Three Chairs for Supper
I Corinthians 11: 17-26

A World Communion Sunday Meditation by
The Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

During my years of seminary and graduate study at Boston University, I took the train to Concord, Massachusetts every winter, spring, summer and fall and from there I walked the mile and a half to Walden Pond. Every season this glacial pond and the woods surrounding it would be different.  In summer, there was a raucous swimming dock, in Fall an explosion of crisp colors, the gray white winters of solid ice and solitude, and in spring wildflowers and new life.

Every season I would be different, too, with changes in life and love, vocation and studies.

One year, I even collected twigs from Walden Pond, and created macramé wall hangings that I gave as Christmas gifts along with a copy of Henry David Thoreau's book, Walden, or Life in the Woods. (Even in the 1970s these gifts were...not well received!)

Reading Walden was an awakening for me and the act of making seasonal visits to Walden Pond was a ritual of intention and reflection.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau built a hut for $28.12 on a rise just above Walden Pond.  He lived there for two years, two months, and two days as an experiment in simple living and spiritual quest in nature. He wrote,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Thoreau certainly did not live in isolation or deprivation. The Pond was just two miles from his family home, he had many visitors, walked to town, and even hosted an anti-slavery fair while living in the hut. It was a season of intention and reflection.  In Walden Thoreau wrote on human development through the changing seasons. He also spent a night in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War.

Thoreau wrote, "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

In Thoreau's hut there was: a bed, a table, a small desk, and... three chairs. In his words, the three chairs were:  "One for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society."  

We have three chairs around Christ's table this World Communion Sunday: One chair is for solitude: self-examination, personal experience of remembrance, reflection and receiving, taking into our very bodies and being the mystery of the Source of life and new life.  Each one of us has a place at the table.

  
Two chairs are for friendship:  gathered and nourished and sent out walking, working, praying, riding together as the Body of Christ.
Together we have a place at the table.

Three chairs are for society:  for God so loved the world and calls us to bless, break, and offer our gifts and our lives for the sake of the world.  The whole world has a place at this table.

One chair is simple...maybe two... but with three chairs, things get complicated.  Places in the heart and at the table begin to require arrangements, assignments, and they challenge us. Seasons change and are experienced differently in different parts of the world.  People from lands where there are no chairs, no tables, no food to feed the hungry fill the third chair. People from countries with whom we are at war fill the third chair.  Children denied health care fill the third chair.  We do not get to choose who fills the third chair.  

Our Scripture is titled in the New Revised Standard Version "The Institution of the Lord's Supper:" On the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

Paul clarified the practice of the Lord's Supper because people gathered in Christ's name without caring for those who were hungry.  People shared meals without remembering Christ was the host.  People had separate tables, ate and drank to excess before others were fed. People claimed the radically inclusive table fellowship of Jesus but practiced without self-examination, without discerning Christ in neighbors, in sojourners, in community.  Divisions, factions, were not the problem - they were the lively reality of genuinely diverse community.  The problem was how they ordered and practiced their common life in the name of Jesus.

Paul says, "Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better, but for the worse... When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord's Supper."

Three chairs for this meal ... and more chairs, more people than we can imagine.

One of the three chairs around the Communion table this morning is a camel saddle that Chris Baetge's family brought from their years in Turkey,  the second chair, the yellow chair, is from a kindergarten Sunday School class. Epworth children have filled this chair for many decades.  The third is a chair and stepping stool, a means of moving beyond what we can reach on our own.

  
Empty chairs have power... longing remembrance and expectation. Invitation.Three chairs for supper invite us to intention and reflection on our practices of solitude, friendship and community.

Today millions of brothers and sisters around the world and in many traditions, share a common meal at Christ's table for the sake of the world.
Thanks be to God.