Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Hopefully, Thanksgiving and Thanksliving abide at this house, but on that day, there is something special with the people and the food and the conversation and all that goes on at our house or at someone else's house.
How big was your table? Not so much in terms of its dimensions, but those that it included? Did your table honor younger and older, richer and poorer, left leaning and right leaning, and all of the other "voices" that make for the rich texture of conversation, life, and relationships?
On Sunday morning I pondered the same things internally, and then ultimately asked the class the same question after we meandered about the texts. We started with I Corinthians 8 and the challenges of the meat sacrificed to idols and the question of who is the "weaker" brother or sister. We also wondered out loud as to what was the parallel in our world today. The notion that knowledge puffs up but agape love builds up gave us pause. Then we segued to other love passages and especially those that explicitly hit on the notion of relationships, like John 21, Jesus and Peter; like Ephesians 5 and a deconstruction of lovingly responding to the needs of the other person unconditionally (submission) and putting the needs of others above your own (agape love) and how they might be rather synonymous; and then we talked about entitlements of our own compared with Paul's in I Corinthians 9.
Then we landed on the notion that we are free in Christ to surrender our entitlements so as to bear witness to the love of Jesus in the world and what that would look like. If anyone had entitlements, it would be Paul for sure. Entitlements is a human condition that says something about all of us. He was willing to become whatever was needed so as to tell the story of Jesus. Did some surrendering of his entitlements.
Sometimes our entitlements simply speak to fear.
If we expand the table and move toward more inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness, we find our entitlements and presuppositions being challenged.
One person in the class caught my attention when she said that people know if we are judging them or loving them.
Our table at Thanksgiving was not terribly diverse. Sure we have the left and the right folks. Our table at church yesterday was somewhat diverse though statistically not so. I am reading Paul, Jesus, and the Psalmist. Sprinkled alongside the Bible texts are John Pavlovitz, Michael Waters, Melissa Milewski, and Pete Daniels. That is a diverse set of readings.
They connect at a certain level and around a certain number of themes.
What do you suppose they are?
More on this topic in a day or so.
How big is your table?
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