A Big Table
- Rev Robert Moses
- Jun 7
- 5 min read
Lessons (Proper 6, Year A): Hosea 5:15-6:6; Psalm 50:7-15; Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
There is something profoundly human about a table. A table is where stories are told, where laughter echoes, where tears are shared, where strangers become friends. A table is where we learn who we are and whose we are. And in Scripture, the table is one of God’s favorite places to reveal what belonging looks like.
We all have food-related memories. My great-uncle used to share a memory of stacked shelves of government food; he particularly recalled the blocks of processed cheese that his scrawny arms could barely carry. I remember the lunch lady at school who wouldn’t give my friend chocolate milk because the “free lunch kids” could only have white milk. I recall going with my mother to the Sharing Center and seeing lines of mothers and fathers waiting to see if they could get some help that week. I learned early on that food could divide people or make someone feel excluded. I understood the economic difference between white milk and chocolate milk.
Today’s readings for Proper 5, Year A draw us into that vision of belonging—a belonging shaped not by worthiness but by welcome, not by purity but by presence, not by achievement but by grace. And at the center of it all is a God who keeps setting tables in the most unexpected places.
God calls Abram and Sarai away from everything familiar—their land, their kin, their father’s house—and promises him a blessing that is not meant to be hoarded but shared. “In you,” God says, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” All the families. Not just Abram’s tribe. Not just the people who look like him or think like him or worship like him or love like him. All the families of the earth.
When we’d visit, we used to play in my grandfather’s basement. On one side of the basement – the side we weren’t supposed to play in – there were stacks of metal folding chairs. I knocked them over once. My grandfather came down to help me pick them up, and I asked him, “Why do you have so many chairs?” “Well,” he said, “you just never know who might stop by for Sunday lunch.”
I envision the call of Abram and Sarai as God’s first great table: a blessing big enough for everyone. Abram and Saria are not chosen for exclusivity but for expansiveness. The call is not to build walls but to open doors. God’s blessing is a table that keeps adding leaves, keeps pulling up chairs, keeps widening the circle until every family finds a place.
In the narrative from Matthew’s Gospel, 0Jesus walks by a tax booth and sees Matthew sitting there. Tax collectors were the ultimate outsiders—collaborators with Rome, exploiters of their own people, morally suspect, socially despised. They were the people no one wanted at their table. But when Jesus sees Matthew, Jesus sees more than Matthew’s reputation. Jesus sees more than Matthew’s past. Jesus sees a person longing for a place to belong. And Jesus says, “Follow me.” No prerequisites. No moral exam. No spiritual résumé. Just an invitation. And Matthew gets up and follows. But the real scandal comes next when Jesus goes to Matthew’s house and sits at a table with tax collectors and sinners. He eats with them. He laughs with them. He listens to them. He honors them.
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?,” the religious leaders ask in horror. Why does he sit at their table? Why does he let them sit at his? And Jesus answers with a line that should be engraved on the heart of every Christian community: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” In other words: I desire relationship, not vacant ritual. I desire healing, not hierarchy. I desire a table where the wounded are welcomed, the lost are found, and the excluded are embraced.
[As a child, I recall my father packing his lunch most mornings — a sandwich and some fruit in a brown paper bag. The image that is still burned in my memory, though, is that my father would pack an extra lunch some mornings, just in case the homeless man was on the sidewalk and needed a sandwich. Dad never mentioned it; he just did it. I didn’t learn what he was doing until years later.]
During my first year of seminary, thirty‑one years ago, a classmate invited me to dinner with his family. His father was an executive at US Sugar, so I expected a fancy barbecue in Wellington. Instead, we drove straight past it, almost to Belle Glade. For twenty‑five years—nearly his entire career—my friend’s father had spent the first Sunday of every month bringing dinner to a housing complex where many cane workers lived. His family shared a meal with them: rice and beans, chicken, stew. They played games, laughed, and ate together. I was young, out of my element, and taking it all in.
\While we were playing soccer, an older man called to me that dinner was ready. I hesitated, not wanting to be first in line. “No, I couldn’t,” I said, remembering how church buffets usually work. But they were ushering my friend’s family forward too. I protested again. The man looked at me and said things could get messy once everyone else came through—they ate “family style,” reaching in together. I told him that was fine. Then came the moment I’ve never forgotten: he held out his hands—dirty from the fields, worn and callused—and asked, “Would you share a bowl with these hands?”
This is a Gospel vision of belonging: a table where the people others avoid are given seats of honor; a table where mercy outruns judgment; a table where healing is more important than reputation; a table where the invitation is always wider than we expect.
Paul, in Romans, reminds us why this table is possible. “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ… through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” Access. Grace. Peace. These are table words. Paul is saying that we belong at God’s table not because we earned a seat but because Christ has already set one for us. Grace is the tablecloth. Peace is the meal. And belonging is the gift.
So what does this mean for us today?
It means the Church is called to be a table‑setting people in a world that is hungry for belonging. A world where many have been told—sometimes by the Church itself—that they do not belong because of who they are, whom they love, what they look like, or what they carry in their past. But the God who called Abram, the God whose steadfast love fills the earth, the God who sat at Matthew’s table—that God is still setting tables. And if we are to be faithful, then our welcome must look like God’s welcome.
Belonging, though, is not passive. It is not simply being polite. It is the active work of making room. It is the spiritual discipline of pulling up another chair. It is the courage to say, “There is a place for you here,” and to mean it. It is the willingness to let our community be changed by the people God brings to us.
And belonging is not abstract. It is embodied in the way we greet each other, the way we speak about those who differ from us, the way we listen to stories that stretch us, the way we honor the dignity of every human being. It is embodied in the Eucharist, where Christ gathers us—saints and sinners, seekers and skeptics, the confident and the uncertain—and feeds us with the same bread, the same cup, the same love.
At this table, no one earns their place. At this table, no one is more worthy than another. At this table, Christ is host, and Christ’s welcome is wide enough for the world. May we be a community where the table is long, the welcome is deep, and the love is unmistakably Christ’s.
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