Last Sunday, I went to a feast. It wasn’t the best feast of my life or a perfect feast, but it was a very good one, and it got me thinking about this Sunday’s story.
Many of you joined me for the feast, it was our visit to the Guru Nanak Society, the gathering place for the Cincinnati Sikh community. We attended their weekly services and their community lunch afterwards. Back in September, when Simran Jeet Singh preached here at Knox, Cincinnati Sikhs joined us for worship and for lunch, last week we were invited to their house of prayer. Let me describe it to you.
It’s called a gurudwara, which means home of the guru. When you walk through the door, you are guided into a room where you are asked to remove your shoes, put on a head covering and wash your hands before you enter the sacred space. When you go in, a central carpet leads you to the front where a canopy houses the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred text of Sikhism.
Each person approaches, can make an offering and bows in reverence. Incidentally, none of this makes me feel like I am being a heretic or unfaithful to Jesus, for several reasons. But chief among them is the way Sikhism welcomes others. The gurudwara’s website says that “it is open to all individuals, regardless of their religious or cultural background, and provides a welcoming space for individuals to connect with their faith and engage in acts of service and charity.” I know that my faith is welcome there. What a great invitation! And I have always found that learning about other traditions helps me to think more deeply about my own.
Anyway, once you’ve made your bow, you take a seat on the floor, men on one of the room and women on the other. People continue to enter throughout the service, which is mostly a combination of scripture reading and meditative music sung with drums and harmonium. There were phoenetic spellings and translations on a screen so that we could sing and follow along as the service was led in Punjabi.
After the service, everyone goes to the langar, the kitchen in the gurudwara that provides a free meal to everyone who comes to the service. The Sikh community serves around 500 meals every Sunday. Volunteers do all of the cooking, prep begins on Saturday afternoon and the cooking begins in earnest around 6am Sunday morning; there is serving and cleanup to do also—it is quite an operation. You grab a tray which is filled with rice, 2 hot entrees, naan, and desert. Some members of the community need the free meal. Others are just happy to enjoy the community. I asked, jokingly, if the meal is better some weeks than others, depending on who is the cook. They said yes; they also said that they had scheduled one of the “A Team” for today because they knew their Knox friends were coming—and it was some of the best Indian food I had ever had.
All of this got me thinking about a parable—a story Jesus tells—about a feast. We read it this morning. A man prepares a great dinner, a feast, and invites people to come. But when the feast is ready, the guests all start sending in their excuses, none of which are very convincing. One says, “I’ve just bought some land and can’t come.” Another says, “I can’t come because I’ve just been married.” A third says, “I have 5 new oxen and I need to go try them out”—I think that’s the ancient equivalent of “I need to wash my hair.” The host can’t believe it, and he sends out another set of invitations to some folks he thinks might be less likely to refuse—the poor the crippled, the blind, and the lame—the people who don’t always get invited to parties, especially in the ancient world. When there is still room, he opens the dinner to everyone; he insists: “go out into the streets and compel them to come!”
This story is often used by preachers who want to talk about who is in and who is out in heaven—who is wise enough to accept God’s invitation. But this week I had a different thought about it. I found myself wondering about why so many people did not come to the feast. And it occurred to me that the most obvious answers are that either the feast itself wasn’t any good; or the invitation was not. Either people knew that this man’s feast would not be tasty or enjoyable and they just didn’t like him as a host, or all of that was great and he just kept it too much of a secret—he thought he was inviting everyone, but he wasn’t good at getting the word out.
And I thought to myself, aren’t those the problems with the church in our culture? Sometimes, the feast isn’t good. There are so many instances of the dominant Christian story being one that many people don’t want to hear. Christians are widely seen as being judgmental or exclusive or regressive; the culture is full of older people who have been hurt by church and younger people who will never be attracted to it in the first place. And sometimes church people just aren’t very nice.
I hope that’s not who Knox is. We seek to be inclusive of different kinds of people, curious about our doubts, and willing to talk about difficult things. I think our feast, though certainly not perfect, is mostly good. In our New Member classes, there’s almost always someone who says to the group: “I didn’t know there was a church like this!” That comment is often perceived as good news, but there’s a sad reality that goes with it: if our feast is such a good one, why is it so hard for people to find. Maybe our feast is pretty good, but we need to work on our invitation.
Back at the Sikh gurudwara, I found some things that aren’t so different from the church. I had an exchange with one of the members of their community. He was a man who was very serious about his religious commitment and he was critiquing what he sees with some others in the community. Some of them don’t observe all of the traditions of Sikhism; some don’t show up for the entire service each week, in fact, some merely come at the end of the service because they’re mostly there for the meal—he objected to this, just like I hear some of you object to Christmas and Easter Christians, or people who won’t join your committee or who don’t pledge. In every faith community, there are plenty of examples of ways people are more or less involved. The typical interpretation of today’s parable invites the people who are most involved to critique the outsiders, the ones who aren’t serious enough, the people who don’t get it.
Let’s re-think that for a moment, without any judgment, and maybe with some curiosity: In every religious community, there are some people who at this present moment are feeling strongly called to a deep commitment; and there are others who are kind of going through the motions, and there are some who don’t care to come at all, and at any time, the winds could shift for any number of reasons and someone might decide to dig deeper and contribute and explore…or might disappear. Some of this is beyond our control; there are some folks we are not going to reach, often because of timing or situation or because they’re connecting with God in some other way. But there are some aspects of what we do here that are within our control and that we must do well—and that we can try to keep doing better—and there’s a reason we need to: When the story is told faithfully, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a an incredible feast. The story of Jesus is immensely important for the welfare of our own spirits and the good of the world. And whether or not people choose to join us in this feast has much to do with how good we allow the feast to be, and how attractive we make the invitation.
Just think about the feast we have to share: Jesus is the originator of the feast, and it’s a good feast. We hear about it in the stories Jesus tells: The Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Rich Man and Lazarus…these are the stories he tells to capture our imagination and draw us into faith. The stories tell of the promise of second chances, the challenge of service to others, the importance of being generous, because you can’t take it with you. Not just the stories Jesus tells, but his very own life is part of the feast: his compassion in healing the sick; his challenges to the wealthy and the powerful; the curiosity of statements like “whoever is without sin may cast the first stone.” And his greatest commandment: “love one another as I have loved you.” These are the stories that people should learn at the feast.
These stories are supposed to remind us of the spiritual opportunities of every day: the blessings of caring for a loved one; the healing we find in forgiving an enemy; the joy of using our time or wealth to help someone else—these are sacred stories that are woven into our everyday lives. Here at the feast we surround people with God’s love: the friend who has lost a beloved spouse; the gay person who has found the way back to faith; the recovering evangelical who has rediscovered God as merciful and curious. These are Knox feasts that happen all the time. We need to keep living these stories; and we need to be good at sharing them. What could be more important?
This morning we’re sharing the primary, symbolic feast of our tradition—Communion—and as we get ready for that I want to tell you one more story about the gurudwara.
Before coming down to the langar, the lunch, a previous feast happens. As the service comes to an end, volunteers start handing out napkins. And then, they bring around bowls of Karah Prashad. It a sweet dish, made of butter, flour, and sugar, kind of like warm cookie dough; they scoop it out of the bowl and place it directly into your cupped hands and you eat it with your fingers. Its sweetness is a reminder of its meaning. As you go from the prayer service you take with you the sweet grace and blessing of God; and the simplicity of everyone sharing in it and doing so humbly and with your hands—that is a reminder of the unity and equality of everyone who is present.
Those are some of the same values we are to remember at the Communion table in church, and that reinforces my general feeling about interfaith experiences: doing something that is a part of someone else’s tradition usually helps us think more deeply about our own. Today as I receive the bread and the cup I will no doubt be remembering Karah Prashad and will meditate on the sweetness of God’s Word and the unity of us all.
I don’t mean to imply that the visit last week to the Sikh gurudwara was a perfect feast, with a perfect invitation. Obviously, many of you chose not to go. Not all parts of the service were well-explained or understandable. And I’m sure it isn’t perfect for them either. I’m sure there are plenty of Sikhs for whom Karah Prashad feels as routine and ordinary as our cubes of bread and tiny cups of grape juice.
But the visit last week, and the story we read this morning, got me thinking about an important matter, to me and to all of us: we have a responsibility that we all share, every week and every day in this community. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is so important. It is a good feast, and all of us, together, must make sure that what happens here is a good feast, with a good invitation. We must do all we can so that as many people as possible can share in the grace and love of Jesus Christ. Amen.