Have you ever had a really good seafood gumbo?  If not, you don’t know what you’re missing.  It starts with a roux so rich it becomes almost the color of dark chocolate.  Then you add what Emeril Lagasse calls the holy trinity -- celery, green peppers, and onions.  When the roux and the vegetables are so well acquainted that they are nearly indistinguishable, then you add the seafood, more spices, and simmer it for hours until it becomes a thick, dark, medieval-looking stew so rich that you have to cut it with something as bland and starchy as white rice.  It also requires a hearty red wine, maybe a nice shiraz.  My husband makes one of the best seafood gumbos you’re likely to find outside of Louisiana.  Come have dinner with us sometime and we’ll find ourselves sitting at the table with our rice, gumbo, and wine, just letting the aromas float up to fill our senses.  Then take that first bite and let its texture and flavor fill your mouth.  Follow that up by slowly pulling the red wine into your mouth, and you’ll find yourself saying, as I did just recently “this is divine”. 

 

There is, indeed, something divine about table fellowship.  There is something of the presence of God there when we enjoy the good things of the earth together.  And it is more than just enjoying the good food, we’ll also share ourselves. We’ll tell our stories and come to know one another better. Telling stories is as powerful and primal a human activity as eating together is, and somehow the two often go together.  We’ll share stories, and we’ll share good food.  This is the heart of real table fellowship, and there is something truly divine about it.  This good meal will remind us of other times where we’ve sat at table with family and friends, and as we begin to tell the stories of those other relationships, we come closer-and-closer to true communion with one another. 

 

When we look at our text from Luke today, we find right at the center of it an affirmation of this deep connection between telling stories and table fellowship.  Let’s look again at this story of Jesus’ journey to Emmaus with two of his disciples on Easter evening. Two disciples, weary and discouraged, are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  Their friend and leader (the one they had believed and hoped was the Messiah) has been executed.  They are baffled and confused because some of their number says that Jesus’ body is not in the tomb and that he lives again.  They happen upon a stranger who seems to be the only one in the whole region who hasn’t heard about what happened.  So as they walk along, they tell all of these things to the stranger.  And the stranger responds by reinterpreting the whole of scripture for them.  As evening nears, the disciples stop for the night in Emmaus and invite the stranger to join them for a meal.  He takes bread, blesses it, and breaks it, and then they recognize him for who he is, the very Jesus they had known so well and loved so dearly.  They rush back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples what has happened, and Jesus meets them there.  Still, some doubt the resurrection, and Jesus answers their doubts and allays their anxieties by eating again, this time a piece of broiled fish.  Here is no ghost in their midst; here is Jesus Christ, in the flesh, their risen Lord. 

 

What is going on here?  Let’s start by thinking about what they were talking about as they walked along that road.  They were talking about the stories of the faith that they had grown up with.  Jesus was interpreting scripture for them, which for those disciples meant the Old Testament, and he gave such an interpretation of it that suddenly they saw it all differently.

 

We have that same experience when reading a mystery novel.  Where we had been groping along in the dark searching for clues, suddenly a crucial piece of information is provided, and now we see clearly who the culprit must be, and all of that character’s actions up until this juncture suddenly point to his guilt in a way that we just couldn’t see before.  You can’t re-read that book without seeing who the culprit is from the beginning as clear as day, and you wonder how you could have missed it the first time through. It all seems so obvious. 

 

Jesus disciples’ must have experienced something similar when they walked along that road to Emmaus with a Jesus they did not yet recognize.  He told them the story of their faith again; he told them the stories of the Old Testament, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; he told them the stories of Ruth and Esther; he told them the stories of the Kings of Israel and Judah, and of the prophets who had called the people of God to faithfulness throughout the centuries.  He told them these stories in light of his own life, and suddenly those old, familiar stories meant something new.  Suddenly the disciples could not see those stories in the same way that they had before. 

 

And now their hearts are burning within them.  They sense that they are on the brink of a fundamentally new understanding of God’s work in the world.  But, still, they don’t see Jesus in the stranger.  In fact, they don’t recognize him until he joins them at table, takes bread, blesses it, and breaks it.  In the midst of that meal, through the hands that break the bread, in the voice that blesses it, they see him; they recognize him. 

 

Jesus does a lot of eating in this story.  He eats bread with the two from the road; he eats fish with the eleven.  In fact, Jesus did a lot of eating throughout his earthly life.  He enjoyed table fellowship so much that he once commented that “the Son of Man has come eating and drinking,” and his critics chastised him for it, saying, “‘Look a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”  Jesus Christ, God incarnate, reveled in all the fullness of his humanity.  He was, most certainly, a Messiah who would appreciate a good meal of gumbo and wine.  There is something about those intensely bodily acts of eating and drinking that made Jesus known to his disciples and that make him known to us.  The stories he told on the road to Emmaus and the parables that he used in his teaching throughout his ministry are powerful, but words are never enough.  If we are to know each other, really be in communion with one another, then we must know each other as the embodied souls and ensouled flesh that we are.

 

That is why Jesus does not come to offer salvation as something that would whisk our souls away from this wretched physical realm and carry us off to a disembodied heaven.  If that were the case, then we would be right to disparage the flesh, to care little for the natural environment, and to care less for our own bodily well being.  But in Christ, God comes to us redemptively to claim us body and soul.  It is no mere accident that Christ is resurrected bodily, that he is known to the disciples in the breaking of bread, and that he demonstrates that he is truly alive by eating fish.  The resurrection of Christ’s body points to the redemption of our own bodies, and it demands of us that we respect these bodies and the beautiful, physical world in which we and all of our life stories are embedded.  We pray this every week in the Lord’s Prayer.  We pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.  In other words, God’s kingdom comes not when we are whisked away to heaven, but when the conditions of heaven come to earth, when God’s will is accomplished here as it already is in heaven, when not only are our spiritual sins forgiven, but our earthly debts are abolished.[1] 

 

When we start to put these two things together (story telling and table fellowship) a remarkable thing happens.  It changes the way we interpret our lives and engage our world.  Jesus changed forever what the biblical stories must mean by interpreting them in light of his own life, death, and resurrection; his life provides the interpretive key that unlocks the meaning of God’s work in the world.  What is characteristic about Jesus’ earthly ministry is how very much focused it was on the good things of this world, and how he invited all people to come and have a share in those good things.  Notice that he was criticized not only for reveling in good food and drink, but also for sharing those good things with those deemed unworthy.  His critics said, “Look a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”  Jesus reaches out and touches the diseased who have been utterly ostracized from civil society.  He converses with tax collectors and prostitutes.  He takes women seriously as conversation partners.  He shares table fellowship with everyone -- from the elite class of the Pharisees, to the working class fishermen, and to the outcast class of tax collectors.  He touches and talks to and shares stories and meals with all of these.  His is a broad, inclusive ministry that never strays far from the central affirmation of the goodness of God’s world.  His inclusive love of all humanity is ultimately so disruptive of the status quo that the powers that be cannot let him live this disruptive life.  But God’s love is stronger than our fear and hatred, and so God kills death and raises Christ.  What more basic affirmation could we have that God loves us body and soul than that Christ is raised body and soul?

 

Think about how dramatically that changes how we live these bodily lives.  The redemption of our bodies calls us into Christ’s love of creation, and that love calls us into an expansive, inclusive love that disrupts the status quo and that God may yet use to transform this world so that God’s kingdom will come, so that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.  There are two obvious ways in which this lesson might speak to us today.  The first is that we must work to find ways to ensure that all people have their daily bread, that the impoverished have ample opportunity to share in the good things of the world.  This is a lesson that I think we’ve learned well.  As a congregation, we do a lot of work through our food pantry and other ministries to invite the poor to the table.  Second, the lesson might also turn our attention to how our lives must model Christ’s inclusive love.  And, again, I think that it is a lesson we’ve learned fairly well as we strive to be a congregation that welcomes people of diverse viewpoints and backgrounds. 

 

But this morning, I want to invite us to consider another way in which this story might speak afresh to us, a way that isn’t so obvious.  Christ’s celebration of the good things of this world and his inclusive love that would share those good things with all people points to a problem about the value of the physical world that resides deep in the heart of our society.  We have a way of both overvaluing material things and undervaluing them at the same time.  It is a problem that becomes incarnate in what we might call our culture of consumerism. 

 

On the one hand, we allow our sense of self-worth and value to be measured by the things that we can purchase, consume, and put on display as markers of class and social status.  We make judgments about our own worth and that of others on the basis of the cars we drive, the location and square footage of our homes, the designer labels on our clothes, and where our children attend school.  We seek from these material markers more than they can give.  We seek from them a sense of security, a sense of identity, a sense of meaning and purpose.  In short, we begin to make them into idols when we rely on them in a way that we ought to rely only on God.  We overvalue and idolize these things because we ask them to provide us with the security, meaning, and purpose that ultimately come only from God.

 

At the same time, this consumerist mentality undervalues the physical world, because when everything has a price tag, nothing has intrinsic value.  When we measure the worth of all things according to how well they serve our ends, we don’t allow that they might be ends in themselves or serve purposes beyond our own.  We reduce the natural world to raw materials and everything else to products that can be bought, sold, and harvested in the ever-elusive quest for “the good life”.  When we reduce the natural world to raw materials that are waiting to be harvested for some useful purpose, then we begin to lose our sense of awe.  When everything has a price, nothing is sheer gift, and we begin to lose our sense of gratitude to God.  We exchange genuine and lasting delight in the good things of creation for superficial and fleeting amusement with the toys we can purchase.

 

We find ourselves, paradoxically enough, trying to make the material things around us into gods who determine our value and trying to make ourselves into gods who determine the value of all things.  But when Jesus walks with us in our confusion and bewilderment toward Emmaus, he tells us a different story about the good world, and he invites us to table fellowship that enacts authentic awe and gratitude and delight.  He gives us, in the tale of the inclusive love of his life story, the interpretive key to understanding our own life stories.  He draws us, in the open hospitality and delight of his table fellowship, toward a true appreciation of the physical creation and the place of our bodily redemption within it. 

 

For Jesus, the material world has a sacramental quality because it has the ability to escort us into the presence of God.  This gives us a new way of valuing the world that does not invest it with either too much or too little significance.  Through Christ, we can see the creation as the realm that mediates the grace and presence of God to us.  The beauty of nature inspires awe in us because we no longer view it strictly according to its market value.  The wonder of our bodies cultivates gratitude in us because we know that our lives are gifts from God.  The smells and tastes and textures of good food evoke deep and genuine delight in us, and the table fellowship that comes with such good food trains us in the hospitality and inclusive love of Christ.  We can value and delight in the good things of this world in a way that honors the claim that God has made on us (body and soul) and in a way that frees us from the anxiety and futility of being consumers who must mark the world with price tags. 

 

There is a deep and abiding connection in the Christian life between story telling and table fellowship, between the meaning of the biblical stories, the meaning of our life stories, the value of the whole creation, and the redemption of our bodies.  We see this already anticipated in the Old Testament.  The lesson that we heard from Deuteronomy today instructs the people of Israel to repeat the stories of faith and the law of God to their children, to speak of them when they lie down and when they rise up, but also to mark their bodies and their homes with these truths.  Christ teaches us the same as he retells the stories of faith during the journey to Emmaus and in the table fellowship he shares once he and his disciples arrive there. 

 

We repeat this ancient pattern of telling stories and enacting them bodily when we tell these stories of faith Sunday-after-Sunday in sermons and Bible studies, when our children learn them in their worship centers and in their Sunday school classes.  We enact those stories bodily when we offer ministries to the city, when we deliver prayer blankets to those in our congregation who struggle with illness, when we mark new members with the waters of baptism, when we come to the communion table, and when we share common meals with one another.  All of this is part and parcel of living out the redemption of our bodies.  So come and have gumbo with me.  We’ll take in the good food, tell our stories, and it will be divine.

 

Amen.