Your Dinner Partners

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
February 6, 2005

Your Dinner Partners
Isaiah 58: 9b-14
Matthew 5:13-20

You marvel at the table that stretches out before you.
There seems to be no end to it, nor any beginning.
You look to the left and it goes over the horizon;
You turn to your right and the chairs undulate
along the table’s edge until they disappear off in the distance.

The table is filled with foods of all kinds,
some familiar, and other foods that look completely foreign to you.
The people who are seated are all talking with one another,
neither loudly nor wildly, but with purpose and warmth.

As you stand there, wondering which of the empty chairs you should take,
a woman comes along side you and gently takes your arm.
Her smile, her eyes, her very face seems to radiate peace and warmth.
She says, “Let me show you to your seat, your place at the table.”
You walk with her only a few steps to a place
where there are three empty chairs.
The woman pulls out the chair in the middle,and beckons you to sit.

As you look around you, you don’t recognize the individuals
who are seated across from you, but they greet you warmly.
A jovial man directly across from you says,
“Welcome. Good to have you here.”
Before you can respond, he resumes his conversation
with the individual seated to his left.

You proceed to fill your plate with food.
The smell is… heavenly, there simply is no other word to describe the aroma.
But you feel odd that you have no one to talk to.
Just then you hear voices behind you
and you turn to see the woman who had led you
to your seat escorting a young man to the chair on your left.
He sits down, and you greet him, even as you feel wistful
that one so young is there with you.
He returns your greeting with an enormous smile
as he digs into the food.
You ask him about his life and he tells you
that his country was the scene of a war;
Gunfire and explosions were the sounds that
filled his neighborhood and his home.
His family was not involved in the battle;
they just simply wanted to live their lives.
But one night a missile fired from a jet
went off its course and careened into his house
as he, his parents, and his brothers and sisters all slept.
The military officer responsible for the misfired missile
lamented the deaths as “unfortunate collateral damage”.

You find yourself absorbed with his life story,
and you encourage him to tell you more.
You learn that when he was a toddler, the area where he lived
suffered through a terrible drought.
Tens of thousands of people died of thirst and starvation.
The boy and his family lived in a refugee camp for months,
subsisting on few handfuls of grain and a cup of water each day.
brought in by an international relief agency.

As you listen to his story, you realize that you know just what he is talking about.
You remember reading in the newspaper about the terrible drought
and starvation in a country you knew nothing about.
It was 12, maybe even 15 years ago.
At first you did nothing,
but then one day as you were standing in a checkout line at the
supermarket, you saw that picture, the one that won a Pulitzer prize,
the picture of a small child squatting in the dust and mud
on the road, belly distended from starvation, too weak to go on,
and there in the background,you remember it vividly now,
sat a vulture, as though it was waiting for its next meal.

It was that powerful photo that grabbed you, spurred you to action.
You began to raise money at your church, at the office, in your neighborhood,
anywhere you could, to send to the relief agency
to provide food to that child and the thousands of others just like him.
No child should die of hunger, not when you live in a country
where one of the biggest health problems was and is
obesity in adults and children.
And you worked for months and months, that child’s image burned in your brain,
a child you didn’t know, in a part of the world you’d never paid attention to.
And now you realize, this was that child,
that child who captured your heart so completely.

But before you can say another word to him,
you hear voices and you turn and see the woman again,
this time seating someone in the chair on your right.
You recognize the person immediately,
and you turn your head away quickly, back to the boy,
but his seat is empty; he’s gone.
And you slowly, reluctantly, turn back to the right
and your eyes meet those of your new dinner partner
and neither of you says a word.
You are both incredulous.
Of all the people you’ve got to sit next to, why this person?

The two of you never agreed on anything; politics, religion, money – nothing.
You often quarreled;
sniped, gossiped about each other.
You each thought the other was weak, lazy, misguided,
at times amoral if not immoral,
irreligious, unfaithful, judgmental.
and just plain mean.

Each of you gropes and stumbles;
you both realize that given where you were sitting
you really should be civil to the other, but how?
And then simultaneously the horrifying thought hits each of you.
Perhaps you are not where you first thought you were.
Perhaps you are in another place……


Every one of us hopes that some day we will be able to take our seat
at the heavenly banquet in God’s eternal kingdom.
The banquet in that place where every tear is wipe away,
the place where gold is simply used for paving stones.
But in a book I was reading last week,
the author raised the provocative question of
who might be seated next to you at the table.
That’s something I had never thought about.
I probably assumed that I would be seated with family and loved ones.
But the author ventured that the seat on one side would be reserved
for those to whom you showed the most grace in your lifetime,
and the seat on the other side of you would be reserved
for those to whom you showed the least grace.
Only one seat would be filled at a time,
and the individuals occupying each seat would change.

I found his imagery powerful, provocative and very troubling.
While we may have some wonderful surprises in the occupants
on the left, most of us will have a much longer line of people
waiting for their turn in the chair on our right,

Through Jesus Christ, God reconciled all his children to him,
but that was only step one.
God wants all his children to be reconciled to one another,
and the author’s suggestion is that if we don’t do that in our mortal lives,
God, whose very love knows no limits,
and who has infinite patience,
will tell us in effect,
“I am putting you two next to each other
because in your mortal lives you squabbled about everything.
You two didn’t work things out in your time on earth.
so work out your differences now.
Take as much time as you need; you’ve got all eternity;
but reconcile yourselves to one another.
My Son taught you that it is by your love for one another
that you will be known has his disciples, so get to work.”

Our Lord tells us that we are the light of the world
but every time we say an unkind word about anyone,
every time we say and think graceless, ungracious words
and do graceless and ungracious deeds, we dim our light.
As God tells us through the prophet Isaiah:
“remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil.
…offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
Do these things and then your light shall rise in the darkness.”

Who will sit in the chair on your right?
How many are already lined up?
How much longer is the line on the right than the line on the left?
But come to this table and be renewed and refreshed in Spirit
and then go out and work on moving even just one person
from the chair on the right to the chair on the left.
Work on making even just one change in your dinner partner
when it is time for you to take your seat at the heavenly banquet table.
AMEN