EATING WITH GENTILES
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church August 8, 2021
Texts: 2 Kings 5: 1-14; Mark 7: 1-14
Jesus had this terrible habit. He would eat with just about anybody. Anybody. In Jesus' day what you ate and with whom you ate were critical matters. This was especially true among the Jews, for whom eating together was literally a religious experience. To eat together was to celebrate their faith, which included very specific rules about what happened around the table. Cleanliness was paramount: clean food, clean dishes, clean hands, clean hearts. A proper Jewish meal was a worship service in which believers honored God by sanctifying the most ordinary details of their lives.
Jesus offended a lot of people with his table manners. He ignored the finger bowl by his plate. He ate whatever was put in front of him. He thought nothing of sitting down to eat with filthy people whose lives declared their contempt for religion. People saw him eating and they knew who he was: someone who had lost all sense of what was right, who condoned sin by eating with sinners and who might as well have spit in the faces of the good people who raised him.
In that time, sinners fell into five basic categories: people who did dirty things for a living (such as swine herders and tax collectors), people who did immoral things (such as liars and adulterers), people who did not keep the law up to the standards of the religious authorities (such as you and me), Samaritans, and Gentiles.
In today’s world, those sitting at such a table might include a child molester, an arms dealer, a garbage collector, an undocumented immigrant, a person with AIDS, a teenage crack addict, and an unmarried woman on welfare with five children by three different fathers. Did I miss anyone? Jesus was, of course, at the head of the table, asking one of them to hand him a roll, please, and offering the garbage collector a second cup of coffee before he goes back to work.
Then the local ministerial association comes into the restaurant and sits down at a large table across from the sinners. The religious authorities all have good teeth and there is no dirt under their fingernails. When their food comes, they hold hands to pray. They are all perfectly nice people, but they can hardly eat their steaks for staring at the strange crowd in the far booth.
The undocumented worker looks around warily, and the garbage collector smells like spoiled meat. The addict cannot seem to find his mouth with his spoon. But none of those is the heartbreaker. The heartbreaker is Jesus, sitting there as if everything were just fine. The authorities ask, doesn't he know what kind of message he is sending? Who is going to believe he speaks for God if he does not keep better company than that? I saw them eating and I knew who they were.
This morning’s gospel has the Pharisees complaining about Jesus: "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus’ response to them goes to the heart of true religious practice: Unless we eat with sinners and gentiles and share our food with people who are not like us, we are hypocrites. Authorities grumble, and everything that follows is Jesus' reply to them.
Any way you look at it, this is an alarming story. It is about giving up the idea that we can love God and despise each other. We simply cannot, no matter how wrong any of us has been. The only way to work out our relationship with God is to work out our relationship with each other.
And how do we do that in today’s world? The only contact we have with garbage men is when we see them on the street, and I’ll wager that we don’t know any crack addicts. We only know the woman with five kids by three different men from the story in the newspaper. We don’t know the undocumented person who mows our grass because we don’t speak Spanish. Thank goodness, we sigh. But Jesus knew these people, not in terms of what they represent, but personally – because he took the time to sit down with them.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we all go out and find the neighborhood crack addict so we can “understand” him better. I mean, what’s to understand? His dependence on the drug is so deep that he’d cut your throat to get the money to buy it. No question about that. And the people who sold him the drug belong in jail, no question about that, either. So, what kinds of tax collectors and Gentiles are safe to sit down with and talk to? The point is, there are no “safe” Gentiles.
The question for us becomes how to take Jesus’ radical message and adjust it for the reality of the lives we lead every day. This is really a difficult thing to do. It’s always easy to be what I’ll call an armchair radical. That’s not a political term – it’s deeper than that. Each of us has a comfort zone. It’s the zone where we can support or oppose a particular issue or concern. For some of us, it’s gay rights; for others, poverty; still for others, refugees. Jesus calls us to move out of our comfort zone and to eat with those with whom we are not comfortable.
Jesus also calls us to move beyond categorizing people. This is even more difficult for us because it’s natural to do that. I know that when I see a Goth-type teenager in the local Shop-Rite, I wonder, why do they dress that way, pierce their chins and tongues? Or when I see someone covered with tattoos, some of which are sexually suggestive.
What Jesus is telling me is that such questions are irrelevant to accepting them as the same before God and that I need to move beyond my categorization of people, no matter what my visceral response to appearances might be. Each of us has a Gentile we’d rather not sit down with or talk to. Jesus tells us we must move beyond our categorization of them and hold them in our hearts as they are held in the heart of God.
Let us pray: God who accepts us all as we are, help us to accept each other as you accept us. Move us beyond apprehension with the unfamiliar and open our hearts and senses to the new and unexpected. In name of the One who eats with us all, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen..