"the table" -- karis sermon

check out this great sermon (it's the text) from last Sunday at Karis. it's all about hospitality and how that builds community. here's the intro:

"Two hit sit-coms of the 80s and 90s were Cheers in the 80s and Seinfeld in the 90s. Cheers, if you know the show, featured guys like Sam and Woody and Norm and Cliff sitting around a bar sharing life, having laughs. “Where everybody knows your name” was the theme song and the tag line. Seinfeld, which I’m sure most of you know, showed Jerry and Elaine and Kramer and George hanging out together, mainly either in Jerry’s apartment or in the local diner. It was the “show about nothing,” but it was really about everything—all the mundane, yet quirky details of life as experienced by four friends living life together. Well, both shows express a longing we all have as human beings. It’s a deep longing for community. But, of course, to experience community, there has to be a certain degree of hospitality. You had to have the Cheers bar, of course, for them to hang out. Jerry had to open up his place to his friends. Without a common place to share and converse with one another, these friendships wouldn’t have happened.

Today, in our individualistic, consumeristic world, we’re isolated people. I think we can watch reruns of those shows and long for what these people have together and experience none of it at all. But community takes hospitality; it takes us opening up our homes and lives with one another. Today, we’re taking a break from our study of Luke for the second part of a brief, three-part series. Today we’re looking at the table—not the Lord’s Supper, but rather the “tables” in our home. We’ll discuss the sphere of ministry found in the home. We’ll take a look at biblical hospitality. We’ll look at the importance of hospitality, the definition of hospitality, the practice of hospitality, the impact of hospitality, and the hindrances to hospitality. Let us pray."