October 5, 2025 - World Communion Sunday: Table Dimensions

October 5, 2025  World Communion Sunday
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Acts 10:1-22, 25-28, 44-48
“Table Dimensions”
Douglas T. King

My friend, Chandler Stokes, once shared this story with me of his childhood Thanksgivings.  It speaks eloquently to Peter’s vision and to the nature of World Communion Sunday.  

He writes, “Rhode Island is the smallest state in the Union.  It seems especially important to note its size because of its pinched little place on the Eastern Seaboard
seems in tune with the sense I have of my own pinched little heart when I lived there—about ten years after the Big War.  When we lived in that negligible state, my father worked for Honeywell.  He did a fair amount of international travel for his work—Japan and Germany mostly.  What that meant for me was two things-one great and one abysmal.

“The great thing was that my father brought home stuff.  Knickknacks-little Japanese samurai helmets, a German beer stein.  Once he brought me a transistor radio that was about the size of a pocket Bible with an earpiece.  It was, for its time (the fifties), really small.  That radio got me into so much trouble, hiding it and listening to it at all sorts of inappropriate times.  God, I loved that little radio, and the trouble it got me into was a bonus.

“Now, the horrible thing was that my father brought home guests.  Foreign guests, who both looked funny and were incomprehensible.  German and Japanese engineers-
pocket protector, black rimmed, social maladroit engineers, just like my father-these guys were weird without needing to be foreign.  And he would bring them home for dinner.  
He would bring them home for Thanksgiving dinner.  

“I only had one favorite holiday as a kid-Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving was uncomplicated by moral imperatives that made me feel guilty for wanting and getting stuff, like Christmas did.  Easter was too much church-and I really wasn’t enough into candy to compensate for ecclesial obligations.  Thanksgiving was great.  It was perfect—even in my young pinched heart, I was thankful for my stuff—and the rest was simple.  Basically, Thanksgiving meant you got to eat your favorite foods.  I hated having guests there to ruin it.  It is not overstating it to say—they gave me the creeps.  I didn’t understand them—they might say anything, like my name, which is never pronounceable in anything but plain English.  And as surely as I thought they were out of place, they must have felt that way too—we had uncomfortable, creepy aliens.

“You see, my father was more an enthusiastic host than a talented or gracious one.  He mostly served them drinks, as I recall, and then they sat at our table, smelling of foreign cologne, alcohol and cigarettes, trying to carry on a conversation in broken English—I’m not sure why it creeped me out so much, but it did.  The conversation, such as it was, was all in English because my father only ever took time to learn how to swear in other languages.  And even though he invariably tried all of his foreign cuss words out before evening’s end,
it didn’t make for much foreign conversation.  He did however, have a way of enthusiastically welcoming these aliens who were away from their homes, of offering them a place to be, a family (of sorts) to be with, and my mom’s great meal…

“My guess is that Mom found out about our Thanksgiving guests about an hour before they all showed up.  But she thought it was a good idea in theory.  I think my mom thought of it as her Christian obligation—simply to welcome the stranger, even if that meant having two people she could barely talk to show up at the last minute and get plastered with Dad.  I was a little boy, and I resented her Christian hospitality and his.

“And sometimes they would spend the night, a couple of nights.  What was he thinking?  That meant I would end up in my sister’s room—didn’t they remember that I had put a baseball bat through her bedroom door.  I was seven, my sister was the one person in my life that I had accumulated enough experience with to know as a true enemy.  And I always ended up in my sister’s room—which hard reality she was always gracious about, ‘Why are you putting him in here?  Can’t he sleep on the floor in your room?  I don’t want him in here, I’m 11, I can’t have a boy in my room.’  Spontaneous heartfelt agreement from me.  ‘Yea, she can’t have a boy in her room, especially if it’s me.  I’m her brother, aren’t I?’  The only thing worse would have been to put me in the room with the foreigners.

“I slept in my sister’s room several grudging nights.  Although a lot was not communicated during their stay, I’m sure that the awkward Japanese and German engineers received the simple trans-cultural message that they were putting me out.

“Still mealtimes were the worst.  Mom would show pity on me—I always thought I hid my deep and cold resentment of the foreigners’ presence pretty well for a whiney 7 year-old but for some reason she could tell that I was uncomfortable—I wonder how: could it have been the ‘Do I have to?’ or ‘How long are they going to be here?’ litany before sitting down to every meal?  But mercifully she would wake me up after my dad and the foreigners
had had breakfast and gone off to work.  I got a break.  I got to eat alone in the morning.  She wasn’t proud of me—she was just protecting her guests.  I certainly wasn’t her friend after failing to do what she commanded, but I was still hers, so she fed me.
 
“Someone reminded me recently that our tables usually start off very small.  A baby is put in a high-chair, with their own little Rhode Island sized tray, their own breakfast table. Their own lunch and dinner table too.  There’s only room for them at their pinched little table.  Then, at family gatherings like Thanksgiving, you get moved up to the kid’s table. Then you get to sit at the big kids’ table, and your tables keep expanding as you grow up.”

My friend Chandler is right.  As we grow up, if we grow up and mature, we learn to widen and lengthen our table of hospitality. We learn that the first table of Jesus’ closest friends has grown to a table that crosses every boundary and border across the globe. We learn that God’s spirit is not so interested in boundaries, in knowing who is inside or outside or foreign.  The Spirit of God is about bringing all of God’s children together.  Peter learned this lesson and opened up the sacrament of baptism to those who some considered to be beyond the reach of God’s claim.  The kosher rules were important but not as important as finding a place for one and all around the table.

The church, at its best, follows God’s Spirit out beyond the boundaries humanity has created, out beyond divisions of race, color and creed; out beyond divisions of economic class and sexual orientation; out beyond national identities; out beyond political affiliations; out beyond those we label as enemies for one reason or another; out beyond all of the labels, until just one is left for us all, the children of God.  And there is one table big enough for all.  We will gather around that table this morning.

Chandler concludes his story by writing this, “And the table keeps getting bigger and bigger until it includes your enemies.  I still forget that sometimes, what I was never aware of as a child, that my father fought in both theaters of the Second World War, in both Germany and Japan.”

Indeed.
Thanks be to God.