The More, The Merrier

The More, the Merrier--August 17, 2018

"On this mountain the LORD of hosts 

      will make for all peoples

  a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,

  of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain

      the shroud that is cast over all peoples,

      the sheet that is spread over all nations;

 he will swallow up death forever.

Then the Lord GOD will wipe away

      the tears from all faces,

and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,

      for the LORD has spoken." [Isaiah 25:6-8]

Spoiler alert here, friends--this is where the story of the universe is headed: a big ol' dinner party for all peoples and the destruction of death itself.

I love these words from the prophet Isaiah, and I find deep comfort in them, whether they come up on a Sunday morning in worship, or I find myself like I was earlier this week reading them to dear saint of God sleeping fitfully in a hospital bed in hospice care, or I stumble upon them paging through my Bible.  I love these words, and they have lifted up my heart when I have been grieving the loss of people I have loved over the years.

But sometimes I also have to stop and remind myself of just how scandalous this vision must have sounded to Isaiah's first listeners.  Before these were words of deep comfort, I think they must have also been words of profound surprise, like the punch-line of an absurdist joke that no one expected.

I say that this vision of a grand divine family reunion dinner was (and is!) scandalous because of how broad and wide its scope is.  When the prophet Isaiah lived, the conventional wisdom of Israel and Judah's religion was something like, "We are the chosen people, and we alone matter.  God has a special relationship with us, and we are exceptional.  Nobody else is really as important, and God certainly favors us over everybody else."  

The ancient story about God calling and choosing Abraham to "bless all the families of the earth" had somehow congealed and hardened into a rigid script that the God of Abraham only cared about the family line through Isaac and Jacob and to the children of Israel, and that their "chosen-ness" meant that God was indifferent toward anybody else on earth.  We do that, we human beings.  We have a way of taking a sentence like "You are special" and hearing it as, "I am better than everyone else."  Well, the Respectable Religious Crowd of Isaiah's day had done about the same, and so you have to imagine it was something of a shock for them to hear the old dreamer talking about this divine dinner party.

The idea of God having a grand victory celebration might have been easy enough to swallow.  Maybe even the idea of God destroying death once and for all, if the people had dared to dream of life beyond the grip of death, was fine, too. But the guest list here?  "All peoples?"  Really?  "All nations?"  What? Isaiah was envisioning something radical--a God who could still have covenant faithfulness with the "chosen" children of Israel, and who at the same time still included "all nations" to be there at the big party.  This was the kind of idea that got so many prophets killed--Isaiah and his fellow prophets dared to listen when God's Spirit whispered in their ears that others were just as included, just as invited, just as precious, as the ones who prided themselves on being "in."

So consider again what it is that Isaiah is really envisioning here: that one day, the God of Israel and Judah would throw a party at which all peoples, all nations, all skin colors, all ethnicities, all languages, all cultures, and all the various and different ways of being human, would find a place set for them at the table.  And there at the party, everybody eats from the same menu, even from the same platters.  There is no first-class seating for the "truly chosen" with the really good food, and then leftovers and scraps for the rest back in coach.  There is no division or segregation into groups.  Everybody who is covered by the shroud of death is invited to watch as God rips it to shreds like an old sheet.  Everyone who has wept will find their tears wiped away. Everyone who is hungry eats.  Yes, the chosen people who have been stomped on by one foreign army after another will feel vindication, but Isaiah's vision of the dinner party is at the same time open to everybody.

That was scandalous.  The conventional wisdom of Isaiah's day was that only fellow Israelites and Judeans were acceptable to God, and that "other people" were a threat to their way of life.  The recurring advice of the talking heads of the day said that "If we let other people around into our lives and communities, they'll change what it means to be Israelites! We'll lose our way of life! Those other people, those outsiders, are dangerous, and they are threatening to make us lose our culture, our nationality, and our way of life!  We must keep them out, out, out, or else they'll taint and infect everything we have tried to build for ourselves here!"  The Respectable Religious Crowd of Isaiah's day said, "The Israel we all know and love is in danger of not existing anymore, because there are all these... other people around, and they are a threat to us! We have to keep them away... out... removed!"  And then Isaiah, knowing full well how controversial it was to say this, declares, "Well, the God of Israel is throwing a party for all of them, and we'll all be seated together at God's table, right here on God's mountain.  God's party is for all nations, and nobody else gets to revise the guest list."

Whether the people who heard Isaiah liked that vision or not is another matter entirely--none of us ever likes to be reminded that God is not exclusively my personal possession, after all.  But that wide, big, expansive vision is what Isaiah saw.  All nations.  A rainbow of faces, with cheeks dried of their tears by the same hand of the one God.

If we are going to call ourselves followers of Jesus, who was fed by vision of prophets like these, then we should be prepared for this kind of an end to the story.  The prophets themselves dared to listen when they heard God speak about a party for all nations.  They did not edit out the other peoples when they pictured the grand dinner table.  The prophets who pointed ahead to Jesus, and then Jesus himself, had this expansive vision of who would find themselves at the table. And that made them see other people differently in their present moments, too.  After all, if you have convinced yourself that someone is just not good enough to make it on God's eternal guest list, it becomes very easy to treat them like they are disposable or ignorable or less important right now when they are walking right beside you on the street, or standing in line at the store in front of you, or looking for work in your town.  But if we dare to listen to the prophets and can see that all nations will be there at God's dinner party one day, you and I cannot help but treat everybody, no matter how different they are from either of us, as a future guest at the table. They may be the ones asked to scooch in their chairs to make room for you when you get there, after all!  

If everybody, no matter their nationality, language, ethnicity, skin color, or culture, is going to be invited to God's big ol' table, then I should be very, very careful before I go dismissing anybody in the course of my day to day life and work.  If God has said that "all nations" and "all peoples" will be there, I don't get to try and narrow down the guest list because it makes me uncomfortable.  And if God says that the table has room for every tribe, tongue, and race, then I don't get to change that... and I should probably consider for a moment that such a wide invitation is actually my only hope, too, since an American of northern European ancestry like me isn't anywhere close to the actual ethnicity of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Jesus.  My only hope of belonging is that God's table is big enough to include me, too, and that others who are different from me will be willing to slide their chairs over to make room for the likes of an outsider like me.

Taking God's table seriously also means that I am no longer allowed to picture the people of God as looking or sounding just like me. And I am no longer afforded the privilege of being afraid of "them," or of keeping "those people" out or away or removed from what I have.  It is all God's anyway--past, present, and future--and God says here in Isaiah that all nations will find a place at the table.  It would be damned foolish of me now to try and shoo away someone to whom God has sent an engraved dinner invitation already.  

Isaiah had the courage--the nerve!--to stand up in a crowd that was dead certain God's blessings were only for people who lived within their borders, and to say, "Hey everybody! Our God is throwing a party for all peoples!" It took courage because accepting that wide vision was going to change what it meant to be the people of God, and the Respectable Religious Crowd were afraid of losing their old homogenous image of what it meant to be Israel.  And Isaiah's vision of a future table for all nations was threatening to them... threatening enough that they were stirred up to silence prophets like Isaiah, or even to start setting up crosses for them, too.  But Isaiah's was a joyful courage, too, because it meant allowing God's table to be infinitely bigger than anybody ever dreamed.  

It still demands courage to see that, and to consider that God operates by the principle of "The more, the merrier," even when we want to imagine that God's blessings are our private possession.

So, again, let this be your spoiler alert: a prophet who got a glimpse of the end of the story saw that all nations and all peoples are there at God's table.  If any of us has a problem with that, we'll have to take it up, not with the other nations or peoples, but with none other than God.

Get ready.  Someone whose story, whose face, whose language is quite different from your own will very likely be the one scooching their chair over at God's party one day... to make room for--you.

Lord God at whose table we are fed, give us the grace and humility and courage to regard all people we encounter today as future tablemates at your grand celebration.  Get us ready for your party.