Diarmuid O’Murchu borrows the Jesus biblical scholar John Domenic Crossan’s translation of Jesus Aramaic word, malkuta meaning kingdom as “a companionship of empowerment.” It was empowerment through mutuality and living in the presence of an unconditionally loving and forgiving God. Jesus empowered people through healing, including, forgiving, eating with them, and imagining with them a world living with God. He proclaimed that this was God’s dream for us. We often translate in our worship as ‘kindom” to capture the flavor of a movement of family of faith choice in Jesus’ use of kingdom.
The issue that Jesus confronted was his own experience of God whose love was unconditional and radically inclusive while his religion maintained a system of exclusions. This still is our problem today: a radically inclusive and loving God and an exclusive religions that try to limit access to God. We seem through history to deal with human religious leaders and groups who fall into the temptation to try to control access to God’s grace by making it exclusive.
There is a raging cultural war in Christianity not just about same-sex marriage or women’s right of reproductive choice. It crosses so many other issues social issues, including the homeless, climate change, race, undocumented immigration, peace, economic justice, AIDS, health care, and more. It lacks a compassionate heart for the stranger or for people suffering who are different from themselves. This type of exclusivist Christianity is very disturbing, for it seems to lack the passion and heart of Jesus’ message of a companionship of empowerment. It envisions an exclusive God and narrowly focused practice of Christianity that rules out so many. It seems heartless to me and lacking Christ. It is obsessed with a sin management strategy that pushes drives so many people away from God just as Jesus experienced in his ministry. It does not care if it excludes anyone who differs in the practice of their sin management Christianity.
I have heard so often from exclusivist Christians, “Have you been saved?” Their world is exclusively divided into saved and damned. But more importantly, such a statement plays on emotional insecurity of people. Such Christians play God, making a judgment who is saved and who is not. If there is ever a sin against the Holy Spirit, it is to use and make God wrathful and not loving, inclusive, unconditional in offering a share in the divine life.
The danger, confronting churches through history, is the distortion of the gospel of Jesus. Wendy Farley says it very well in her book, Gathering Those Driven Away,
Christianity moves through history carried by the impulses of domination an exclusion. It despises uppity women, no-hellers, contemplatives, queers, and thinks even less of those people outside Christianity altogether. But without their witness to the nearness and tender mercies of Emmanuel, the memory of Christ is impossibly distorted.
I grew up Catholic, a church driven and obsessed with sin management, guilt, and shame. It was hard to get to the core of the gospel as grace and not as judgment, punishment, and penance for sin. When I look back at Christian history, it makes me cringe in horror how many people have been harmed, driven away, excluded, or even killed in the name of Christ. They acted in the name of an exclusive god.
In his message of about an inclusive and loving Abba God, Jesus attempted to shift his people and religious tradition from religious exclusivity to religious inclusivity: “No one is out, everyone is in.” Those who have only known exclusion, the poor, the marginalized, the despised, and the disenfranchised. Jesus was not obsessed with sin management; he preached a gospel of grace, forgiveness, compassion, and love.
It is the upside down empowered companionship–transgressing all boundaries and tearing down walls of religious exclusion and ethnic and gender prejudice. I want to call Jesus’ life and ministry as “grace gone wild.” He preached a wild grace that could not be domesticated, controlled by anyone or any institution. It was totally under the inspiration and outside guidance of the Holy Spirit. He gathered back those people driven away and excluded from religion.
Companionship denotes community, mutuality, co-creating together and empowering one another to form a loving and hospitable community where everyone has a place at table. The meals, the healings, and parables of Jesus imagined a freedom, equality, and compassionate care. Jesus awakened the imagination of his disciples and audiences through stories and symbolic gestures—to empower the new vision of God. His parables are subversive stories to stimulate our imaginations to envision a world where we all are living with God in our midst.
Today’s gospel, Jesus flees from the crowds after the feeding by boat since they wanted to make him king. But there is no way to escape them. Thus, he instructs them in the beginning of the Bread of Life midrash or sermon. Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never hunger and whoever places his faith in me will never thirst.”
There is no room for exclusivity in his teachings and ministry, and he rejects the attempt to make him king. Jesus rejected power over people as kings or priests exercised. Power was shared, for he empowered them to act on God’s dream of inclusive love and understand that the greatest would be a slave to all.
Central to companionship of empowerment is sharing food. Jesus shared food with a wide range of people at the table or in field feeding thousands; these were meals of radical inclusiveness, marking not merely a revolutionary concept with far-reaching implications but deep expression of companionship of empowerment. Companionship is made possible when people gather around the sharing of food. Friendships are formed and deepened, love and care are reinforced. We help and serve one another in love and because of love.
Celebrating a meal of God’s grace of forgiveness and unconditional love provided occasions for healing empowerment to take place. People began to dream of a new future with God. They did not dwell on repentance, guilt, and shame.
For Jesus, the open table is a symbol of communal sharing in which nobody is ever hungry. The open table was a place of God’s wild grace operated. For Jesus, there seems to be no doubt the table always had to be open. Nobody was to be excluded. From highways and the byways all are brought into the banquet—prostitutes, sinners, tax-collectors, the outcasts and the marginalized of every type.
Anne Primavesi has noted for many churches today: “The table companionship of Jesus has lost its true bite and scandal. The salt has lost its taste.” There are so many conditions placed around the communion table: the correct words and gestures by an ordained clergy, open to baptized members of that church or denomination, correct beliefs and doctrines, correct state of purity to receive the bread of life and drink the from the cup of life. When you take mirror to other church practices of exclusion around the communion table, you upset and offend Christians. They give back justifications for their actions, just as the Pharisees justified why only the pure could sit at their tables or the priests justified who could be excluded from the Temple. Whatever justifications are used, it is still excluded. There is a wonderful line from the prophet Micah 4:6: “Beloved, I will assemble the lame and those who have been driven away.” No question the Pharisees and holiness groups in Jesus’ era would exclude the lame from their gatherings. But God goes on to say, “I will assemble those who been driven away.”
How many people have driven away from churches and from God’s communion table? Hundreds of million! Because they are insubordinate women, a different race or ethnicity, LGBT, homeless, have a fetish lifestyle, a different religion, fight against climate change and find God expressed in nature, or some other difference. Jesus’ unconditional invitation to the open table is lost within such church eucharists. Christians from another denomination or non-Christians are not welcomed at the table. The inclusive God’s table has become exclusive. The invitation of grace of the open table, subversive and radically inclusive, is no longer accessible to everyone. Insiders are welcomed, outsiders are excluded from the inclusive God.
Radical inclusion means God’s wild grace! Many clergy from exclusivist denominations or churches will give you theological excuses for their practice of limiting access. You have to be baptized first before you come to the table. Or you belong to another church. Or you don’t believe the doctrine we believe.
The only possible reason for exclusion from the communion table is when someone disrupts the safety of the sanctuary. Over the nearly eleven years as pastor, I can recall a few such individuals at this church who threatened the safety of the sanctuary or assaulted someone at service, were drunk or high, or inappropriately touched someone. I have spoken to such individuals that such behaviors violated the hospitality of the sanctuary and not acceptable. In a couple of extreme occasions, we have to ask someone to leave. Or even threaten to get a restaining order on attendee who assaulted myself and JJ during the service.
Hospitality is another form of inclusivity, but as family members we welcome folks to the dinner table of God. When you enter a home, you are welcomed to share a meal. That was my Greek grandmother’s notion of hospitality who welcomed anyone coming to her home.
Do we invite people to service and then tell them that they are not welcomed at the dinner table? As a newly ordained Catholic priest, I celebrated the eucharist at my family’s home. Do I follow Catholic legal exclusion of my Greek Orthodox grandmother from communion because she is not Catholic? Do I exclude my niece from communion because she had not made her first communion from communion? Both actions would been harmful to my family.
I invited a Hindu classmate to dinner, and she came for mass before dinner. She came to the table for communion, and I did not turn her away. Or a Japanese Buddhist friend who I also welcomed at the table for communion? He was so touched that he was baptized and became a Catholic several months later. Hospitality touches people who then decide they want to be part of God’s family because of their extravagant welcome and inclusion. I like the UCC welcome:
No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here. We believe in extravagant welcome. This is why we insist that God’s communion table is open, not closed, and God’s gift and claim in baptism are irrevocable. We advocate justice for all.
To the horror of Jewish exclusivists and Christian exclusivists, Jesus sat down, indiscriminately eating and drinking with suspect men and women who were sinful and impure. He told them that they were “beloved children of God,” already forgiven before they even asked God. He was accused of being drunkard and sinner because he associated with sinners. He did not care about sin management but making God’s grace thoroughly accessible and inclusive to all. He proclaimed a universal salvation based on a divine mercy and love like the father of the prodigal son who ran out to greet his son, hug and kiss him. God’s extravagant love exceeded the example of the father in the parable.
Just as the religious exclusivists—the fundamentalists, the Pharisees, scribes, and Temple clergy—were upset and brought charges against him, so today when we proclaim the inclusive grace and love of God many churches become upset. They have invested too much time and effort in their sin management strategies to control the faithful and become wealthy. They control access to God’s table, and I believe in my heart that is not what Jesus did during his ministry. He did not exclude Judas from the table at the last supper, nor Peter who foretold of his denials, or disciples who suspected would flee at the first sign of danger.
Jesus died because of his meals symbolized that there are no more outsiders! He died because of the people he shared an open table with. Everyone is in—irrespective of religion or any condition. Radical inclusiveness is a core value of empowered companionship with God and with one another. It is accomplished not me but by a community who is welcoming, caring, and inviting.
Christians for centuries have maintained that Jesus died for our sins. There is truth that creedal statement. He died because of human sinfulness. Human sinfulness—exclusive religion and ruthless political power—arrested, tortured, humiliated, and crucified Jesus. But Jesus died for God’s wild grace of radical inclusive love! That is why I understand the mission of our church and the Christian church as “gathering in those who have been driven away.”