“Everything
I Needed to Know, I Learned at the Table”
Many of my earliest memories revolve around the table. I suppose it’s no coincidence. At what other place do we gather so frequently over the course of a single day? We go to bed once, each night. We brush our teeth twice, in the morning and at night. But we sit down at the table three times: morning, noon, and evening. I imagine that for many of us, some of life’s most fundamental lessons are learned first at the table.
I remember holding hands while someone prayed a prayer of gratitude. Here I learned the lesson that the food on these plates does not magically appear out of nowhere. It comes from the earth and from the hard work of other hands and from the generosity of whoever has set the table. I remember waiting as plates were passed around the table; I remember learning to say, “Please pass…” or “May I please have…?” I remember learning not to take the last piece of something without asking if anyone else would like it. Here, I was learning the lesson that other people have needs and desires just as I do. Just grabbing food from plates willy-nilly would deprive others of food. Sharing was the way that we could all be satisfied. I remember learning to chew with my mouth closed and to use my inside voice. Here, I learned the lesson of respect; how I behave has an effect on others. I remember learning to say “thank you” at the end of each meal and to ask to be excused. Here, I learned the lesson of gratitude, of showing appreciation for the work and generosity of others.
The table taught me many lessons. But in summary, it taught me the lesson that I am not the center of the universe. It taught me to be aware of others and to consider their interests before my own.
Of course, that’s not all that I’ve learned at the table. I remember later—in middle school and high school—how certain criteria determined whether you belonged at a table. Did you wear the same kind of clothes as others at the table? Did you participate in the same kinds of after-school activities? I remember how some tables were considered more important or popular than others. I remember how threats and violent force were sometimes used to obtain coveted candies or treats that belonged to someone else. I remember how folks would trade foods, exchange this for that. At these tables, I was learning the way of the world: the way of status, possessions, and power; the way of calculation, judgment, exclusion, and force. At these tables, I was inclined to forget the earliest lessons I’d learned of grace and sharing. Instead I was learning self-interest: how to navigate a world of competing desires so that I might get what I want, so that I might secure my portion against the threats and competition of others.
One last table memory comes to mind…. It was my first year studying abroad in Sheffield, England, and I was attending an Anglican church. One Sunday morning, the neighborhood drunk—a homeless man whom everyone knew by name—stumbled into the sanctuary and down the middle aisle, asking for something to eat. The priest paused where he was in the sermon and graciously welcomed the man, inviting him to sit on the front row and to wait for the Lord’s supper. When it came time to share the bread and the cup, the man stumbled forward along with the rest of us to receive the bread and the cup. I don’t know what the experience meant for that man. But I know that for myself and others in the church, the moment was a memorable lesson of what we already knew about Christ. Centuries ago, people asked about Jesus, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Mark 2:16). His opponents had gleefully condemned him as “a drunkard and a glutton” (Luke 7:34), not because he overate and overdrank but because he ate and drank with the wrong people. At that table on that Sunday morning, all the lessons we’d learned in the world—about the importance of prestige, possessions, and power, about judgment and exclusion and force—all those lessons were erased, and in their place we relearned the lesson of God’s love and grace: the lesson that the goodness of life is an unearned gift generously offered to all of us from a deep, infinite source of love.
“In the
Beginning…”
According to the gospel of John, this lesson of love and grace is baked into creation. It is the fabric with which all the world is woven. If you could take a spiritual DNA test of everything in the world, you would find this distinctive divine mark of love and its unending grace….
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
John begins his gospel by going back to the beginning itself, insisting that the Word—or logos in the Greek—is how everything in creation came to have life. Later in the same chapter, John reveals that Jesus is the embodiment of God’s Word, God’s logos—and that word logos bears resemblance to an English word that I find helpful here, which is logic. In other words, when God creates all things, there is a certain order or logic to everything. In the same way that the mathematical equations express scientific realities fundamental to the universe, such as gravity and energy, Jesus embodies and expresses the spiritual realities that are foundational to all life.
John’s creation story draws from a rich Jewish tradition that declares Wisdom to be an integral player or character in the creation of the world. We find hints of this tradition in the Old Testament. Proverbs 8 offers us a compelling portrait of a personified figure of wisdom, sometimes called “Lady Wisdom” by commentators. She calls out to anyone who will listen, instructing them in God’s way. In the latter half of Proverbs 8 (which I’ve included on our scripture handout today), we hear from Lady Wisdom directly. She insists that she existed before creation and that when God began creating the world, she was a craftsperson who helped God. “At the first, before the beginning of the earth…I was beside [God],” she says, “like a master worker” (Prov 8:23, 30). Later she declares, “Happy is the one who listens to me…for whoever finds me finds life” (Prov 8:34-35). The picture that emerges from this portrait of Lady Wisdom is that she holds the blueprints of creation—not necessarily a detailed building plan, but rather the various spiritual principles that underlie life, that make for a structurally sound and ordered creation.
All of this to say, the life that emerges in creation is not simply a matter of elements and atoms and molecules, of carbon and oxygen and photosynthesis. It is more profoundly a matter of love and grace: a matter of mercy and forgiveness, patience and gentleness, change and growth.
So when John insists that the Word—the divine logos, the divine logic—was an instrumental part of creation, and then identifies that logic with Jesus Christ, John is saying that in Jesus Christ we can see the spiritual reality that lies hidden behind all creation. I imagine that, no matter how far science advances, we will always be scratching our heads about what precisely lies behind our wide and mysterious universe of planets and stars and dark matter. I imagine we will never recover what exactly lies behind what science calls “the Big Bang.” But according to John, we already know the even profounder Wisdom that underlies and holds together all creation…and we know it in the person of Jesus Christ.
And as we all know, wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge. Knowledge is what is in your head: ideas, thoughts, equations. Wisdom is what is in your heart and your body: habits, reflexes, muscle memory. Jesus does not come to teach us ideas that will get us into heaven. As God’s wisdom in the flesh, he comes to show us the Way of life: the habits and reflexes that make life good, that bring heaven down to earth. And he teaches us all this by example, for that is how we learn. We learn by imitating and by experiencing.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that Jesus made a name for himself at the table. The table is where many of us learn our first lessons of life. If I were to tell my life’s story through my memories, I might start by saying, “In the beginning was the table….” According to John, Jesus was in the beginning of all creation as the Word. But in a similar way, he taught us all at that beginning point of our lives—at the table.
“Rejoicing
and Delighting”
10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
According to John, the world has lost sight of God’s Wisdom. The world no longer knows the Word—the logos, the logic— that is foundational to life. To be blunt, the world has lost its way. God’s way. That is why Jesus comes to us, to reveal to us what has been forgotten, what has been lost. And according to John, what has been lost specifically is the awareness that we are “children of God” (John 1:12-13).
Consider for a moment the lesson that Jesus teaches at tables. How he eats “with tax collectors and sinners” (Mark 2:16). How he gives pride of place to the last and the least and the left out (cf. Luke 14). I think, for example, how he invites himself to Zacchaeus’ home, to the house of a man who is a reprehensible traitor in the eyes of his fellow Judeans, and how there he proclaims Zacchaeus to be “ a child of Abraham,” which is to say, a child in God’s family, a son of God. That is the lesson that Jesus teaches at tables. Perhaps not always with words, but instead with repeated practice, with habits of humility, by routinely lifting up others. At the table, he teaches that you are a child of God. Your enemy…a child of God. The foreigner…a child of God. The homeless person…a child of God.
In Proverbs 8, Lady Wisdom declares herself always to be delighting and rejoicing in God’s creation: “I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Prov 8:30-31). I see the same thing in Jesus, who delights in welcoming others as fellow sisters and brothers, as fellow children of God.
At tables—which are, I imagine, the “beginning” for many of us—Jesus embodies the Wisdom that was at the very beginning, the Wisdom through which all things come into abundant life. It is a counterintuitive Wisdom, a lost Wisdom, a Wisdom that cuts against the grain of our world’s way of power, possessions, and prestige. It is the Wisdom of love and grace, of mercy and forgiveness, of patience and gentleness. It is the Wisdom of knowing we are not the center of the universe but rather children of God with many brothers and sisters.
And every time we gather around the table, we are reminded. Taught again. Trained in the habit of our wise Lord, who delighted in all creation at its beginning, just as he delighted in the company of tax collectors and sinners, the lowly, the last, and the left out.
Prayer
God’s Wisdom in the flesh,
May your table manners shock us
In their difference
From the ways of our world.
May your table manners teach us anew
How to live well and abundantly
In the way of love and grace. Amen.
