Eating in the Kingdom of God
Luke 13:22-30

When I was about 14 or 15 I got an idea that when I grew up, I would be a Bill Sherret or a Dan Mumuagh - I would be a pilot, perhaps even fly fighter planes.  Keep in mind that this is someone whose total experience of flying was to sit in a movie theater on a Saturday afternoon and vicariously experience the thrills of flight in B movies about World War II or the Korean War.

When I was in college, in ROTC, I actually went through a screening test to see if I could qualify for potential flight training.  When they tested for reaction to spinning in a circle, the dizziness and recovery time revealed that I would not be someone that you – or I – would want to rely on to get from point A to B by air.  I did not have the necessary gift nor had I prepared for the rigors of that calling.  I wanted it in the ideal but was not willing to pay the price to achieve it.

Truth be told, there were a lot of things I imagined I wanted to do or to be when I was growing up.  It is an important part of being a kid.  There were, at one time or another – not all at the same time – thoughts and dreams of becoming a football player or athlete of some sort, a musician, a politician, a great physicist, a farmer – oh and a pastor.  One of the tragedies I witnessed as an educator of young adults in recent generations was the lack of vision for the many possibilities of life.
 
However, if I have learned no other lesson in life, I learned that to be anything, one must make a commitment, accept discipline, work, study and train, practice, accept direction and help, and be focused on their own gifts and needs without judging the gifts and needs of other.

Rubbing shoulders with talented people does not create an innate talent in one’s own self.  And rubbing shoulders with Jesus does not bring us into the kingdom of God.

Which bring us to this morning’s gospel reading.  I can’t help but recall a few weeks back when our Old Testament lesson had Abraham asking the incarnate God if Sodom would be destroyed for the sake of 50, then 45, and so on down to 10.  In an echo of his intercession, we hear the question asked of Jesus: “will only a few be saved?”
  
Jesus, of course, responds with a story – a story about the difference between wanting something badly enough to commit to it versus wanting the benefit, the recognition, the reward – but not being willing to pay the price.  In the end, the answer seems to be, “Yes, only a few will be saved,” – and, “No, a very great many will be saved.”

To hear what is being asked and grasp what it says to us, we must first take it out of the stilted and religious atmosphere of church.  In your mind, let the setting take form – the dust and heat walking down a road toward Jerusalem.  Perhaps the mountain could be seen in the distance, through the haze.  Hear the voices of people walking from and to that city, the bleats of sheep and goats and an occasional horse being ridden through the crowded road by a Roman soldier as people scattered lest they get run over.  The smells of garlic and onions and overripe cheeses mingle with that of the animals and the people.

Everywhere people are moving, not only Jews – who actually were less than half the population of Palestine – but Arabs, Edomites, and Egyptians from the south; Greeks and Phoenicians from the north, Romans from the west, and Syrians, Babylonians, Hindi from the east.  This melting pot has endured subjugation under Greek, Egyptian, and now Roman rule for over 200 years.  And yet there remains strong within the collective memory of the Jews, an idea that this is God’s land and they are God’s people.  It is only a matter of time until God sends a deliverer and reestablishes Judah as his dwelling place, the place to which the whole world will look for salvation.

A concept of salvation is established in the earliest of the Bible stories, the ones that sound as if they should begin with, “Once upon a time…”  We find a need for salvation – for a restoring of our relationship with God and with one another - in the story of Eve and Adam and their attempt to cast off dependence on God through eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  But that knowledge - and how we love to wield our pseudo-ability to judge good and evil in others – was too great for them and for us.  Yet in our desire to be independent, we draw back from our relationship with God.  And in drawing back, we find ourselves enslaved to a destructive power that robs our lives of joy, of peace, of meaning and significance.

The story was and is told, again and again.  It was true of the children of Abraham – going down to Egypt for food when famine gripped the land, only to find, some 400 years later that they were slaves in a strange land and longed for return to the home that was so distant in the collective memory.

It was so when God met Moses and the elders on Mount Sinai to sit at table and talk about a future for these chosen people in a land of milk and honey.  They were not only being saved from Egypt but from themselves as they circled in the desert.  And perhaps more importantly, they were being saved for a purpose – to become a people, to inhabit a land to and bring the light of God to the whole world.

When Babylon carried the people of Judah away into captivity, their lament was, “How shall we eat these strange foods when we have been abandoned by God.  How shall we sing our song when we are held prisoner – far from the land, the kingdom of our God?”

Isn’t it interesting how the themes of deliverance – salvation – and food seem interwoven?

Again God delivers them, brings them back into the land, rebuilds the temple – and yet, somehow, in their zeal to guard their worship, they allow the light of God’s love and grace to grow dim.

Now, once again, Israel is in captivity.  Roman power has imposed a peace on the Western and Middle Eastern world by the might of the sword.  And though the people are in the land, there is no sense of freedom, no sense that God is ruling.  Thus the excitement at the possibility that this young man, this carpenter’s son from Nazareth who lays claim to be a Messiah (a political term more than a religious one) might, just might, be the one to save Israel.

Others have come and gone with the same promise but somehow, this one speaks with authority, he manages to rankle the ruling class yet encourage the downhearted.  However, his strange teaching seems to offer little in the way of political hope – where are his men, his arms, his resources to do battle with the might of Rome?  He manages to antagonize the political and religious leaders wherever he goes, appealing more to the poor, the weak, the outcast, the sinner, the downtrodden.  He eats with sinners and touches the unclean.  Rumor has it that his disciples eat without performing the ceremonial washing and he excused that on the basis that it is not what goes in but what comes out that establishes our relationship to the living Word.

What kind of deliverer is this?  Perhaps he only intends to save a few and grow a new nation from them.  “Will only a few be saved?”  Saved from what?  Saved for what?  Saved how?

We, like those folks of 2,000 years ago want to be saved from our circumstances.  But God wants to save us - in our circumstnaces - to eternal life.  Somehow, we have gotten an idea that eternal refers to quantity.  But the Kingdom of God is eternal and eternal life simply means life in that kingdom - a kingdom that does not reckon in time but in quality of life.  Living is more than racking up another birthday - for many that is hell, not life.  Living is to celebrate every moment because of dignity, worth, joy.  And Jesus came to announce that that life is available, independent of circumstance.

Are you healthy, wealthy, and wise?  Rejoice.  Are you sickly, poor, and limited?  Rejoice.  Even in our alienation from God and from one another, we seek salvation from our fear, our sense of isolation, our sense of futility.  But we seek it from within our own power, in our accumulation of things, in our demeaning of others to lift ourselves.

To be saved from ourselves is perhaps our greatness need.  To be saved for communion with the God who made us, who instilled the God essence into our very being, and who made us to be the rulers and caretakers of this pinnacle of creation – Earth.  It is our self-independence that leads us, again and again into slavery to the “world.”  And it always God who delivers us again and again.  The words of absolution: “…keep us in eternal life” are not so much about a future time as where we will live in the coming week.

There is a collect in Morning Prayer, a Prayer of Self-Dedication, which speaks to our need: 

Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated unto you; and then use us, we pray you, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Jesus reminds us that God’s first question – “Adam, where are you?” is an invitation to come and walk and talk, to sit and dine.  Jesus reminds us that the invitation is always open: Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.

It is at table that we are set free, saved as it were.  And so it is that we are all invited to come to this table where we can, in the words of the collect “be gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit” so we may show forth the power of the kingdom among all peoples.


John Dryden Burton
26 August 2007

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