Making room at the table (Luke 24:13-35)
The church has been inhospitable to a wide range of folks over the years, excluding people because somehow they aren’t right the way some church folks figure right ought to look.
But it’s not right. If there’s one thing following Jesus teaches us, it’s when strangers and wayfarers come among us, we’d better make room at the table. Because it’s in those acts of hospitality—the sharing of food, the loving embrace of those who’ve been turned out, the kind word to the one whom the world has beat down, the hand on the shoulder of the grieving—it’s in acts like these that we can finally see Jesus for who he really is. It’s precisely in these welcoming gestures that we find Jesus.