Sunday, August 18, 2024

Proper 18 (Year B)

Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

The Rev. Clint Brown

When I was a boy, I had the good fortune to know and spend time with a small covey of great aunts still living, and I know that when you hear their names, you will know that they were of a certain place and era. There was Aunt Geraldine and Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Clementene and Aunt Martha, and, if they had been still living, I could tell you about Aunt Callie and Aunt Odos, Aunt Gladys, and my own great-grandmother Alma Agnes – six sisters and two sisters-in-law, eight in all. Now of those I knew, Aunt Geraldine was the type to say whatever came to her mind – and to do so constantly – perhaps you know the type? – while Aunt Evelyn was her complete opposite, so quiet and unassuming that you were as likely as not to forget that she was even there. Aunt Clementene was one of the largest personalities I’ve ever known, while Aunt Martha, though I was assured she had mellowed considerably through the years, was still slightly terrifying to me as an adolescent boy. What brought us all together during my summer breaks was ceramics at my grandmother’s house. It was something that the sisters all enjoyed doing together, and I was sure, even then, that I was a witness to something special. In the morning, we sat around folding tables under the carport cleaning greenware or glazing bisque or modeling rose petals out of clay in our hands, and then lunchtime would arrive – which was usually no fancier than tuna fish salad, chips, and sweet, sweet iced tea (Southern style) – and whatever conversation had been going on outside was now carried over into the dining room. I heard stories about growing up during the Great Depression and all the changes that they had seen in their lives. They told stories about each other, of course, and shared their memories about this or that event from their past. Curiously, now that I think about it, I don’t remember politics ever once coming up, which suggests a strong contrast with today, when we seem to think that that’s the only way we can define ourselves, and which further suggests to me that there are, in fact, many more important things we might talk about – or worry about – when given an opportunity. Around that table, I heard about less distracted times when hardships, endured together, taught you to depend on one another, and it was from this table talk that I first came to appreciate the wisdom that the fewer needs you have the less you have to feel stressed about. And now, long past the time when they have gone, the great aunts live on in me whenever it happens that I am to take the measure of a person’s character, because what counts for decency and honesty and courage for me is how well that person stacks up against the great aunts and their kind of beautiful living that I got to know sitting with them around a table.

In the Book of Proverbs, it says that we are invited to Wisdom’s Feast. “Wisdom…has set her table. She has sent out her female servants; she calls from the highest places in the town, ‘You who are simple, turn in here!’ To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread… and walk in the way of insight’” (Proverbs 9:1-6). The benefits of Wisdom’s feast I think anyone can appreciate, but it seems all too clear to me that most of us, most of the time, are too distracted to even show up. But what happens if you’re not at the table? I can’t help but think about my great aunts and what wisdom I would have missed had I not been there. What connections to my past would have been lost to me? The challenges I would have failed to overcome lacking their example. This is the price of skipping Wisdom’s feast and not showing up at the table.

There are lots of opportunities in your life to be at tables. There’s the dinner table where you and your family can try to sit down more often for meals together; the table of some family member you haven’t seen in a while; there is the lunch table at work where you can get to know your colleagues better; there’s the cafeteria table at school; there’s the council table at City Hall; the committee table where you might contribute your unique perspective; the diplomacy table where words replace swords in the resolution of disputes; the voting table where you choose who will administer your will as one of the sovereign “people;” there’s the table over which you extend your hand to serve a plate of hot food to a needy person; and, most important of all, there is the Lord’s Table here at church. All these are tables where significant and life-changing meetings can take place; all these are places where wisdom can be found. But the thing about tables is that they only matter if you sit at them. What happens if you’re not at the table? And the answer is nothing; or, rather, something but something that lacks you and whatever unique contribution only you could have made.

If you ask me, “What is Wisdom and Wisdom’s feast?” I will answer that it is connection: connection to each other, and, most significantly, connection to God. When you are not at Jesus’s Table, you miss the reminder about who you are. Here at the altar, we are reminded of our values. It is a reminder to our over-worked, over-scheduled, over-the-top-living selves that what we’re actually called to as followers of Christ is a life of sacrifice. “…and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51b). The sacrifice of Christ’s body on the cross is the heart of Christ’s wisdom, and it translates into our participation in it, too. Because that’s what the bread on this altar represents. That is Wisdom’s feast. Sacrifice is the dish meted out to us at this Table. I’m certain that you give careful attention – as you should – to how to pay your bills, satisfy your boss, meet deadlines, and carve out whatever time’s left over for recreation, but how much thought, over the course of a week, do you spare to think of all these things in terms of sacrifice? “Sacrifice” is the lens through which we are to see our lives and it is what transforms our efforts from meaningless self-serving into a self-offering. Self-offering is the wisdom and the feast to which you’ve been invited today whether you realized it or not. It is the feast on display every Sunday here at this altar. So let us, therefore, keep the feast. Amen.