Emmaus – Peculiar Faith

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

A remarkable array of momentous conversations, epic arguments, and tender lovemaking happens around the dinner table—all those “kitchen table conversations,” as politicians like to call them, that bring families together in good times and crises alike.

The Table sits at the heart of biblical accounts of the Gospel and at the very center of Christian worship for all the obvious reasons that come quickly to mind, and also the subtle ones that shape all those moments of shared meals: food, in short, is necessary for life.

The story many of us heard yesterday from Luke, the story of encountering the risen Jesus as a stranger (24:13-35), comes with the added benefit of sounding terribly queer—I don’t mean it’s an LGBT-related story (necessarily), but that it scrambles expectations and refuses tidy conclusions (the risen Jesus, after all, vanishes from the dinner table before anyone can even gasp and he refuses to be contained). I used it for the preface of my book Peculiar Faith (from which the name of this blog site is derived) and it never fails to both console and unsettle me.

Reading and reflecting on that story again this year, I was suddenly reminded of the iconic 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Few probably imagine Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy as a Gospel-story tableau—least of all those actors themselves—but doing so brims with critical insights. Race, gender, and sexuality all appear so clearly intertwined by pushing Luke’s story into that film, and in ways that lend some much-needed cultural flesh, as it were, to an Easter hope.

Recalling the film’s plotline, Tracy and Hepburn are hosting a dinner party at the request of their daughter, who wants them to meet her fiancé. How lovely! But prior to that party they didn’t know that their daughter’s fiancé was Black. Their daughter also invited her fiancé’s parents—her future in-laws—to the same dinner party, and they didn’t know that she was white!

The movie portrays both families as socially liberal, generally speaking, and mostly supportive of tolerance and equality in that mid-twentieth-century middle class way. But then they must confront their own stubborn and deeply rooted biases when those social issues are suddenly part of their own family.

It’s remarkable, actually, that this film was even made at that time. It was released in the same year as the landmark Supreme Court ruling “Loving vs. Virginia,” a unanimous decision that overturned bans against “interracial marriage.” That was not terribly long ago—in 1967 I was six years old!—and prior to that ruling, it was illegal in sixteen states for a white person to marry a black person; you could go to prison for doing that.

These state statues were generally clustered together as “anti-miscegenation” laws (an arcane way to register one’s disgust at “mixing” otherwise pure races) and it’s important to note that these laws were not evenly enforced. It was considered much more scandalous for a Black man to marry a white woman than the other way around.

Why would that be? Back then (still today?), it was widely assumed that a husband exercises final authority over his wife, and it was culturally repugnant to suppose that a Black person could ever have that kind of authority over a white person.

These racially-gendered dynamics also help to explain why so many Black churches have been reluctant over the last few decades to embrace marriage equality for gay couples. That seems odd at first until one recalls the long history of using marriage as a tool for white supremacy, stretching all the way back to institutional slavery and into Jim Crow segregation.

Given that history, anything that even carries a hint of destabilizing the Black family is treated with suspicion by Black churches—and quite rightly so, and with that hint comes the poignant reminder of how inextricably interconnected race, gender, and sexuality are, and always have been.

When I first started delving into these forms of social analysis, I confess: I was impatient with them. It just seemed terribly convoluted, even unnecessarily complex—until I returned once again to the tools for biblical interpretation. Modern social dynamics are not any more complicated than the established rules for proper meal sharing in first-century Mediterranean societies, and indeed, those ancient patterns easily rival today’s expectations for dinner party etiquette in “polite society.”

It matters, in other words, when Christians gather to hear the wonderful story from Luke about the journey to Emmaus to recall that table fellowship was one of the ways to monitor and maintain social order in that first-century world—and Jesus was constantly disrupting that very order.

In that world, who is “allowed” to share food and fellowship at the same table was determined through a tightly orchestrated flowchart of cultural categories filtered through religious regulations and purity codes. Those determinations were rooted in biological family, of course, but much more: social and economic status, and also ethnicity and proper religious observance.

Traces of those many rules and regulations show up in the constant scandal Jesus caused by eating with prostitutes and tax collectors—and also the invitations he accepted from Pharisees and Sadducees—and also in the parables he told about wedding banquets and dinner parties, which included the anxiety about wearing the proper outfit and not messing up the seating arrangement at the head table!

So, guess who’s coming to dinner!

Someone who shows us a more excellent way of being human with each other, and of building thriving communities devoted to justice, and perhaps at the root all of that, of finding oneself loved fully, exactly as we are—no caveats, no conditions, no green card required, no proof of insurance necessary, no credit check, no references needed, no passport, no driver’s license, not even a baptismal certificate! you are embraced at the Table just as you are.

Guess who’s coming to dinner!

It’s a stranger, someone we don’t recognize, someone outside the standard social conventions and the rules of proper behavior; someone to break us free from whatever holds us back from abundant life—including our own resentments and insecurities.

The key to Luke’s story is hospitality—those disciples on the road to Emmaus decided to extend hospitality to a stranger, to invite him to dinner, urging him to spend the night with them at the inn. Hospitality breaks through the boundaries set by social norms, and that’s exactly when they recognize the risen Jesus: when he is at table and breaks bread with them.

While I often find myself distracted by the many tasks associated with genuine and effective hospitality, I need to remember always that hospitality in essence is a posture of love. Hospitality sometimes springs from love; sometimes hospitality creates new forms of love that weren’t there before; and sometimes hospitality renews a love that had grown old.

The God of love—the God who is love—welcomes each and all of us fully to the Table, so that we can in turn welcome others, without condition, in love and for love.

This is Peter’s point in the portion of his first letter assigned by the lectionary yesterday (1:17-23). Now that you have embraced the truth, he writes, the truth of God raising Jesus from the dead, be sure to live like it. You have been born again, so live like you mean it, he says, and practice mutual love—love each other, especially when it’s hard—love, love, love each other.

And lest that Petrine text sound dusty, Spencer Tracy’s character is basically channeling St. Peter in the final and impassioned monologue Tracy delivers at the end of that 1967 film.

As he reflects on having welcomed strangers into his home for dinner, the enduring love for his dear wife becomes even more vibrant (Hepburn has tears welling in her eyes), and the love for his precious daughter illumines everything, and he then declares that love is indeed stronger than any social bias.

Luke would heartily agree: Love put those disciples together on that road; and then love opened their hearts to hear the words of a stranger; and then love moved them to extend hospitality to that stranger, whose presence at the Table reveals once more that love itself is even stronger than death.

Luke’s story—and every queerly disorienting Gospel story about the risen Jesus—pushes me always to remember the very heart of Gospel proclamation: there is only love in the heart of God.

Declare and repeat, often; cross-stitch it, frame it, and post it above your computer if need be. It’s the truest thing in the Universe: There is only love in the heart of God; nothing else, absolutely nothing but love, and this love—poured out on the world in Beloved Jesus and the Abiding Spirit—this love inspires forgiveness, reconciliation, and the kind of healing that leads to new life.

And not even death can stop it.

Bodily Memory and Peculiar Hope

My beloved Australian shepherd dog Judah died suddenly one week ago today. Except for a short trip that I took not long after adopting him, he and I were together every single day for nine years; I honestly don’t know how to live without him.

I’ve been walking every day since then, along exactly the same routes Judah and I would walk every day. We walked at least three, sometimes four times a day. Judah had a map of downtown Saugatuck firmly in his head; he knew which shops and restaurants had treats for him. He was quite insistent about stopping at those places on our late afternoon walk.

So I’ve been walking those routes this week, stopping at each of those places, remembering so clearly his beautiful face and his determined gait. I’m doing this not just because the exercise is good for me (though it is). I’m walking those routes because memory is often quite physical and bodily.

Memories run deep in our bones muscles, they take up residence in our guts and hearts. That’s why grief can be such a bodily experience; it can physically hurt. I can still feel the touch of Judah’s forehead on my lips where I kissed him while he died; I can still smell his soft and earthy fur.

The Gospel writer Luke tells us about two disciples of Jesus walking along a road toward a village called Emmaus (24:13-35). Luke puts this village at seven miles from Jerusalem, so this is not a short stroll, especially through that hill country of Judea.

These two disciples, these dear friends of Jesus, are walking with heavy hearts. Jesus had been horribly killed just three days prior. They are in shock, disoriented, probably afraid.

How do you go on after heartbreak, especially after trauma and violence? What do you do when it seems as if nothing will be the same ever again? How can you just walk to the village inn, just like you used to, as if nothing had happened?

Grief poses questions like these, repeatedly and painfully—things are not the way they were, and they will not be that way again. Significant loss will always change one’s life; this might be one of the earliest lessons everyone learns about life itself.

Those disciples knew that; that’s why they are so dejected and dismayed. Luke knew that, too, which is why he has the risen Jesus join the disciples on the road, but as a stranger, not even recognizable by his closest friends.

Easter does not put things back the way they were.

Nothing about the resurrection stories in accounts of the Gospel turns back the clock to how things used to be or how we wish they had been; that’s nostalgia, not resurrection.

Easter instead puts us on a road toward the fresh and startling, toward the unrecognizably new and vibrant.

It is also the case that this “stranger” on the road seems to lecture these disciples about the importance of the past, using the scriptures and quoting the ancient prophets. Later on, Luke tells us, these disciples marveled at how their hearts were burning within them, set ablaze by the compelling interpretations of Scripture they were hearing along the road.

This is not, however, a mere backward glance. We modern Western people tend to think that way, as if ancient texts remain roped off in a faraway, dusty history. To the contrary, shared memory, our texts and traditions, should help us understand who we are right now and how we got here, and therefore how to travel forward.

The “scriptures,” as Luke calls them, are meant to be a living tradition, speaking directly to the present moment for the sake of traveling faithfully toward an unknown horizon. This is why, in both Jewish and Christian communities, interpretations of ancient texts are always evolving, always brought to bear in fresh ways on current questions.

After all, Luke unfolds this story on a road; the disciples don’t even stay put at the village inn, not even for the night. They were—“in that same hour,” Luke says—back on the road. Luke portrays Christian communities on the move—shaped by sacred traditions but not enthralled by monuments or tethered to mere precedent; traditions are sacred when they keep our hearts open to the God who “makes all things new.”

This Emmaus-road story keeps Christian faith rooted equally in memory and hope, and especially how these intertwine in complex and compelling ways.

Both individuals and communities can sometimes become stuck in the past, perhaps paralyzed by painful histories or wistful about a fabled golden age; we can also become so enamored with “the next best thing” and constantly chasing after shiny objects that we become adrift, with no sense of where we are and with no compass to guide us forward.

Early in the twentieth century, philosopher and theologian Josiah Royce suggested that healthy communities must hold both memory and hope together; this can set us on a path to heal our wounds, repair our divisions, and unite us with love toward what Royce eventually called Beloved Community.

This made a profound impact on Martin Luther King, Jr., as he studied Royce in his doctoral program. The image of Beloved Community inspired King to reject any form of segregation or separatism in the Civil Rights Movement; he urged us instead to learn how to live with a shared memory of racial violence while also holding in common the hope of a future flourishing where all, no exceptions, live in peace with justice.

“Beloved Community” was Luke’s vision as well, especially in the aftermath of state-sponsored terror, a brutal execution, and a fragmented, scattered community of disciples and friends—a dismembered community. In the midst of this ghastly grief, Luke re–members the community around a table and during a shared meal.

In this story, Luke gives us all the elements of what Christians now recognize as Eucharist: our shared memory of what happened to Jesus; our shared hope of new life; the bread blessed, broken, and shared.

Blessing the bread reminds us that all things come from God and return to God.

In breaking the bread we see our own need for mending and healing.

By sharing the bread we embody a hopeful vision of wholeness and communion.

This is not only a bodily memory from the distant past but also a peculiar hope now and for the future. And I suspect that’s why Luke has Jesus suddenly and queerly disappear from that shared meal.

As Beloved Jesus vanishes from that table in Emmaus, Luke invites us to find him at all the other tables we set with hospitality, and where we welcome the stranger, and encounter the healing presence of the risen Christ—not to put things back the way they were, but to keep our hearts open to a future we cannot yet imagine.

In the meantime, I will keep walking the routes I once shared with Judah—because I miss him terribly and cherish the memories of walking with him. I will give thanks on those walks and along that road believing that the future of the risen Christ is not only my future but Judah’s, too.

The Village People on Easter

I confess: I still enjoy dancing to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People, complete with all the goofy hand gestures that accompany each of those four letters. A dance floor filled with people, arms stretched above their heads to make a “Y” – it looks like a prayer meeting.

That song became something like a gay anthem way back in the disco days of the late 1970s. Earlier this year, some activists suggested including that song in the opening ceremonies of the winter Olympics in Sochi, to protest Russia’s stance toward LGBT people. But Victor Willis, the song writer, insisted that he really didn’t have gay men in mind at all when he wrote it.

Willis’ protests notwithstanding, The Village People have endured as gay icons, not least for their costumes. The biker, the sailor, the soldier, the cowboy, t village_people he American Indian, the construction worker, and the cop – these hunky cultural stereotypes fueled the erotic fantasies of many gay men (including me). This might make The Village People rather gay, certainly kitschy, but not terribly queer.

Something far queerer happens toward the end of Luke’s gospel account, a story that features another kind of village that many Christians will hear about this weekend, as we always do on the third Sunday of Easter.

An alluring stranger joins two disciples of Jesus traveling along a road toward a village called Emmaus. When they arrive, they invite this stranger to join them at the village inn. There, sitting at table, the stranger breaks bread. In that moment the disciples finally recognize the stranger as the risen Jesus; in that same moment, he disappears (Luke 24:31).

But wait! What happened to the joyful reunion part? If not a Hollywood-style orchestral soundtrack why not at least a hug? Or as Dorothy put it in the Wizard of Oz, “My! People come and go so quickly here.”

Luke’s village people underscore the peculiar character of Christian faith and indeed its queerness. “Queer” not so much for its LGBT sensibilities but for its refusal to give what so many of us want: a clearly defined God we can grasp and control.

Luke set the stage for that moment several chapters earlier, when Jesus appeared in glory on a mountain. There, Peter did what I would have done and excitedly proposed to build a booth, a place to capture and contain the glory (Luke 9:33). But Jesus refused to be boxed in and captured, just as he did in a village called Emmaus.

First-century Emmaus and twentieth-century Village People – together they can remind us about the risks and dangers in trying to categorize, classify, and capture both God and humans. On the one hand, we risk living with little more than an idol, and on the other, all the dangerous cultural divisions drawn by race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender of the kind NBA Clippers owner Donald Sterling just recently displayed.

Black men play basketball. Asian women are bad drivers. Gay men lust after American Indians, especially if they just happen to be construction workers. Familiar stereotypes are easily dismissed but they linger, fortifying the categorical assumptions most of us adopt nearly every day.

The familiar made strange.
The reliable unraveled.
The status quo ecstatically undone.

These are the peculiar hallmarks of Christian faith and they invite us into queer moments of encounter. In the midst of what we think we already know – racial profiles, sketchy neighborhoods, exotic cultures, the familiar stench of decay and death – right there strange new life awaits. Queerly enough, according to Luke, hospitality is the best way to see it.

For Luke, it takes a village to raise the ensign of Easter over the familiar categories of our despair. Even The Village People can help when we see their campy costumes as parodies and we dance not with categories but with people, our arms raised in the shape of a “Y” – or even better, as a “V”.

God’s victory over death appears when we break bread with strangers, and even more in the courage to dance with them.