Scripture: Hebrews 11:39—12:2
In days gone by, people used to buy their seats in church, or at least rent them. I don’t know, maybe there are a few places that still have this practice; I doubt it. But in the old days, the bad old days, the people of means in a congregation would pay a certain amount of money in order to have their name placed on a pew and have it reserved for them on a Sunday morning.
This had the practical effect of raising some money for the church. It also had the practical effect of allowing that family to arrive to church at the last minute knowing that their seats would be waiting for them and they wouldn’t have to worry about having to sit on some undignified bench or being relegated to some far corner of the sanctuary unsuitable for people of their station, where the heat from the pot-bellied stove didn’t quite make it. So this hypothetical prominent wealthy family, let’s say the well-known Wheeler family of Virginia, would arrive and be ushered prominently to their prominent seats in the front-center part of the church. This was the Wheeler pew. They paid for it. If the Wheelers weren’t there, no one else sat in it. The down side was that if the Wheelers weren’t there, it was quite apparent to all. The Wheelers couldn’t be quietly absent one Sunday. Then again, they probably didn’t mind. They didn’t have to account to anyone for their whereabouts, and their absence would just serve to remind everyone of how important they were. They were probably not there because of the important business they had to attend to, and besides then everyone could say: I wonder where the Wheelers are this morning.
Thankfully churches gradually did away with this practice, I hope for the obvious reason that differences of wealth and power and privilege which prevail outside the church should not prevail inside the church. However, the last church I served also had family pews. People didn’t pay for them, but they were quite clearly pews that belonged to a particular family. A number had been sitting in exactly the same pew for the forty years in which the church building had been in existence. Some had no doubt occupied the equivalent pew in the old church building since before they were old enough to sit, having been baptized in the church and held in their mother’s arms through church services. If, on occasion, a visitor would come and unsuspectingly sit in someone’s pew, when that person arrived he might, not so much stare at them as though they had no right to be there, but maybe give a sideways glance as though to say: Hmh! Someone has the nerve to sit in my seat.
So anyway when someone was not there, it was not just that a pew was empty—lots of pews were empty—but a specific person was missing from a specific place. And when someone died, his or her absence would be silently felt, not necessarily spoken of or even quite consciously acknowledged, but silently felt. A certain person’s pew is now empty. There’s an empty place in the community.
Of course Sojourners is a different story. There are no pews here to buy or rent. We’re not old enough and haven’t stayed in one place long enough to develop firm seating habits. Some of us may have a certain part of the room we gravitate to on Sunday morning, but we’re pretty flexible and non-possessive group of people, and we’re a pretty changeable community with people moving in and out pretty freely and when someone leaves, their seat gets quickly filled by someone else. Which is as it should be. But which is also as it should not be.
Ava and I were talking—Ava being for this week not only my life partner but also my worship planning partner—we were talking about what the theme might be for this service and somehow our conversation led us to talking about the symbolism of communion as filling the empty places within us, and then we started to talk about those empty places themselves, all the different kinds of empty places that we may have within us or among us. This was last Sunday night, so some of this may have been inspired by our having said good-bye to Konrad and Georgia just that morning, but it came from other places too. There are empty places all around us and within us. We don’t have to look too far. We just have to not close our eyes. As Ava put it, there are holes in everyone’s life. And what we need not to do is to try to cover those holes over as best we can or as quickly as we can. We decided to visualize this by setting empty chairs around the communion table this morning. For you, for me, for this community, there are empty places that are very much a part of us, places we need to guard and even embrace.
Some time ago, when Timothy McVeigh was being executed, I heard a radio commentary that struck me and that I still remember. It was responding to a statement by one of the family members of a person who had been killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. The original statement had expressed satisfaction that the execution was taking place, saying this would provide closure for their family. The commentary in response, also I believe by someone who had lost a family member, said basically that closure was not a good word, not a good idea, that whatever reasons there might be to execute Timothy McVeigh, closure was not one of them. He said that there are some losses we human beings experience that are not consolable, not anyway in the sense of closure, as though the loss of a beloved someone could just be wiped out, covered over without a trace, as though disappearing in quicksand. There are some important ways in our lives, he said, (paraphrasing William Faulkner) in which the past is never dead and in fact is not even past. Nor do we want it to be. Those empty places become a living part of who we are. And not either just some private pain that we are to bravely bear. They become part of what we are able to offer to offer to one another. The truth is, the paradoxical truth is that the more we incorporate those empty places into ourselves, the fuller we become.
So these empty chairs around the communion table before us today represent for me people who are missing from our common life, people who have been part of Sojourners who have made this community what it is, been deeply committed to what Sojourners aspires to be, or perhaps just needed to be here for a while. The empty chairs are for people no longer here, who are not known to everyone now present but the empty chairs say that this is a community, and my definition of a community today is a place where people will be missed. It is not a collection of interchangeable individuals who come and go, filling up the empty places and taking each other’s places. So these chairs are for Georgia and Konrad and Roger and Barry and Tricia and Marie and many others, people who have passed through here and had to move on.
These chairs are also, for me, empty because they are waiting for those who have not yet arrived. We don’t know who they are yet, and we don’t quite know in what ways this will be true, but we will not be the community we are to become, we will not be ourselves, until these people have arrived. The community that gathers around the communion table today is not just we who are physically present. We are surrounded, as the Hebrews scripture aptly says, by a great cloud of witnesses, people come and gone, people not yet arrived. Because we know there are those empty spaces, the room is fuller than it appears this morning.
That cloud of witnesses also includes people who inhabit the empty spaces each of us have within us, people part of this community because of their ties to us, because when we come together here we bring the people we are missing with us. Not only people who have chosen to join in the life of this community or who one day will join in the life of this community, but people who have been joined to us individually—they too gather around this table because you and I carry them here, in our prayers, in our bodies.
And then there are other people missing from this table. Because of course this table doesn’t belong to Sojourners and it doesn’t represent just this community. This table is God’s table, and one of the things that means for me is that it is a banquet table for all God’s people. It’s a vision of God’s realm, of the larger human community we are meant to be.
And so these empty chairs are for Moslems and Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and people of all other religions who we are meant to sit beside around this table. It is not simply, it is not at all that we are meant to welcome others to our table, because it is not our table at all. It is God’s table and we are meant to gather around that table not with some as hosts and some as guests, but side by side with all as guests at the table of God. Those empty chairs represent these people too who are missing at the table, and in a much larger sense than I was speaking before, but in just as true a sense, we cannot be the community we are meant to be, we will not be ourselves, without these people being there.
And not just the people of other religious traditions either. I think of empty places and I think of the empty places in my own faith, the holes in my believing, the parts of my spirit that I know are empty and need to be filled in. Those empty places in my fabric of faith connect me with people who do not consider themselves believers but who may have holes in their fabric of non-faith, places within themselves that need to be filled in some measure of hope or nourishment, some food of belief or faith, no matter how unconventional. We all have holes in our faith or un-faith, and I see this table as meant for believers of every stripe and for people who are not sure that they are any kind of believer, or who are pretty sure they aren’t. There are chairs around God’s banquet table for people who see themselves as non-believers, and we will not be ourselves until we and they are sitting side by side.
These empty chairs have still other meanings to me today. They represent chairs not sat in by people of color in our society at lunch counters and school rooms, in movie theaters and board rooms, in the pews of churches and the halls of Congress. They represent the empty places in our history books that ought to be telling hard but healing stories, hard but healing truths about our history. Maybe I am led to bring that up because it’s the first Sunday of black history month. I hope we can learn to feel that emptiness and to speak of it every other Sunday…and Monday and Tuesday…of the year. These empty chairs mean for me also the place at the table that ought to be there, for people of color and for women and for gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, and again we will not be ourselves until we are sitting side by side not only around God’s table but around all the worldly tables we need to share.
We are incomplete—incomplete as a community, incomplete as individuals. That is the way we come to God’s table, the only way we are able to come. We have lived enough to have known loss. We carry those losses with us in our bodies, the ache of people we miss. We also carry with us the ache of yearning for a day when all will have a place at the table. We do not come to God’s table whole. The bread on the table does not remain a whole loaf. It is to be broken in order to be shared. We are broken…in order to be shared. In the form of a whole loaf, the bread is a sterile symbol. How much richer it becomes when it is broken and shared. How much richer we become when we confess the empty places, the broken places in ourselves and offer them to each other in love. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 3, 2002