August 5, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Place at the Table

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51
John 6:24–35

“I am the bread of life.”

John 6:35 (NRSV)

The economy is for God
which means
it is also for my neighbor;
it is for my neighbor,
which means
it is also for God.

Chris Wigglesworth

My family returned recently from vacation in Europe. We spent some time back in the homelands, in Scotland. It’s always good to go back and see the family. Most of our time in Scotland was spent in my ancestral home, the Isle of Lewis, where my father and grandfather and great-grandfather and all the generations back are from.

Lewis is the largest island in the archipelago known as the Outer Hebrides, or the Western Isles. Whenever we go there, we live in the house my father owns now, which was the house my grandfather built on the smallholding, or croft, that he farmed. We had other family members there, and my brother who is just a couple years older than I and myself spent some time reminiscing about our childhood holidays on the island, because every holiday—Easter, summer—any time off we had, we would be shipped off to stay with our Granny and our grandpa, whom we called Shen, which is the Gaelic word for grandpa. It really means “old man,” but all the kids call their grandpas Shen.

So we would go and visit Granny and Shen, and we were remembering back to what seemed like these idyllic days of youth when the weather always seemed to be good. We would be sent out in the morning and spend all day playing. We would find somewhere to have lunch: someone in the village would look after us or my Granny would give our friends lunch. And then we’d come back and all gather, of course, for dinner in the small kitchen around a small table, which never seemed to be too small. There was always space at the table for aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who would come. We would sit together. My Shen would offer the grace in Gaelic. He would pray for a long, long time, and my brother would try and make me laugh during that time, to get me into trouble. It is kind of blasphemous when I look back on it.

The point is that there was always space at the table for everyone to gather. As I was thinking back on that, I realized that without really knowing it, here were lessons for life, lessons of faith: a place at the table for everyone there. Welcome, inclusion, nourishment, family, community, conversation, laughter.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the meal table plays an important role in the Gospel story. Eating with Jesus is the context of many important parts of the narrative of the Gospels. We find ourselves today in one of those situations, not in a house, as is so often the case, or in a room, but out by the lake. It’s the aftermath of the feeding of the multitude with the loaves and fish that the young boy gives to Jesus. We are in the midst of what one commentator describes as “a story about bread, but not about bread.” There is a paradox at the heart of this story because ultimately this is a story about the meaning of Jesus. The crowd is after Jesus again. New Testament scholar Alyce Mackenzie puts it this way: “The renewed growling of their stomachs is their signal to seek him out again.” The crowd are wanting more food because they are hungry, but what they get here is not the same bread as the previous day. In fact, Jesus offers his very self. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

In many ways, as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion, we enact this saying of Jesus. Adam, in his announcements, offered the invitation to the table for Communion this morning, and as is our practice, he invited all to come to the open table, all who believe in the Lord Jesus. In our tradition, the Reformed tradition, it was not always the case that that invitation would have been given. Rather, in our past history and, indeed, in some parts of the Reformed today they have a practice that is called “Fencing the Table.” Fencing the Table means that those who are deemed fit to receive Communion are examined, and then they are admitted to a part of the church, so that they can receive Communion. And then there is a fence; it’s often a tablecloth placed along certain pews, and people who are deemed not fit to receive Communion would sit behind and not receive the elements of bread and wine. Thankfully we have moved on from the practice of Fencing the Table. Indeed, we find in the Reformed tradition that there are new understandings of the meaning of the sacrament developing.

Earlier in the summer, in May, the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, met in their General Assembly. One of the reports they received was on theology and the economy. How are we to understand economics from a Christian point of view, a Christian worldview? In a very fine essay on this subject, two theologians from Glasgow University, my alma mater, wrote about the Christian underpinnings of the understanding of an economy that works for the good for the whole society, a kind of “humane economics.” Doug Gay and Werner Jeanrond write this in the introduction to their treatise on theology and economics: “The central Christian practice of sharing in the Lord’s Supper is a definitive sign of how all that comes from God is to be offered back to God and shared with our neighbors.” They quote Professor Chris Wigglesworth, whom I’ve quoted on the front of the bulletin: “The economy is for God which means it is for my neighbor; it is for my neighbor which means it is for God.” It shouldn’t surprise us that this work is being undertaken, as throughout the history of the church and certainly in the Reformed tradition there has been engagement with the questions of equality, inclusivity, and mutuality in the economy right back to Calvin, the founder of the Reformed tradition writing in Geneva in the middle of the 1500s. Calvin points in many different ways to the role that rich people have in working for the common good. In a commentary on 2 Corinthians he writes, “The Lord recommends to us a proportion that we may in so far as everyone’s resources admit, afford to help the indigent that there might not be some in affluence and others in indigence.” In Geneva, the Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which Calvin wrote and which became the rule book for the city council, had provision in them for the care of the poor and particularly for medical coverage for poor people. Doctors were required to spend a part of each week with the poor people in the districts that they served.

And we can jump from Calvin directly to the recent encyclical letter from Pope Benedict in 2009. The letter is called Caritas in Veritate, charity in truth. Writing just at the time that the economies of the world were tanking, Pope Benedict was reflecting on the drive for profits. He wrote this in a prophetic statement: “If profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

Much has been written these past months and years about the causes of the great recession. There were many people who wrote about the causes being rooted in the issue of leverage, leveraging debt, and the debt-to-equity ratios that banks and investment houses were carrying. One writer has questioned what seemed to become orthodoxy. William Cohan, writing in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly, offers a different take on the causes of the economic downturn. He writes that it’s not about these complex economic matters of leverage and debt-to-equity ratios. He says the problem is that what were once partnerships in the investment banks had moved to become public corporations where profit was the only thing that was important. Cohan writes this: “Employees felt free to take huge risks with other people’s money; as partnerships it was their net worth that was on the line.” Cohan says that in his view, to prevent another crisis financial, executives should once again have something close to their full net worth on the line every day, so that they will take risk management more seriously.

We know that in the days to come, the next hundred days, we will be in the midst of the presidential election. We’re going to hear it over and over again: “It’s the economy, stupid.” I wonder as we hear that, do we reflect on what a Christian word might be to this economic situation? I love the prayer that comes from a base Christian community in Lima, Peru, and which they say at Communion:

God, food of the poor,
Christ, our bread,
give us a taste of the tender bread
from your creation’s table;
bread newly taken from your heart’s oven,
food that comforts and nourishes us.
A fraternal loaf that makes us human;
joined hand in hand, working and sharing.
A warm loaf that makes us family;
Sacrament of your body,
your wounded people.

There is a place at the table for you this morning. You’re invited to come. Is there a place at the table for all when it comes to the way that we order our economic circumstances? I believe that we are called to live in ways that reflect mutuality and inclusion in the ordering of our economic lives.

Gay and Jeanrond end their paper with a modern classic hymn by Shirley Erena Murray, titled “A Place at the Table”:

For everyone born, a place at the table.
To live without fear and simply to be.
To work, to speak out, to witness and worship.
For everyone born the right to be free.”

May it be so. Amen.