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Breaking Bread With Heretics: The Table of God’s Hospitality

I live just down the street from a very conservative Southern Baptist seminary.

I often sit at the nearby coffee shop and just observe people, listening as the conversations waft in and out of earshot. (Okay, so technically it’s eavesdropping but I’m currently repenting of it.)

Today as I walked up the sidewalk I could hear a man probably fifteen to twenty years younger than me at an outdoor table, lecturing two other people about God and heresy and “Truth”.

I sat and sort of marveled at him. He was so confident in his youth; so sure of himself, so authoritative, so ready with answers, his theology so fixed and unwavering.

(He reminded me a lot of someone.)

I remember that place well. Sometimes I really miss it.

Life was so much easier then, yet it’s a place I’m glad I no longer live.

I feel more vulnerable here. The lack of certainty is humbling, the grayness making me softer.

My questions and doubts have expanded the table of my hospitality and helped me realize that every person I encounter is someone I can learn something from.

I can be a student of everyone. I should be. They all reflect Divinity. Each is a teacher.

I also remember when I was in the place this man is, what I thought about people like me now; how superior I felt, how sad I was for me.

I shouldn’t have been, but my faith story bred the subtle cocktail of pity and disdain that I labeled Love.

Back then I had people like me figured out:

I was lost and needed direction.
I was blind and needed revelation.
I was broken and needed fixing.
I needed to be sure of what he was sure of.

As I listened to this man I wondered about him; what the next fifteen to twenty years holds for him, what he might learn, how his faith might change, how he might feel as he listens in on a conversation like the one he’s having right now.

I wondered too, where the road of my faith will take me should I be blessed with another twenty years here, and how I’ll feel about the me writing this.

If I see this man again here I think I’ll invite him to sit down and share his story with me, see if he’d like to hear mine—see is if he’s willing to break bread with a heretic and sinner like me.

Jesus was, so I’m hopeful.

I’m hopeful for him, hopeful for me; for both of us as we walk into who we will be, knowing that there will be a chair still open at the place where Love waits to meet us.

Most of all I’m grateful that the table of God’s hospitality of Grace is big enough for me today, for the me I used to be, and for the me I am becoming.

 

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