Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, February 28, 2010
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year C: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27:10-18; Philippians 3:17 – 4:1; Luke 13:(22-30)31-35

Jesus’ words on reception and rejection in the kingdom of God form the larger part of today’s gospel lesson.[1] Jesus speaks in response to a question, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?”[2]  He replies, “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many . . . will seek to enter and will not be able.”[3]. Matthew’s Jesus speaks similar words near the beginning of his ministry in the Sermon on the Mount.[4] But in Luke, Jesus is three days from Jerusalem. As in Matthew, Mark and John, Luke’s Jesus has a keen awareness, foreknowledge, of the suffering that lies ahead for him there.

Again, today’s gospel lesson begins with the question of how many will be saved. It continues with the image of the householder and a vision of the afterlife. When the householder speaks to those who ate and drank with him – and whom he taught, he denies that he knows them and keeps the door to his house shut. Like the rich man who fed the poor man Lazarus with the crumbs from his table,[5] those who are “shut out” will see “Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God.”[6]

The death and resurrection of Jesus is the central message that shapes the narrative of the gospels and of the entire New Testament. But it’s not the only message that shapes the narrative. The particular context of Jesus’ religious community also shapes God’s revelation of himself in Jesus.

The possibility of life after death was one of the great religious debates of Jesus’ time and place, but not the only one.  If there were life after death, was it only for God’s chosen people? The conventions of what one ate, how one ate, and with whom one ate were rigidly observed and endlessly discussed. One senses all of this in today’s lesson.

I should not have been surprised that what the late New Testament scholar Norman Perrin called “table fellowship” is the point of departure for a book on baptism that, it turns out, Father Smith and I are both reading right now.[7] I’ve mentioned it before, Maxwell Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation.  Johnson is a Lutheran pastor and professor of liturgy at Notre Dame.

The resurrection was the radical belief of the first Christians. Following the example of Jesus himself, eating together was the radical Christian activity. Jesus was criticized as “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”[8] Johnson follows Perrin in seeing Jesus’ table fellowship as the invitation to those to enter into a relationship with him. As the late theologian James Griffiss used to observe, they ate first and talked later. Table fellowship with Jesus came before conversion – think of Zacchaeus.[9]

It’s not actually clear from the New Testament how Jesus’ first followers, the disciples, Jesus’ family and those who followed him faithfully, came to be recognized as, in Luke’s phrase, “mother and brother” to him.[10] The origins of baptism are in some way as unclear as the origins of the Eucharist. There is for example, no textual evidence for the institution narratives being a part of a Eucharistic Prayer until the latter part of the fourth century[11] – no bells, no elevations, no genuflections, no incense. Clearly bathing, baptism, is an early part of the New Testament equation, but it is probably the case that Jesus’ first disciples were gathered with words and with meals. They were eating while they were sorting out the bathing, the baptizing.

The Christian communities which first heard this Good News didn’t have churches or traditions or much of anything except the words and lives of those who spoke about Jesus’ death and resurrection. But these words and the lives they helped believers live seemed to bring new life and healing to others in ways they could not explain. Eating and drinking with each other, too, seems to have changed them, again, in ways they could not explain. But not everyone believed, not everyone joined in, not everyone fed the poor.

I am not an academic expert in any way on anything in the New Testament. I know very little about the technical, textual relationship between Luke and John. But I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of them as related.

Luke and John are both interested in the response of men and women to Good News, though for different reasons. John is concerned almost entirely with his own community; Luke is concerned with the mission to the world.

In John, before Jesus begins to speak words identifying himself as the Good Shepherd, he explains to the crowd gathered around him and the blind man he has healed, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.”[12] In Luke, those who have not striven to enter the house are left out.

Perhaps in both of these gospels, the question of judgment is more about reassuring those who are gathered together that they have indeed entered through a narrow door and are at table with the Lord, more about where they are already sitting than it is about God’s wrath and punishment. And in Luke, it’s always about why Christ’s mission has left Jerusalem and headed to Rome and the wider world.

Many of the same questions that occupied those who first called themselves Christians occupy us today. We still are sorting out conversion, initiation and table fellowship. And a question that still hangs in the air is why everyone does not believe in the resurrection, but we do or in some way are trying to believe? Why are you and I here and not elsewhere? Why are you and I alive, when each of us knows people our age who are not? Who is welcome at the table of our church? Who is welcome at the tables in our homes?

So much about life itself is mystery, holy mystery. Our human minds can explain successfully neither good nor evil. We know life. We know death. We know love.

John’s Jesus spoke only once about the kingdom of God.[13] Luke’s Jesus speaks all the time about the kingdom of God. But I think John’s Jesus best explains why the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Paul and the rest of the New Testament are so powerful, then and now. Jesus explained that his words were “spirit and life,”[14] even words about dying in Jerusalem. The Word still speaks, and gnaws at us – because there is still room at God’s table for those who are hungry.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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