April 10, 2005 - Third Sunday of Easter - Mother Stephanie Parker

FIRST READING: Acts 116: 1-3, 10-14
PSALM: 116: 1-3, 10-14
SECOND READING: 1 Peter 1: 17-23
GOSPEL: Luke 24: 13-35

"When He was at table with them, He took bread, blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him, and He vanished from their sight. They said to each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while He was talking to us on the road and while He was opening the Scriptures to us?' Then they told what had happened on the road and how He had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread."

How He had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Now, I think what Luke is desperately trying to teach us today and what Jesus is very clearly teaching those early disciples is that, in order to claim our place at the table, we must first claim our place in the story. And, in order to claim our place in the story, what must we first do?

Know the story! Excellent! See, usually I make Andrew be quiet, because he knows the answers, but, today, I am glad he was there for me!

First, we must know the story. Now, some of you journeyed this very journey with us through the Lenten Program. We did, Be Known to us in the Breaking of the Bread, and we had this wonderful journey. This particular passage framed that journey for us. How is Christ made known to us in the breaking of the bread, the very bread that we break every single Sunday in celebration of this great event, the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ on Easter? We celebrate it. So, what Luke's incredible telling of this journey on this road to Emmaus tells us is that it is key and vital, if our hearts are going to come alive and burn within us as we approach this table, that we must first know the story. It is indeed the story and knowing our place in the story that sets us on fire and calls us back to this table.

Now, one of the stories I shared to illustrate this point during the Lenten Program, I was really hesitant to use again today, because people had heard it, but I couldn't get away from it. It is the one thing that I could think of out of my own experience that so clearly illustrated this, and this was the story that I had written some time after my mother's death when I had gone to visit one of her older sisters and heard more of my mother's story than ever I had heard before. I was compelled, particularly now since my mother had gone on to her glory, to record and hold onto whatever I could of that time in her life, and so I came home from that time and wrote a story that I entitled, "Grandmother's Feast". The story I told in that was a story of truth. I might not have gotten every detail right, but I recorded very faithfully what was told to me by my aunt and what I had learned from my grandmother, herself, and what I had heard from other members of this family in all of those years growing up.

Now, one thing about my grandmother that everybody knew and that I knew from the point that I actually came onto the earth and was old enough to know such things is that every single Sunday, without fail, she set an incredible feast on her table.

I mean, it was one of those good old home-cookin', mountain orchard feasts - and it was Sunday dinner - it is what we call lunch, but it was Sunday dinner. And Ma-Ma Keener's Sunday dinner was a thing to behold. It was a huge, one of those old fashioned big, huge tables with all the leaves added in, and, on this table, she would cook, with her very two hands - we didn't bring anything; it wasn't like a covered dish; she wouldn't have it! - she would have chicken; she would have chicken and dumplings; she would have ham; she would have fried okra; she would have pole beans; she would have biscuits; she would have cornbread; she would have white beans; she would have . . . . I mean, everything was repeated; everything was resplendent; everything, almost, was even duplicated, and I actually have an actual snapshot of her sitting behind this table with her little broach and her little apron on, after she had come from church, still setting this incredible table. Now, I want to tell you that every, single Sunday, even before and after my family did their time in Europe, every single Sunday, we knew where we would be at dinnertime - Southern dinnertime, which is lunch - we would be at my grandmother's table. And not only us, but the entire huge extended family of my grandmother's children and grandchildren would be there, and we came every Sunday, without fail, not because she called us up every Saturday night and said, "Are you going to be there?", and not because she called us sometimes on Friday and said, "I feel like cookin' dinner on Sunday; will you come?" She set that table every Sunday, and we came from near and far - we would drive up from Atlanta to those mountains of North Georgia - and we came from near and far because her love for us was so strong and so deep that not to come would have been like rejecting her very self and everything that she was. And we came, not because we felt obligated to this old woman, that she would give us a jaw-beatin', as my mother used to say, if we didn't come. No, we came because her love for us was strong, and our love for her, in return, was so strong that we desired nothing more than to go and to be there with her at that feast.

Now, it became very commonplace when I would have friends sleep over on Saturday night that, typically, they would get permission to go to the country to have this Sunday dinner with me, and anybody who walked into that table, including myself, who did not know my grandmother's story could see the feast that was laid there and could know that this was going to be a wonderful event and something to be a part of. But to know, to really know what was happening at that table on Sundays, you had to know my grandmother's story. And, if you knew that story, if your eyes became opened in that way, you would know that what was happening there on that Sunday was even far more than the wonderful event it seemed to be.

Now, my grandmother married when she was 12 years old. She married an older man, all of 18 or 19 years old, I believe, when they got married. And she had known nothing but emotional and financial scarcity and poverty for all of those very brief, but I think for her, very long 12 years in many ways. Now, when she married this man who was, himself, dirt poor, I think they were very deeply in love, and, from all the stories that I have heard, they shared a wonderful several years of marriage. And if the progeny was anything to judge by, it was a very wonderful marriage, indeed, because, at the time of my grandfather's death from pneumonia about 13 years after they wed, my grandmother had nine children and one on the way. Nine children and one on the way, and, again, from everything I hear, they had been incredibly happy.

Now, here she was, barely a woman not even yet really 30 years old, in the heart of what? Can you imagine the time period? In the heart of the depression. Here was a young woman living in the hills of Georgia, the wife, and now the widow of a dirt farmer, who didn't even own his own dirt, who was left with all of these children and with one on the way, in the heart of the depression. Now, time after time, the welfare workers of the day came and would say to her, "Mrs. Gaiten, you have to give up some of these children. There are plenty of people in town (because town was some ways away) - there are plenty people in town who can take your children and raise them up for you. You don't have to put yourself through this. Let's just take some of those children and farm them out to other families in town" And Ada absolutely refused to do so. For her, I think that would have been a death of another kind, so, through the midst of the depression, through all that that meant - it meant her cleaning houses for other people from sun-up to sun-down; it meant that that baby that she carried in her womb at my grandfather's death was born, and I kid you not (some of these things pass into legend, and maybe this is how they start), that baby was born caught in an apron, standing up, as she cleaned the fireplace in someone else's home. That is how that final baby came to be born. And also, in addition to cleaning the houses, she would walk every two weeks a little over five miles into town to get a sack of government flour that was issued to the people back then. And, for two weeks, she would make what my Aunt Sarah told me was water gravy and biscuits, and they would eat nothing but water gravy and biscuits, along with maybe the few vegetables she would get from other people as a result of cleaning their houses for those two weeks. And that is the kind of subsistence life that she lived, but, through that entire time period, until she remarried again, not until that youngest boy, who was in the womb when my grandfather died - she did not remarry until he was almost nine years old - so all of that entire time, she held this little family together with her two hands that were beaten; they were scarred; they were bloody often, from doing the work she needed to do to keep this little family together.

But now, time goes on, and in God's great universe, wonderful things can happen, so, as her children grew up, and the depression ended, the poverty that had been such a fact of their life started to recede into the past, and my grandmother is a good example of that, or my mother. I never knew any of this poverty even existed in our family until I heard the story, and then I knew my mother better in that story. But, out of this whole depression, as everything started receding away, and as her children had their children, Ma-Ma Keener started setting this table - this table that knew not one ounce of scarcity. This table was full of all the resplendent life and redemption and resurrection that life had promised, and so, every Sunday, as we came to that table, we began to know what set that table - not just this woman who wanted her family about her, but this woman whose great desire was to share the incredible abundance of God's creation with those out of a poverty that many of us, as her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, cannot even imagine. So then, after I knew the story, and after anyone who came to those feasts knew the story, they would walk in and see so much more than just this big, beautiful table spread before them. They would see the sacrifice, and they would see the love that set that table.

This is what Luke tells us in his story today, that Jesus did for us. When He opened the Scriptures to them, and when He told the story of His life - and in telling the story of His life and what it meant to Him to come to this moment in Jerusalem where His two hands, bloodied and raw, were nailed to the cross so that we would have freedom unheard of and untold - He invites us in today, as does Luke, to know the story and to read the Scripture - not just to come on Sunday and hear it sort of said at a far-off distance, but to know it, to hear it, to let it set you on fire for what it means to be invited to this table every single Sunday and what exactly it is we celebrate.

We don't just celebrate the abundance, do we? We celebrate the abundance rescued and wrested and taken and stolen from the jaws of oppression and defeat. That is what we celebrate. That's who we are as children of God. We are people who celebrate and make holy every single Sunday and every time we break bread together, and it is not only in coming and breaking the bread. How did I know the story of my grandmother? It was told to me. So we share the story. We share our stories and how we came to be a part of it, and it makes us more whole; and we share it with our loved ones, with our children as they come up, and with our children's children.

I remember that I had some company last week, and, in one phone conversation with Andrew, I said, "Andrew, I have bought enough food to feed an army. You would think I was having 15 people instead of 2." And he sort of laughed and said, "Why do you think that is?" I said, "Well, maybe it's a southern thing." But then, today, this morning, when I was reflecting on this, I realized what that was. That was a Ma-Ma Keener thing! It hit me like a shot out of the dark.

So, who she was becomes part of who I am as I welcome people to my home and to my table. So it is with us as Christians, O.K.? Who Jesus was as our brother and who God is as our father, mother, creator, all of those things influences who we are and how we invite others to this table. So, the world is ours. The story is ours. Claim your place in the story, my friends. Tell the story, and then come with singing hearts and rejoicing voices and celebrate at this table.

AMEN