Table fellowship

Tuesday April 28th Psalm 23: You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow us all the days of our lives and we will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. "War is the coward's escape from the problems of peace" Thomas Mann. All too often we rush headlong into battle and conflict rather than into negotiation, conversation and justice.  To be honest, there is more money to be made in war than in peace, at least for the well-connected and morally bankrupt.  But it is a path that eventually leads to the whole world being bankrupt both morally and financially.  The world now faces the devastation, economically, socially, and politically, that this headlong rush to war can bring to the generations that follow such cowardly greed and self-righteousness.  In contrast, the Lord sets us down in the presence of our enemies at a table. As we gather to eat, the underlying premise is that we are all the children of God gathered around the God’s table, with God as the silent listener of every conversation. Our task in life is not to pull one over on our enemies, or get the better of our enemies, or experience the joy of having a snit fit with our enemies, our task is to recognize that our enemies are our brothers and sisters at the table of God.  Our job is to find out how to get along. It all starts with recognizing and respecting the other as a child of God. It is then the real work starts.  Those who cowardly send the sons and daughters of others to war don’t have the stomach for the real work and operate only out of fear.  Our task, out of love for God and love for our Brothers and Sisters, and even out of the love for the ones trying to solve problems of the world with war, is to stop them in the name of the God who created us all and called us good.