This Is The Table

"This Is the Table"--June 1, 2017

"For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." [Romans 8:19-23]

Let me tell you something about my dining room table:  I really, really like mine.

I have learned in this life not to say that I love things, because after all, things, objects, and possessions cannot love you back, much less love you first.  So I will refrain from saying I love my dining room table.  But I do really, really like it.

I like it, in part, because it has a lot of character.  It has years--decades, even--of nicks and scrapes and gashes in its surface from multiple generations of Bonds eating at it.  I like it because it is real, solid wood, and not some pressed particle-board with a laminate top that is only pretending to be wood.  I like that it was the very table I grew up eating family dinners around, and that my parents generously gave it to me and to my wife when we were first starting out.  That table is a sign of grace at its best to me--it is a gift that has lasting presence, it is authentic, and it wears the marks of endurance on it.

That said, there is also coming a day when that table is going to need a good refinishing.  We will get out the Old English.  We will give it the Murphy's oil treatment.  If sanding and staining are necessary, we will do that. We will do whatever else is necessary to renew that table, so that we can keep it and continue to use it.  And as someone who has done the work of stripping and re-staining furniture in the past, I am well aware that if it comes to such labor, it may be a lot of work. But I also know that after that kind of labor, a piece of furniture can be given a whole new life.  Decades more dinners.  Years upon years more of use and life and enduring.

In no way do I want to destroy, get rid of, or throw away that table, or just get a new one.  But rather, I want to take care of it. In fact, I try to take decent care of it on a day by day basis after supper time, making sure we clean it off after the dishes are cleared, using wood-safe cleaners, and making sure my kids don't sneak off when no one is looking to go carving shapes into the table-top.  And all of that is even knowing that there is coming a major renewal day for that table, when the spots of bare wood will be stained to match the finish, and it will shine again.

But even knowing that there is a future renewal in store for the table, I want to take care of it in little ways on a day by day basis all the same even now, because, as it turns out, I really, really like that table. 

You know what wouldn't make any sense?  If I said, "Well, I'm counting on the fact that one day we're gonna spend a long full day restoring that table, so go ahead and bang it all up now.  We'll get around to fixing it all later."  That would miss the point, wouldn't it? 

If I said, "Well, at some point in the future, the table will have a renewed finish to it, so I might as well trash it now..." you would doubt whether I really care about that table like I say I do.  Rather, you would expect that if I really, really like it enough to plan a major restoration one day to make it like new, I would also in the mean time like it enough to do what I can to take care of it now in between daily lunch and dinner messes and crumbs.  You would say to me something like, "If it matters enough to restore it completely one day in the future, it matters enough now, too, to do what you can to take care of it in little ways in the mean time." 

And even if I didn't know for sure whether it would really hurt the table or not to leave really hot casserole dishes right on the wood without a pot holder or trivet underneath, you might expect me to take those kinds of preventative, pre-emptive steps just in case--like putting hot pads  out to protect the table from excess heat and warming--even just as a way of hedging my bets.  You would expect all of that from me with the same logic, too: that if I cared enough about this table to commit to some future major restoration, that it would only make sense that I take care of it in whatever small gestures I have at my disposal right now, too.

Well, in a sense, that's how God feels about all of creation.  God looks at this creation, as broken and stained as it is, and God says, "But I really really like that table."  Well, to go even further, God says, "I really really love this creation."  And God loves creation enough to have made the promise to restore it all--we usually call that resurrection.  God's promise is to restore creation so that everything can be renewed, like it's a whole new creation--like it's a new heaven and earth.  God's promise is to restore these lives of ours, or as Paul calls it in the letter to the Romans, "the redemption of our bodies."  The resurrection of Jesus is part of the promise, along with the "first fruits" of the Spirit among us now, that assures us of that future promised mending-of-all-things and restoration of the whole universe.

Our hope as Easter people is that God loves the you-ness of you and the me-ness of me so much as not to let death erase us permanently from existence, but that God holds on to us and promises to raise us up, restore us, and renew us.  The Christian story is of a God who loves the particularity of you, and the details of me, so deeply and wildly that God holds on to us even beyond death and promises restoration.  And Jesus is the picture of that in advance.

And, in fact, the New Testament says, God is so wildly enamored of this whole universe that God is going to make all of creation itself renewed, restored, and re-created.  As a colleague and friend of mine says, the promise is that God will make "all things new," not that God will make "all new things."  The whole universe is like the dining room table God really, really likes--that God even loves--the creation at which God wishes and chooses to dwell.  And because of that, God has promised a future reclamation project--the day when, as Paul says here, the creation is "set free from its bondage to decay."  Our ways of wrecking and pillaging and depleting and trampling all over this creation, and all over one another, these things will come to an end, and at long last, with more than Old English and elbow grease, God will make this beloved creation new again.  Plants and trees, sure.  Wolves and lambs, indeed.  You and me, beloved, too.

Now, if that much is all true--and right out of the pages of Scripture here--and we can think of the whole universe as the beloved (but definitely distressed) dining room table of God's that God wants to keep and has promised to restore, then in this day, in this life, how are we supposed to treat this world and the people in it?

I ask this because sometimes we Christians--especially (and sadly) we Christians--totally miss the boat on this one.  We sometimes say things like, "Well, because God has promised to take us to heaven one day, who cares about how we treat the world in which we live now?"  We sometimes even make it worse than that--we make it sound like caring for God's world demonstrates a lack of faith in the God who promises to restore the heavens and the earth. You hear religious folks say things like, "Well, hey, I believe that God will protect us (usually they mean "us as in my particular kind of Christian") from any truly disastrous effects that could happen in the world, so any real substantive attention to being good stewards of this planet where we live shows a lack of trust in God.  I don't worship the earth--I worship Jesus!" you'll hear.

But, come on, really?  That's rather like saying, "I know you love that table, and since you're going to fix it all anyway one day, I'm going to deliberately carve my initials into it now with my fork tines, because, hey, if I tried to help restore it now, it would be like saying I didn't trust you to refinish it later."  And that's just plain foolish. 

If we know that God cares enough about this whole creation to promise at the last to strip down the old finish and renew it completely, and if we claim to be part of the family of God, the household of God, then our calling is all the more to take care of what God loves, even if our efforts are at best like wiping the crumbs off after dinner, or not leaving a scalding casserole dish right on the bare wood surface because the heat would ruin the finish even more.  Caring about this creation that groans is not a matter of failing to trust in God, or of casting ourselves in the role of savior, as if we think a can recycled here or a bit of roadside litter-picking there will do all that "renewing" that God has in mind to do. But it is to say, at least, "God, I know this table matters to you--so I will take care of it as well as I can in the mean time, while we also wait for the day when the great restoration is complete."  Because even selfishly in the mean time, this is the dinner table where we eat, too.

All of this talk about caring for this creation where we live is rooted in our faith in the resurrection.  We get something dangerously, blasphemously, wrong when we say that God's ultimate plan is to scrap the universe which God has called "good... very good" and for us to float on clouds with harps one day.  That is decidedly NOT the way the Scriptures, beginning to end, tell the story.  The story the Bible actually tells starts in a garden, with none other than God getting dirt under the ol' divine fingernails, and it ends around a tree in the middle of God's new creation, where heaven and earth are joined and renewed and all things are made new.... not that God pitches the old and buys all new things.  If the Christian claim were simply that after you die, you get to go to some otherworldly cloud-based theme park because God didn't much care for this creation, then yeah, we would have license perhaps not to care about leaving the casserole dish on the tabletop and scorching the surface, or leaving gash marks in the arm rests of the matching chairs.  But as it is, God has said from beginning to end of the Story that God loves this table, in all its particularity, with all its marks of character and history, precisely because this is the table where God has had generations of family dinners with humanity, precisely because this is the storied table where we have communed and broken bread together, precisely because this world is the table at which none other than Christ himself offered up his life and rose from the dead.

So... one day, when we get to that great and promised resurrection banquet that the prophets kept having dreams about, where all nations are gathered, tears are wiped away, and death is destroyed once and for all... in the midst of the passing of the platters, take a quick peek under the linens and tablecloth on that day.  The Scriptures tell us you will find a familiar grain to the wood at that table... and that at the last the same old table at which we have met with God since the beginning will be renewed and restored with a brand-new-but-somehow-oddly-familiar shine to it.

Lord God, teach us to love what you love... which is all creation... and to love whom you love... which is all of us.  Teach us, even in small and symbolic ways, to take care of the table.