From the beginning, the Christian story has been written at
tables. Jesus set the tone, eating with sinners and outcasts
and spinning these wild stories about feasts where the
most unlikely guests topped the invitation list. His followers
later scandalized their neighbors with their fellowship
dinners that mixed men and women, rich and poor, slave
and free, Jew and Gentile.
But tables tell two stories. They can be places of exclusion
as well as inclusion. Who is invited? Who is left out?
On this World Communion Sunday, Jesus tells a parable
about a banquet and an act of courage that redefines the
meaning of belonging. The story starts with every host’s
nightmare. You clean the house. You borrow chairs from
the neighbor. You drag down those extra table leaves from
the attic. You prepare an elaborate meal. Then, one by one,
just before they’re to arrive, the guests begin to call. Sorry,
can’t make it. Something came up. Just not feeling well.
Too busy. Can’t make it. Before you can catch your breath,
the distinguished list of guests you carefully curated has
evaporated. No one is coming.
The excuses sound familiar. Who hasn’t heard them all, or
made them all? Okay, maybe not the one about the oxen,
but you get the point. In response, the host’s anger feels
very human. All that work for an empty table.
We might expect the host to cancel the party in wounded
pride, to let the feast spoil in silence. But just watch what
courage does: Go out into the streets and lanes, and bring in
the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.
Then, when there’s still room: Go back! Go back out into the
streets and lanes; compel people to come, so that my house
may be filled.
He isn’t just inviting a different set of people. He’s
subverting the criteria for inclusion, shifting his focus from
the right crowd to a crowded table.
In Jesus’s world, refusing a banquet invitation was more
than ghosting the host; it was a public insult. And bringing
in the very people excluded by purity codes wasn’t pity;
it was reversal. Jesus isn’t telling a charming story about
hospitality here.
This is a picture of the kingdom of God and a warning to the
religious leaders at dinner with him. Exclude others from
God’s table, and you will find yourselves left outside.
This is not charity. It is courageous witness.
I saw this kind of courage years ago, worshiping with a
Catholic community outside Managua, Nicaragua. Their
church was beautifully broken. There were only two
complete walls on either side, only half a roof, dirt floor.
Which all combined to mean that no one, and nothing,
could be kept out. I’m talking about birds flying through
during the homily. I’m talking about children who repeatedly
kicked soccer balls into the chancel and a priest who kicked
them back with a grin. Street vendors selling their crafts.
Babies fussing. Laughter drifting in on the breeze.
And as we prepared for Eucharist, as we prepared for the
Lord’s Supper, people wandered in from north and south
and east and west to join us. Then the Nicaraguan priest
did something that took my breath away. He invited our
group of Presbyterians to come forward for the sacrament.
No, he insisted that we come.
“Esta mesa,” he said, “es para ustedes también.” This table is
for you as well.
Not the right crowd. A crowded table.
It’s the message of the parable. When God sets the table,
we don’t set the guest list. When we decide who belongs
at this table, we have forgotten our role in the story. We are
not the host. We are the servants whose master has said, “I
want my house to be filled and no seat left empty.” We are
invited guests compelled to invite others, to say, “This table
is for you as well.”
On World Communion Sunday, the Christian family draws
the widest circle we can imagine. The table links us to
Christ-followers in village churches and soaring cathedrals,
in refugee camps and everywhere a table is set for the
Lord’s Supper. We affirm our unity with siblings facing
persecution, war, famine, crushing poverty across the
globe. This awareness of our unity creates an agonizing
tension. For followers of Jesus, our global solidarity is
inseparable from the reality of brokenness. Our table is set
in a world of pain.
The parable concludes with haunting judgment: None of
those who were first invited will taste my dinner. They had a
chance. They chose scarcity over abundance. They chose
control over grace.
But the banquet will not wait. Their seats are already taken.
With or without us, God’s table will be filled.
We come as invited guests. We come as those who were
once standing on the margins, brought near by the wonder
of welcome. We are the ones waiting in the highways
and the hedges for the scandalous embrace we never
deserved. And having been so welcomed, we have no
excuse to exclude.
The most subversive thing the church can do in a fractured
time is to prove that profoundly different people can share
the same loaf, the same cup, the same hope.
And so, Second Church, we are called to courage. To
confront the corners of our own hearts where exclusion
has taken root. I remember in college, when I was sorting
through my own views, I asked my mentor, Dr. Orval
Wintermute, how to reconcile what seemed to me at odds.
As he often did, the old professor answered my question
with a question. I’ve never forgotten it. “Chris, do you think
it is possible to overestimate the love of God?” I know
some of you are wrestling with this tension right now. That
struggle takes faithfulness when many would rather draw
lines of separation.
Some are preaching a pseudo-gospel of identity checklists
and limited seating. The vulnerable are treated as a threat
to be managed rather than neighbors to be welcomed. The
baptized are denied a place at the tables of leadership or
blessing because of who they are. Exclusion is excused
in the guise of “biblical fidelity.” Hostility dressed up as
“muscular authority.” This is not new. The church has always
faced this temptation—to be those first invited guests in
Jesus’ parable, the ones who had their reasons, who had
their standards. Who chose their own self-constructed
circles over the extravagant welcome of the host. And it left
their stomachs empty and their hearts hardened.
The truth of the gospel is deeper. As Yale theologian
Miroslav Volf has written, exclusion is not just rude. It is a lie
about God when we exclude, claiming God’s abundance
is limited and suggesting God’s grace has boundaries we
get to determine. When we decide who’s in and out, we are
making ourselves the host of a meal we were only invited to.
The courage Christ calls us to is subversive precisely
because it refuses the categories our culture—and much of
the church—insists upon. So, what does this mean for us?
Well, it might be the most important work for the church
now: to show again and again, to show the world, that we
are not a vehicle for extremism, division, or weaponized fear,
but a community called to reflect God’s boundless grace,
especially when that work stretches us.
So yes, we share tables to address food insecurity. Yes,
we stay in relationship even when it’s hard. Yes, we refuse
to treat any person or group of people as a problem to be
solved when they are God’s beloved children claimed by
the same grace that claims us.
We reject the baptizing of dehumanizing ideologies. We
refuse to recreate God in our image. Because, friends,
the call of the Lord’s table is not a call to politeness but to
faithfulness. To be faithful to a God who invited us when
we had no claim on belonging—and who keeps extending
the invitation.
I think you know exactly who needs an invitation to your
table. I think you know who has been waiting at the edges
while you’re comfortable at the center. Listen: God’s love
transcends all your categories. You cannot overestimate it.
When you come forward this morning, remember that
priest on his beautifully broken altar, who chose the
courage of welcome over rigid rules. His choice changed
my life.
Esta mesa es para ustedes también. This table is for you as
well. So, make space for everyone our host welcomes.
Pray with me: Holy God, gather us at your table. Seat us
beside those we would never invite. Send us to carry your
love to all. Amen.