What difference does it make who you eat with?
Before you jump to too quick an answer, allow yourself to mentally relive the horrors of the middle school and/or high school cafeteria.
You sit with your friends. You sit with people like you. You hope for folks you think are cool and/or cute to join you if you’re sitting first. (Someone thinks she knows why all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria…)
Choice of who we eat with typically reinforces our social norms. When we share food together, we are quite often, if tacitly, confirming a likeness: we are family, we are Christians, we are neighbors, we are friends.
This morning I heard a sermon on hospitality. It took up the hard words of Jesus in Luke 14:
- Don’t choose places of honor at the banquet–you might be humbled.
- Don’t invite friends or family to your meal–they might invite you back!
- Compel people to join the marriage feast!
The Kingdom of God warns us about how we eat.
If we use our meals as an opportunity to reinforce our social standing, we may be in for a humbling surprise.
If we decline to use our meals as an opportunity to transcend social boundaries, actively reaching “downward,” we may be in for a humbling surprise.
And, one of the important points from this morning’s sermon, if we don’t live as though the Kingdom of God is a social as it is “spiritual,” we have missed the point.
The Kingdom of God which comes and announces glorification to the humble is supposed to be reflected on earth. That earthly reflection is to be the church. We are to be the ones who demonstrate in our life together and lives individually the world-subverting hospitality of God.
Now, who should we invite over for dinner…
J.R., any chance of the message that you heard being available anywhere? Like what you have said in this post.
Brad, here’s the link to the sermon:
http://www.chathamchurch.org/sermons/sermon/2012-06-03/the-table-of-jesus
-Daniel
‘… if we don’t live as though the Kingdom of God is a [sic] social as it is “spiritual,” we have missed the point….‘
(Presumably you meant ‘as social’.) Hmm. I’m not sure I agree. I wonder what this ‘spiritual’ is. I suspect that the idea that there is something ‘spiritual’ in addition to, or in apposition to, or distinct from the social — that’s what misses the point.