Paul Graves: Consider adding leaf to your table

My wife and I remember Formica and chrome tables in our family kitchens when we were growing up. Each table had at least one leaf our parents could use to extend it.

In our dining room for the past 38 years has been a beautiful maple table with four leaves available for when we know friends or family are coming for dinner.

Extra leaves for the table likely are on your mind if you anticipate arrivals for Thanksgiving. So how about a “what if …” question.

What if Thursday, you answered the front door and someone you really didn’t expect to see – or even didn’t want to see – greeted you and asked if there was room at your table for him/her?

Such a scene isn’t likely to happen for real. But we are playing “what if.”

What are you prepared to do?

We just finished a very rancorous and divisive political campaign season. Would the candidates you didn’t vote for be welcome at your dining table?

How about people who campaigned hard for an initiative or proposition you opposed?

Or how about that person three pews from you at church whom you can’t stand?

Luke reports some intrusive questions by Jesus in Luke 6:32-36, like: “If you love only the people who love you, why should you receive a blessing? Even sinners love those who love them!”

And he goes on in the same irritating way, challenging his disciples to practice what he and they are preaching.

I believe this extends to your dining table as well. Whether yours is a literal table or a metaphorical table, let it remind you to extend your boundaries of radical hospitality. The opportunities to add a leaf to our tables seem unlimited.

At times, they seem oppressively all around us.

Some of us can wear ourselves out by welcoming people we don’t like very much (or at all). Yet there are those who seem to be energized by extending their tables (read “hearts”) to all kinds of other people.

Why does being so radically hospitable drain some but invigorate others?

There may be many reasons, but I suspect they all have something to do with how deeply the joyful hosts can see beyond the surface image of their guests. They look beyond the “wants” to where the person’s “needs” reside.

I was reminded of this last Sunday as I learned from one of our church members that, just the day before, he had led the first-ever meeting of Narcotics Anonymous held in the Bonner County Jail. The program has been his passion since it was instrumental in bringing hope to his own life.

He is involved in one NA group as a member. But he is determined to put an extra leaf in the table by offering those in jail a chance to discover how other recovering addicts wanted to support them into sobriety.

He extended that table last week, and six guests showed up for “dinner.” I honor him for his faith-based radical hospitality.

As you prepare for Thursday’s holiday, and the holiday season we will both enjoy and endure through the end of December, I invite you to remember Jesus’ nettlesome questions.

Do you love/like/respect only those who return the favor? What blessing is that for you? Or them, for that matter?

There is some measure of enlightened self-interest in what we do on behalf of others. We get something out of being gracious, being generous, being hospitable, being respectful and loving.

There is no use denying that truth. It would be false humility to do otherwise.

Perhaps one real blessing we would receive is a genuine humility. As we welcome people into our lives whose politics or attitudes or actions clash with our own, we are humbled enough to stop pretending.

We as hosts and they as guests need not hide our common needs from each other.

We are the “sinners” Jesus speaks of in Luke 6:32. It is the mark of a genuine follower of Jesus that he or she is able to genuinely welcome someone not normally welcome at the table.

Yet when seated at that extra-leaf table, that person may offer you what your heart needs at the moment.