the same could be said of guest lists today. You did not sit down at the table with just anyone. Table fellowship was a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and religious hierarchy and status. Table fellowship was intimate fellowship. One only ate with those whom one accepted and respected. So a good Pharisee who kept the law and maintained ritual purity would never eat with some peasant or shepherd – sinner – who for whatever reason was ritually impure, who did not follow all the requirements of the law. It just would not happen. Period! End of discussion! There were long established social and religious barriers that just were not crossed, and everybody knew that. One ate with one’s own kind.
Yes, everybody knew that and abided by it, everybody that is, except Jesus. And so the Pharisees’ question, “Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?” carries with it shock, disapproval and disdain, and perhaps even a little alarm. He should know better. What does he think he is doing? He is bringing shame on himself and on all those who follow him, and he is disrespecting our customs and laws. What is he doing?
I believe that Jesus’ insistence on inviting and then sitting down at a table with just about anyone is as radical and unsettling today as it was 2000 years ago. Think how fearful, distrustful, intolerant and suspicious our world has become – our nation has become – many of our churches have become. These are days when the differences between us – religious, racial, cultural, sexual - seem more frightening than ever. I don’t believe we would have tolerated the detentions at Guantanamo a generation ago, but we are so frightened now. And then we run headlong into this text.
In sitting down to dinner with a group of tax collectors and sinners, Jesus blows apart the religious and social divisions and boundaries of his culture, and the Pharisees see this right away. That’s why I believe they are probably more frightened than angry. For what Jesus is saying is this: “All people are welcomed at my table; all people are welcomed in my kingdom. The old rules, the old restrictions, the old prejudices, the old fears, the old laws have no place here.” At Jesus’ table, says John Dominic Crossan, “one could have classes, sexes, and ranks all mixed up together. Anyone could be reclining next to anyone else, female next to male, free next to slave, socially high next to socially low, and ritually pure next to ritually impure.” In terms of proper table fellowship, Jesus’ table, says Crossan, was nothing less than “a social nightmare.” Jesus simply doesn’t seem to care about, appropriate distinctions and discriminations among and between people. His is a non-discriminating table depicting nothing less than a non-discriminating Kingdom of God. All are welcome. All have a part to play. All of us located…just across the table. In the timeless words of Robert Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He could have been talking about Jesus, describing Jesus’ welcoming, open, inclusive ministry. Can ours be any less?
The Vietnamese Zen monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, speaks of life as a vast web of “inter-being,” a web in which all life is linked together. There is no escaping this central fact. Something as simple and ordinary as a piece of bread, he says, cannot exist in and of itself. Rather it is part of this web of inter-being. In the bread there are people: farmers, bakers, truck drivers, along with their families, their ancestors, their friends and relations. In a small piece of bread are seeds, sunshine, rain, the bees as they work the flowers and make honey, the chickens and the eggs, the cows and the milk, the tiny yeast that give the bread its lightness. As we make our list of the ingredients for something as simple as a piece of bread, we find that the interconnections are endless and vast. Taking the bread into our mouths, we too participate in this “inter-being,” the on-going communion that is life in this world.
This is our faith. This is how Jesus lived his life. And no matter how scary the world gets, we cannot, we must not, forget it. In a column the other day, Thomas Friedman caught the spirit of this text when he wrote that in a nation that is overwhelmed by fear, as our nation seems to be, “people don’t mix, ideas don’t get sparked, friendships don’t get forged, stereotypes don’t get broken and freedom doesn’t ring.”
Look around, in this sanctuary, at Long’s or Mary’s or Fiesta or wherever you go after church…look around: all of us God’s beloved children, all of us welcome, all of us Jesus’ kind of people.