(Another Sunday Sermon for Last Church of Lubbock, Texas)

Brothers and sisters of Last Church in Lubbock, Texas, I recently preached to you about finding Jesus more intimately and powerfully in the bread and wine than we are normally accustomed. We made this discovery by taking an unusual stroll through Genesis. If you missed that sermon, I encourage you to go back and look at it now, or, if need be, request a copy so that you can. I think it is worth your while to open your theological imagination to the Bible, to God’s word, to Genesis in this case, and let Jesus come alive there in your heart and mind afresh.

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In that sermon, I made a number of points without calling attention to the fact they were points. Organizing an outline of a message in that way is great for writing research papers, books, and study guides, but in my estimation it makes for terrible preaching. All good sermons should have a point, of course, and most should have good supportive points, but when you outline them (map them out at the start) you effectively shut down further engagement. The sermon, in that case, is a sleep aid, not a wakeup call. Your road map basically sends listeners to all their prefab categories instantly, and they check out of Hotel California with their preconceived notions, no longer sensing the need to listen to you.

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But that sermon is now preached. The new notions and categories are now established. There were a handful of “lessons” along the way. There were new avenues of imaginative and theological exploration opened to you. And depending on the angle of approach, those might be stated as “points” made in support of that overarching “point.” The points were there… but I didn’t make a point of them, and so you experienced the fresh thinking rather than resisting it.

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Hmmm…

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Did you get the point? We looked more closely at the meal Jesus gives us than we are normally apt to do. We found him doing business with God’s creation and with our hearts like never before.

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Did you see the theme of meal tying together all of Genesis (and all of the rest of the Bible with it) in one massive subplot? Why has no one ever pointed this out before? Maybe you heard it before, but I never did. Why didn’t you tell me? I’m betting you didn’t know about it either. Nor really. The sermon opens up new implications we need to explore!

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What if in fact the whole Bible is in a sense a story of eating, of proper table manners (theologically speaking)?

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What if, underneath all the drama of Adam and Eve, Lamech, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and his family is a much deeper story, and what if that deeper story was all about eating from the tree of life vs. the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Or, what if it was really a deep structure story/theme of bread and wine? Or, what if it was all really about eating Jesus’s body and drinking his blood and therein finding life?

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Oh man! If we could say things like that about Genesis, we suddenly discover whole new and fresh avenues of discovery regarding God’s will! Wouldn’t that be meaningful to a group of Christians? I think at Last Church it would be.

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If THAT, or something like it, were the truly deep and unifying story connecting everything else in the Bible, what would it say about how God brings order to creation? What would it say more intimately about how God relates to you, to me, and to us together?

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My words in today’s sermon remain a tad esoteric at the moment. I know. But if you’ve been on the journey of imaginative reading through Genesis I guided you on in the last sermon, it is time to develop some new categories of thought, to sort data in our mental/spiritual databases. I don’t want simply to stall out in the academics of it, but to package ideas in chunks and categories which we can set on a shelf and retrieve as needed while we go deeper into this deep structure narrative which seems to be holding the whole Bible together. I’m going to map out some new points this time. Please stay awake.

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Can we attempt that?

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Today’s sermon will focus on point 1 – World order with regard to the Lord’s Table. To make this material more manageable, we will break the overarching point of the salvation meal in Genesis tying together all the drama of creation and redemption in Genesis (and possibly the rest of the Bible) into these two main subpoints, and we will deal with the first one in today’s sermon.

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Already, I know, just stating it that way is causing you to yawn a bit. That plus the fact that we will reiterate much of the things said in our last sermon means this will be very challenging to stay awake. But if you caught the last sermon, I figure you found yourself awakened to new possibilities. I assure you this one will light the fuse to the dynamite that will eventually blow your theological imagination wide open. Let me know if you fall asleep before I’m done. But I’m betting you will be wide awake on the other side.

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First, though, we reiterate. We come again to the things said previously, meaning there is some level of review. Specifically, we reiterate that Genesis opens with a meal story (trees of life or of knowledge) and closes with Joseph’s world saving, famine relief meal.

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Who knew? I grew up in church attending a lot of Sunday schools and Bible studies, but I don’t recall anyone ever making a point of this observation which is really jumping of the pages of the Bible all of a sudden.

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This raises a number of questions I will want us to think about today, but first allow me to preview a moment on the second point. The meal we share with Jesus gets down to business with our hearts and sorts out the lies from the truth in a deeply loving and caring way. And this also raises a number of questions, though not normally as obvious since so much Christian tradition already treats Eucharist as a time of introspection.

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But let’s hold this second point in the back of our mind briefly as we explore the former.

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Church, if you read Genesis, as we did last time we met, it becomes inescapably obvious that God creates and sustains the world. Creation is his own property to do with as he wills. And what he creates, he loves and judges to be good, very, very good. God is the hero of his story, and though humans are meant to play a role in the world order, they are junior partners meant to do their work through bearing God’s image in priestly worship. Most everything else humans attempt to contribute to God’s reign and salvation pretty much end up missing the mark.

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The tradition in which I grew up never actively argued against this point, but we shortchanged it in numerous ways, some of which we now seem to be rethinking. But in some other ways we are not rethinking it enough. I ask you to think with me now about those shortchanges.

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By way of explanation, consider this: I was raised in the church to believe the point of my life was “to go heaven when I die.” That, in essence, was the point – the overarching point of EVERYTHING. If you are middle aged, like me, and possibly younger (but more likely older), you might recall the standard sermon which asked this most potent question, “IF YOU DIED RIGHT NOW, WHERE WOULD YOU SPEND ETERNITY?”

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Do you remember that one? Clearly, it was designed to get the listener hooked with a sharp jolt of fear. The preacher would put the fear of God into the listener(s) with this terrible question and then outline how to determine the way you can “go to heaven when you die.”

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Depending on which faith tradition your preacher was speaking from, there were a number of different sub points argued about which were meant to support this overarching point, and arguments about the subpoints tended to drive wedges between the faith tradition in which I was raised and neighboring faith traditions. These differences had all the different faith traditions competing with one another for souls (as if God had in mind different churches should compete for the sheep!). Thus the church was divided hundreds of ways.

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Some of these wedge-driving subpoints had to do with proper baptism, prayer, worship practices and so forth. Or we fought about grace vs. law keeping. And then we found pitting these ideas against one another undermined everything in the end since churches began shrinking instead of growing. (And shrinking churches was/is a problem for all the different faith traditions!) The only unifying factor was the deeply mistaken notion that our tradition had the niche market on the right doctrine which would help you “go to heaven when you die.”

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Do I make sense?

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Sadly, none of that was even aiming at the target. No wonder it missed the mark!

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I mean, when I grew up and studied the Bible in the academy, I eventually learned how so much of this stuff did not make sense, but I hope I am making sense of the nonsense now as I spell it all out for you.

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Let me explain it like this: As far as I could tell, both as a kid and even looking back now as an adult, the goal of “going to heaven when we die” was the overarching point both we in the churches of Christ and Baptists (as well as Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and even Cowboy church) were all driving at. However, we argued over the subpoints of how to achieve this overarching goal, and thus we wound up splintered into various camps.

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Speaking for the churches of Christ in particular, we believed in NOT using instrumental music in worship, in a specific method of baptism for salvation (rejecting the idea of salvation via a “sinners prayer”), AND had the gumption to believe (borrowing from the Baptists) no matter how good your moral life, you could not please God but must rely on his grace. We also believed that if you were in one of those other churches trying to attain the same goal of going to heaven when you die, that by not adhering to our subpoints, you were in error and doomed to damnation.

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Ain’t that something?

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But all of this hinged on the deeply mistaken idea that we were trying to “go to heaven when we die.”

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What if going to heaven when you die is not God’s goal for your life, but that this creation he made be redeemed and heaven come down to earth, like we read about in the closing chapters of the Bible as a whole?

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Hmmm…

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The tide of opinion and thought on this matter seems to be changing in the last generation. There are a lot of us alive today who have begun rethinking God’s word and God’s world along these lines. Some haven’t, but, of those still remaining in those ever shrinking churches, a lot have. As N.T. Wright so often quotes, “The Lord’s Prayer” teaches us to pray, “…may Your kingdom come, Your will be done ON EARTH like it is in heaven.” God’s will is meant to be worked out here and now where we live, work, play and EAT and not relegated to pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.

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Wow!

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Yes, a lot of you have come to terms with that by now. Some of you are still wrestling with that. Only a few of you have yet to be exposed to it.

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It’s a lot to chew on… a lot to swallow.

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This change of direction (a repentance, btw) is so fundamental that it changes EVERYTHING about being a Christian. It doesn’t destroy everything, but everything is impacted. Love for God is still the most important thing, but how that looks and is worked out is changed. Gone is the esoteric notion of spending eternity floating on a cloud and playing a harp!

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Are you still with me, church?

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Stop here and ask questions if you are feeling bulldozed by this presentation. It is possible you are one of the last to know about this tidal change sweeping over the church. But it is far more likely, you have come to new awareness and have wrestled with this notion a long time. It is possibly refreshing for some to find me stating the matter so plainly, finally.

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But there are implications, Last Church, that we have not worked out. There are implications we have yet to even begin to consider wisely. And as part of this first point about world order with regard to the Lord’s Table in today’s sermon, I want to introduce you to such thinking.

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Genesis, as our tradition used to read it, wasn’t a whole lot of help explaining our scheme of redemption. It covered the fall. Not much else. It was all creation and no redemption. The idea I grew up with, the idea which so neatly fit with the going-to-heaven-when-you-die mentality, was that in the coming Judgment Day, God would destroy the earth with Judgment Fire. This world was destined for the great incinerator in the sky. What need have we of ecology? We were all planning on leaving earth. We even called the Bible, the B.I.B.L.E., claiming it was an acronym for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

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Wow!

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I hope we were loving God, because we were sure getting the rest of it all jacked up!

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In that worldview, we felt compelled to keep Genesis and use it, but for what?

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Well, Charles Darwin and dinosaur bones needed refuted and explained away, so we mined it for that mostly. And honestly, I still find Christians trying to use Genesis for that kind of program rather than for the revelation of Christ.

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But as our last sermon powerfully depicted, the salvation meal proves to be a deep structure theme in Genesis, framing the whole book AND the whole Bible too. Jesus is everywhere in Genesis, especially in the bread and wine. We saw how all the world’s problems sprouted in the garden when the gardener ate from the prohibited tree! Then we saw Joseph in Egypt, the dream interpreter, mystically and prophetically took the role of the wise gardener storing up food with which to feed the world in seven years of famine!

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That famine had the potential to kill every man, woman, and child, and presumably all the cattle and critters too, ever bit as much as Noah’s flood had done! Yet God provided a way through the disaster, a man this time rather than an ark. This was almost a worldwide destruction not only all of humanity but for also God’s chosen people! God arranged for a salvation meal to sustain his creation by working his divine ironies through these sinful people!

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And even though we see Joe’s dream of stars and hay bales bowing come true, we also see that he in no way engineered any of it in the slightest. At best he was faithful to God all along, but he didn’t plan his way to the palace via a murder plot, being sold into slavery, being falsely convicted of a sex crime, and thought dead by his father for years on end. Nope. None of that was his engineering. Rather, in God’s mysterious ways, he would be so morbidly humbled as to take the form of a slave, the form of a convict, the form of a dead son so that God would raise him up.

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Yes.

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God is the engineer. The engineer is God, the true hero of the story. And God is with Joe in prison, and he shows up in the bread of the baker and the wine of the cupbearer AND calls upon Joe to interpret dreams of bread and wine! There is no “level” in which the meal isn’t center stage or where God isn’t the real hero in any of this story, and in all of it, God is bringing order and salvation to his creation! But we are beginning to blur over into the next sermon a bit with all the interpersonal aspects of Joe’s life. For the moment, we are focusing on the impact of the meal on world order. God wants his earth ordered according to his will ever bit as much as heaven.

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It happens with Jesus in the meal!

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Think of all the other important salvation meals we find all through the Bible! We see this reiterate hundreds of ways all through the Bible! Remember when Esther saves her people? How does she go about it? She facilitates a banquet with the king! Isaiah dreams of a messianic banquet in the Age to Come! Jesus gives his disciples his Eucharist, and I have not yet mentioned the Old Testament’s premiere salvation meal – the meal to which even Eucharist pays homage – Passover!

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Passover is a war meal! While the Hebrew fathers cower behind doorposts covered in lamb’s blood eating in haste with their loins gathered in one hand, their staff in the other, and their children huddled in the other hand (ask me later, that’s too many hands, I know, but somehow they do it), outside in the darkness of the midnight hour, they hear the bone chilling cry in the land like has never been heard before! That’s how they eat that salvation meal inside their huts, and it’s how God crushes an empire out there in the dark!

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Makes you wonder, don’t it? What is going on among the principalities and powers of the air when Last Church sits to eat together the salvation meal of God?

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Oooh! Good question!

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That’s how God, in the Bible, brings salvation and order back to his beloved creation, and the people of God are not the hero in that story. They don’t engineer it at all. They are a sinful lot, barely faithful with ther small part in the action. They face fear, doubt, pain and shame yet find joy, hope, faith, and love in the meal, but again, that is jumping ahead into our next sermon.

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The people of God neither add anything to it nor take anything away, not so much as a jot or tittle!

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Sound familiar, Church?

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Of course it does. And by talking about it as we are doing now, you are drawn closer to God and closer to his redemption. I haven’t even listed off a bunch of rules or morals for you to obey. This is merely God’s heart meeting your heart, and now you are feeling hungry for salvation. You want to feel the power! This could change the world!

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Somebody give me the AMEN!

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For those of you coming to terms with “God’s kingdom come and will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven,” Genesis suddenly has a lot more insight than explaining away dinosaur bones! This is God’s heart meeting your heart at the Table of Apocalypse!

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You now see how THE BIBLE depicts God’s salvation coming into creation! This is church business in the world and no one else’s! No banking institution, no educational system, no real estate firm, law firm, hospital, governorship, or presidency can touch this mystical power for world order, nor are they suited for it. This is church business. This is, in the words of Jesus, “My Father’s business” of which he must be about even as a twelve year old in Herod’s grand temple! This is, as St. Paul says in Ephesians, the manifold wisdom of God being made known to the principalities and powers through the church!

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Do you think there might be some implications for us to consider?

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Why on earth would a church in God’s good creation, eating his salvation meal at the Table of Apocalypse ever put their faith in a ballot box or a political candidate? Do you think you can vote this into office? Is Jesus on the ballot? How about you eat your ballot? There’s more power of God in the bread and wine, in the revelation of Jesus to you and through you than there ever will be in a ballot!

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I will stop short of calling the church to abstain from voting, but I will get up in your grill and ask you why you would neglect the Table in favor of lesser world orders? Let’s at least – AT LEAST – major in the majors and minor in the minors. No?

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Implications.

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Last Church of Lubbock, You are a group of truly humble people. Not many of you come from elite colleges. Not many of you have powerful or fancy jobs. Not many of you  drive fine automobiles, and not many of you live in a home. You are more humble than most. Since you are a figment of my imagination (also a humiliation in itself), I factor in that a few of you do in fact own nice homes in which the rest of us meet for worship, but those homes and bank accounts are heavily taxed by King Jesus through the love and sacrifice you give. But there’s barely $10 between the rest of us to share, and yet the Spirit of God dwells in us with far more power and value than a grand cathedral with stained glass, bell tower, organ, and steeple.

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We are God’s people finding our strength in him, not us, not in a bank account, and not a ballot box.

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There’s far more for us to talk about in that realm, but, Last Church, this is merely a sermon. One among many. And anyway, we need you to do some thinking through these implications. We need you to reveal what God shows you! Perhaps as we sit at the table and partake of the bread and wine, it would be a good time and place for us to hear from you, the church!

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If God would save the world through Noah and a flood, then turn around and save it again through a dreamer-turned-slave/convict presumed dead by his father, then what is he doing with you, Last Church? What is he doing with you?

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The fact you sleep in a van or under a bridge in no way means you are somehow not in God’s will. On the contrary, in God’s hands, you might be exactly where he has positioned you for his great plans! Is God with you in homelessness? He was with Joe in prison in the bread and wine, and you are now at the Table of Apocalypse!

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Implications? Do you, Last Church, want to consider some implications with me?

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Wow! Anybody falling asleep now?

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Who knew the church was so empowered? What do we really need a flag for? Why would you pledge allegiance to it and not to the Lord of the Table?

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Hmmm…

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At this stage in our visit, I am asking you to consider more carefully than usual your trust in God. Trust his intentions, trust his methods, his commands, his lordship. He created this world, and it is designed to work in a certain kind of way humans do not engineer or fully understand. Lean not on your own understanding, but in all your ways submit to God, and he will make your path straight (Prov. 3:5-6). Let this word from God apply double to his church! We have a God-ordained job to do which he does not give to banks or military installations. We, like Joseph of old, are lifted up in the courts of Pharaoh where the king realizes he needs our otherworldly help running this world. And God has in mind feeding the world through those with proper table manners.

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In the kingdom of God, the two mites of a widow are worth more than all the wealth put into the treasury by the rich! (Mark 12:43-44). God has chosen the poor of the world to be rich in faith (James 2:5), and the Church of Lubbock desperately needs more faith than money.

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By eating this meal, Last Church, through you the world is being saved.

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Today we come to the table of the Lord to eat his body and drink his blood. This is the most sacred part of our worship, the most intimate moment we have with Jesus as a church. Eating his body and drinking his blood, as he describes in John 6, is a repulsive idea. When I was a kid, it made me think of Count Dracula.

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Funny, maybe. Funny to a kid. But to seriously contemplate eating someone’s flesh is a terrible thing. In 1972, the Uraguayan rugby team survived a plane crash in the Andes by means of such morbid contemplation. For them, and for those of us who find ourselves mortified by their story, it was no laughing matter; it was a somber thing if ever there was one, something to be ashamed of instead. The report of their cannibalism caused a backlash until the survivors revealed they had rationalized it based on their faith and practice of Eucharist.

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The rugby team represents an extreme outlier case of Christian experience. By far, most of us never had that experience and never will. Over the course of my life worship in our tradition attempted to be just as somber but nowhere near as morbid. I never heard a minister officiate the table and remark on the cannibalistic aspect of our worship. On the contrary, I heard many lessons about “discerning the body” and “eating in an unworthy manner.”

This is a concept the church learns in the letter of First Corinthians. We want to take care not to eat judgment on ourselves, and this normally (in my experience) was treated as a matter of proper introspection. I grew up in a church tradition where the observance of communion was a silent practice. The whole church would sit in almost complete silence passing trays of cracker and grape juice back and forth and eating a tiny pinch and sipping a tiny drip. This was reverence, as I understood it.

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In that moment of silence, it is presumed each member partaking would quietly and reverently humble themselves and contemplate the cross of Christ. If your mind wondered away a moment, I suppose that would mean you were eating in an unworthy manner. Heaven help you not get distracted by a buzzing fly! You didn’t want to eat judgment!

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To be frank, I think when I was young, I observed communion more in fear of eternal damnation than in either reverence or joy. It all seemed so important, but I didn’t really know why.

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I would try to visualize Jesus hanging on a Roman cross forgiving my sin. But I’m not sure I always maintained this inner reverence. I thank God it passed quickly, because as an American teenager with a Walkman and MTV, my attention to such formal introspection had a short shelf life. I wasn’t distracted by a fly nearly so much as a pretty girl.

Once I was grown and studied Bible in the academy, I came to a different view of that most holy moment. “Discerning the body” is not some effort at navel gazing, not really. Rather, and this idea totally upends all the silence and the tiny portions, St. Paul would have us discerning the body depicting a meal we share with others, one in which we wait to eat until even the poor and lowly are seated with us.

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St. Paul has such a potent idea that the church be unified! Discerning the body so as not to eat and drink judgment means we take care to share this moment with lowly people among us, that we come together as ONE. Sadly, that is an aspect we were totally corrupting unwittingly all along as a congregation. It was not the distraction of a fly or a girl for one individual to worry about, but a concern we all share as ONE.

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That’s an important concept we don’t generally talk about even to this day. Perhaps it is one we should literally discuss as we sit around a real table and break real bread as we shatter the silence in conversation and song.

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But today I want to take you into Jesus’s heart as you eat this meal at this table. I want to reveal Jesus to you in the bread and wine. This is yet another aspect of communion observance. There is a meditation involved, but it’s not so much your navel in focus as it is Jesus’s heart. Yes, as a group, an assembly daring to become ONE in prayer at table, we can have a heart-to-heart meeting with Jesus. I want you to see him afresh and to hear him anew. I want you to feel what he feels when you come to this table, and that is a notion I never heard anyone preach before.

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How can we know the mind of God? How can we know the heart of Christ?

We can listen to him tell his story.

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We are not the first to get this meal all messed up. What exactly are the proper table manners at THIS TABLE? In order to ask such a question, we must get a proper perspective, and a proper perspective comes into view when first we talk about Adam and Eve at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That sends us all the way back to the beginning of creation, to the Garden of Eden.

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Go there with me now.

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In the garden, God loves his creation. He loves his creatures and places the man and the woman within a good creation. We know this because as Genesis 1 describes it, God creates a little more each day for six days, rests on the seventh, and hold’s Judgment Day court at the end of each day finding the creation to be good. This goodness continues reverberating and coursing through creation as a harmonious peace we call shalom.

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God’s creative love is immense! The proper loving response to this love is simple. It’s not hard to understand at all. Any gullible, naked farmer can do it, and so can we.

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There is one single rule this man and woman simply must obey, and it is truly an easy rule. They can eat from any tree in the garden, including the tree of life, but the one tree in the middle of the garden, the one God designates as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that tree they are prohibited from eating. If they eat of that tree, they will die, and shalom is no longer pulsating through creation.

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Ain’t that something?

You can literally count the rules on one finger! The consequences, though, well… you can’t count them in a lifetime.

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For our purpose today, we note mainly how the world is ordered (or disordered) with a meal! The man and the woman go around the garden cultivating and ruling over all creation with a dominion given by God and everything is good. The world is at peace. They are like high priests in a ceremonial worship where their tending of flowers, even their nakedness, and in fact even their mere breath, bring glory to God! And at the center of all that worship and honor is a meal with one simple rule.

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The breaking of this one simple rule has had dire consequences ever since. We can sum up those consequences in the word “death.” Every muder, every unwanted pregnancy, every war, cancer, heart attack, and wrinkled up, old age that kills us and every thorn, thistle, weed, or pain, sweat of the brow, fear and curse ever known to mankind sprouted from the moment this meal was not eaten in a worthy manner. Adam and Eve ate judgment on themselves and all their children.

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That is the story at the start of all stories in creation. It is the way the Bible as a whole, it is the way the book of Genesis begins.

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Today, Christians treat Genesis as some sort of theological mine from which to dig up refutations against Charles Darwin and to explain away dinosaur bones. Let us not reduce such an important story to these ancillary matters. Let us find world order and redemption instead.

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In the beginning was a meal. A meal and a tree of life. We find this tree of life returning again at the end of Revelation, the end of our Christian Bible. I would argue, we find it again all through scripture, actually, but that would be an argument for another day. At the moment, I ask you to consider the other end of Genesis, the epic story of Joseph, son of Jacob, a sweeping epic that consumes the last thirteen chapters of the book.

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I ask you to notice how along the way to Joe’s story, things in creation have grown worse, not better. Adam and Eve are no sooner expelled from the garden and their two sons have a jealous dispute about how to worship God, and Cain kills his brother Abel! Within just six generations of sons, Lamech arises, pronouncing curses and claiming he will order the world by killing people who wound him. The shalom seems to be slipping further and further out of reach as death comes to rule over the humans.

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But also notice that our loving God comes to restore and repair his broken relationship with creation. He gives Adam and Eve yet another son, and through his generations raises up Noah, a man through whom he judges the world, mankind, and starts it all over again. This love of God remains even though at turn after turn, his redemption is thwarted.

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After destroying creation and starting again, God promises not to use that method of redemption ever again. Eventually, he calls Abram (soon to be called Abraham) and his wife to bear his promises of redemption. God will be with these people and rehabilitate them and through them bring his redemptive shalom back into the world.

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As we find our bearings in this story of the world, there are two things we need to say to help us make sense of it (actually many, but two for our purpose today): 1) The Bible tells the story first and foremost of God. God is the hero. So even when we read about Abraham or Jacob or Joseph or David or St. Paul, the real hero is not the little boy who kills the giant, but God who guides his stone. And 2) All the problems of our world began with improper eating arrangements. Theologically, at root, our problem is table manners. We got into our mess with a meal – our forebears ate judgment on us – and we get out of this mess as we learn proper table manners.

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We have already noted how the whole Bible is bookended (framed) with the meal at the tree of life, and now we notice how all of Genesis is framed in a salvation meal too.

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The drama of God calling and loving Abraham and his children goes through numerous twists and turns. God makes everlasting covenant-promises to Abe, promises of salvation, of land, and descendants. And God stretches Abe’s faith to the breaking point along the way. Abe and his wife stumble, and he makes a baby with the servant girl, a scandal if ever there was one! But God insists, even this will not thwart his purposes with Abe. When Abe finally gets his promised son, God calls him to sacrifice this gift on the altar, and Abe obeys, which puts this covenant trust in great jeopardy. But God stays Abe’s hand at the last moment.

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But then that boy grows up and has two sons, and like Cain and Abel before them, these two descendants descend into murderous strife. Jacob, whose name means “Liar/Deceiver” manages to appease his brother and avoid murder eventually, but the threat is there and is very real. But along the way, we find God’s promises and love must contend with very deceitful and manipulative people.

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But as the saga unfolds, we are drawn deeper and deeper into the hearts and minds of this family, and as readers we can identify and even share their experience. We see ourselves in them as we find God in them too. Their story becomes our story. And the story follows Jacob and his sons specifically.

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We see Jacob fall in love with Rachel, and like any good love song on the radio, we find ourselves sympathizing. We tap our toe and feel the rhythm of this love song as it twists through the manipulations of Uncle Laban who wants to marry off his older daughter too. So far, it’s all highly understandable, even though it deals with a distant culture from long ago. Leah needs a husband too, and Jacob may as well be hers.

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Ah… but the way Laban deals with this is simply treacherous! Jacob has bound himself to promises he must now keep, and this leads to years and years of sacrifice so that he can love Rachel, but that love now bears the baggage of loving Leah too. And Leah, poor Leah! Who doesn’t feel her pain? Leah, like her daddy (like Jacob too, for that matter) knows how to manipulate people, and taking a page from Abe’s story, she offers her servant girl to Jacob in order to make a baby!

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This is NOT planned parenthood! This is unplanned chaos! The roots of intergenerational jealousy sink deep in the soil of this deceitful garden, as Jacob, his two wives, and their two servant girls make a family, eventually consisting of twelve sons! These twelve sons from Jacob, the LIar, are the patriarchs of Israel! Their drunken debauchery is the spring from which God must work out our salvation!

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And along comes Joseph, eventually, who is Jacob’s favorite son, born in his old age of his true love, Rachel. Rachel, that maiden he met at the well that day long ago and stole his heart! Joe is the son Rachel bears him, and so it’s only natural that Jake loves Joe most.

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And Joe, it turns out, is a tattletale, Daddy’s pet, he gets the fancy sport coat and all the favor. But that’s not all. Joe, also is an arrogant little punk with big dreams of grandeur, and he enjoys spouting off at dinner with the family how some day, when he grows up, all these brothers will come and bow low to him.

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The brothers hate him. They HATE him!

If he were your little brother, you’d hate him too.

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This is a familiar pattern by now. The brotherly jealousy and hate and murder plots have been humming all through Genesis since Cain and Abel. What is God, our hero, going to do with and through this?

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What Joe’s brothers mean for evil, God uses for good.

And this brings us back to table manners.

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Well, not immediately, first we must watch Joe descend into a pit. It’s a grave of sorts. The brothers contemplate murder, but they ultimately relent. Yet, they lie! They jacob to Jacob about this causing their father to think the lad is dead, and then they must face the rest of their days maintaining this morbid lie. Meanwhile, Joe, the dreamer, descends into slavery and a dungeon which for years on end feels like enduring a living death.

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There can be no doubt, Joe’s dreams are crushed, pulverized, and shattered over and over and over again as at each stage of his humiliation, his dreams of grandeur slip further and further out of reach. And if we recall at every step how God is the hero redeeming creation and making promises all through this saga, we should see how the impossibility of redemption is increasingly divine! Only God can do this. But in the narrative tension we must ask: How???

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Where is God in this mess? It can be hard to tell! But the bigger the problem, the more powerful the God who redeems it! Yet, at turn after turn, he keeps working with the least, the humblest, the weakest, and most unlikely people so that he does not share the glory with them but receives the praise due him in proper table manners.

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I know by saying that way, it seems a little out of kilter, but look again. Look carefully with eyes of faith. “Those forgiven much, love much,” says Jesus to Simon eons later. And that little insight helps guide our understanding of what happens here in Genesis.

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Joe is buried under the weight of a foreign empire, completely unknown by Pharaoh. He is buried under the weight of his brothers’ lie, and Jacob believes he is long dead.

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The Bible does not feature this part of the story, but we can presume Jacob mourns Joe’s passing, and every year at the anniversary, he weeps. Every holiday festival when the family comes together, there is an empty seat where the arrogant dreamer sat. The seat is no longer filled with arrogant dreams, but with the lie the brothers are now forced, in order to keep up appearances, they must now maintain. Oh, what a burden they have created for themselves and their father!

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For all we can tell, the brothers are pretty good guys except for this one lie which is no little lie at all. There is no record of them repeatedly treating anyone else like this. They in fact seem completely honest about their dealings when we meet them again later, but they are now burdened with this old lie they still maintain. This one lie disintegrates them, and they have no integrity.

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Meanwhile, God has arranged for a cupbearer and baker to go to jail with Joe. A cupbearer and baker. This isn’t the keeper of the royal flock or the captain of the guard. No. The cupbearer and baker! Think about that. These men work at the royal table! And not only that. They aren’t merely the wait staff, this is the guy who serves the wine and the guy who bakes the bread! These are the servants of Eucharist! In that cup and in that oven are the blood and body of Christ!

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And these guys who covertly bear witness to Christ and to God’s movement far beneath the drama and far behind the scenes backstage join Joe in his imperial pit where that old dreamer listens to, and interprets, their dreams – the dreams of bread and wine! And Joe interprets their dreams quite successfully in what we Christians might think of as almost a prediction of death, burial, and resurrection! For the baker will die, but the cupbearer will be restored. And that is exactly what happens.

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Oh, how the plot thickens! It’s exciting, when you really think about it!

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But we must be patient, and Joe especially must be, for despite one convict’s request of another, (“Hey, man, when you get out, can you do me a solid?”), the cupbearer seems to blow Joe off. That is… until… Pharaoh has a nightmare that troubles him so much, he calls all his wise men to come and interpret it for him. But they can’t.

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Now, when the king calls all his servants to a special session, they take him deadly serious. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, they come running for these special sessions. Normally, convening a special session of congress gets things done, but this is a truly unique problem, and none of Pharaoh’s best advisors can help. This one stumps them all. And this never happens. It never happened before!

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It’s while the court is in a dither on this matter that finally, finally, finally the cupbearer either remembers or finally gets the gumption to speak up on Joe’s behalf. But I would have you notice that by speaking up this way, the cupbearer must confess his own criminal record! Everyone in this story is humiliated in one way or another, and this cupbearer is no exception.

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“Do you remember that time, O King, when you threw me in prison a while back? … ahem… well… I met a guy in the dungeon who interpreted dreams, and he nailed it. His dream interpretations accurately predicted the future of both me and the baker. If you want help with your nightmare, you should consider talking to Joe.”

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St. Paul tells the Philippians that Jesus did not grasp at his deity, but humbled himself taking on the form of a slave, and even more humiliating himself to the point of death, death on a cross, but God raised him up, up and up so that his name was above every name, and at the name of Jesus every tongue would confess and every knee bend.

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And with only the smallest of exceptions, we see God do that with Joe here. Joe plays the Jesus card all the way back in Genesis! Joe seems to have been grasping at greatness back in the beginning, but he was humbled and took the form of a slave and a convict, a forgotten (even dead) convict, but now, at long last, God raises him up, and he interprets Pharaoh’s dream, and then at his presence every knee bends as all the stars and hay bales bow to his!

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And the dream, the nightmare, is explained as a starving world. God’s good creation will be plunged into famine and starvation for seven years. But first there will be a time of plenty, and if a wise gardner were to wisely prepare in advance for this coming disaster, he could feed the world. And Pharaoh senses in his bones that this lad understands, so he appoints the lad to be in charge of this worldwide rescue operation of all of creation!

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Yes, Genesis opens with a meal that brings on disaster and closes with a meal of salvation!

Simply divine.

Don’t you think?

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And we’ve already seen Jesus Christ seething beneath the surface at at least two points along the way, not to mention all the others! Cain and Abel are sinners, but we see Jesus in Abel, as he dies in a jealous murder between brothers, and Pilate knows the Jews hand him over due to envy! (Mark 15:10).

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Esau sells his birthright and is cheated out of his blessing by his baby brother who is a liar, and yet we see Jesus in this liar taking a bride and bearing God’s promises. (What does this say about you and me? Can the world see Jesus in us?)

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The whole world comes to Joseph and bows low, just like he’d dreamed long ago, though the dream comes true like Joe never could have expected. And Joe is stripped of all his arrogance, pride, and dreams long before they come true. So, when Pharaoh calls him up out of that grave – ahem – lyons den – ahem – dungeon, Joe wastes no words or time taking credit for himself, but points solely to God, the real hero of this story.

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And through Joe (or Jesus in Joe), the whole world finds food for life. Life is preserved for every living soul through this man God raises up. And word of this gets out around the world reaching Jacob who sends his sons to get some food so that they might live too.

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Wow!

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And upon meeting Joe, after so many years and so much has changed, the brothers do not recognize Joe in his royal garb, and they bow to him, and the dream comes true! But that old dream is, in the urgency of the situation, merely the poetic justice part. The urgent business of feeding and reconciliation is at hand. And Joe recognizes the brothers though they do not recognize him!

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These brothers wronged Joe. He knows it; they know it. They have been burdened with this lie all this time, both Joe and the brothers, each in their own way. But in the meantime, Joe takes special interest in THESE men. He singles them out to share a meal! They have the work of reconciliation at hand. Redemption doesn’t merely feed the world some calories, it reconciles brotherly hate.

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But Joe does not immediately reveal himself to them. He wants to do some heart-to-heart business with these brothers, and this happens at the table! They must learn proper table manners, theologically speaking. Yet, as they eat, and as the brothers still as yet do not see Joe for who he really is, Joe is overcome with emotion and must retreat to weep!

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Can you feel that?

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That, brothers (and sisters) is the heart of Christ, and as we eat in an unworthy manner, not recognizing him and the movement of God in our lives, this is what Jesus is doing with us. He steps back to weep as his love for us is overwhelming even to him.

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We show up at his table that he has prepared in the presence of his enemies (us), and he loves us in our wayward lies. He steps out to weep.

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Isn’t that remarkable? God weeping over us? There’s a number of emotions tied up in all that, but love is the overwhelming thing here. And God/Jesus weeps sometimes when his love is so moved. We tend to think of God as more detached, more high and mighty and judgmental, even if graceful. But God has feelings too.

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Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus too. It’s the shortest verse in the Bible! (Easy memory verse, if you are into that sort of thing.) But it begs the question: Why? Why does Jesus cry over Lazarus? We all know he is gonna raise him back to life! So why weep? Why not just raise him up?

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Love.

Love takes the time to cry. It’s a heart thang.

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And Joseph washes his face and returns to the table. He proceeds to deal with his treacherous brothers in such a way to work out their demons, to force them to face their lie and talk about it. They don’t recognize their brother is alive and well, that they have now bowed low to him already, yet their old dealings with him come home to roost as they eat this meal with him! The irony is divine!

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The brothers leave the table on mission to get Rachel’s other son and bring him for Joe to lay eyes on, and ultimately to retrieve their father Jake too, and bring him into Joe’s courts as well. Eventually, Joe reveals himself at the table! and we are instantly reminded of those disciples at Emmaus in Luke 24.

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I’m telling you about Genesis today so that when you come to the Lord’s Table and celebrate Eucharist, you will meet Jesus for a heart-to-heart visit. Our reading of Genesis facilitates a new reverence for this table. The world is ordered through our communion observance. And the story of Joseph feeding his brothers who bow low to him at long last reveals to us our position with Jesus as we face our lies and find him weeping over our betrayals.

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Let us surrender our lies to him. Let us find new, deeper trust in God and his salvation as we share this meal. Let us talk about this story and get excited as the plot thickens! Let us look deeper than we are accustomed for the movement of God in the world and in our brothers and sisters joining us in the drama of table manners. The tree of life bears such fruit, and we want to eat it. The joy of the Lord is our strength. The joy of the Lord is hosting his children around his table and singing the songs together of apocalypse and eternity.

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Let us take some TIME, and SHARE this meal, not simply a pinch of cracker and a thimble of grape juice, but real time and a real meal shared with the heart of Jesus today in a worthy manner so that we eat and drink salvation on ourselves. Let’s not reduce this meal to navel gazing and silence, but let’s eat!

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Can I get and Amen?

Good.

Let’s eat.