Walking with integrity - Celebrating Open Table's 15th birthday
Revd Cate Jacobs offers a blessing at the end of the service of thanksgiving for Open Table’s 15th birthday.
LISTEN to a recording of this reflection [13 minutes].
SEE MORE photos from the celebration service.
Cate has been a member of the Open Table Liverpool community since the early days, and supported the relaunch of the community in St Helens in 2021. Cate is also a poet, spiritual director, mother, grandmother, and author of Climbing Mountains in the Dark, which evokes her experience of living with HIV. She also preached at Open Table Liverpool’s tenth birthday communion service in 2018.
ON SUNDAY 18th June, the first Open Table community in Liverpool hosted a celebration and thanksgiving communion service to mark fifteen years of creating safer sacred spaces for LGBTQIA+ Christians.
The celebration was led Revd Cate Jacobs, who was ordained priest at Liverpool Cathedral the previous weekend. This is her reflection:
The theme of our service and celebration today is ‘walking with integrity’, and the inspiration came from the verse from Psalm 84 that was printed on the front of the service sheets in the early days of Open Table.
‘No good thing will God withhold from those who walk with integrity’.
The cover of an order of service from an early Open Table communion celebration in 2008, featuring the words of Psalm 84:11: ‘No good thing will God withhold from those who walk with integrity.’
You could say that it is the foundational verse upon which Open Table was built. It has become the fastest growing fresh expression of church in the country today - with more than 30 communities across England and Wales, and we continue to expand, which is astonishing.
So perhaps the challenge for us today, and going forward, is how do we continue to walk with integrity? And where better place to find some answers, than to go back to the very beginning, to the place were monotheism (belief in one God) began.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace their religious ancestry back to Abraham - which is why we are known as the Abrahamic religions. He clearly did something right - the proof of the pudding and all that - is that we are all still here, many thousands of years later, worshipping the one God.
As we join Abraham’s story in Genesis 18:1-15, we find Abraham camped under the oaks of Mamre - ancient peoples recognised the spiritual and medicinal properties of trees and plants. And oak trees will have been known as a symbol of strength and protection, so no coincidence that we find Abraham beneath them - it implies that he is under the strength and protection of God, because it is here that the angel of the Lord appears to him.
We are told that Abraham looked up and saw three men, and immediately offers them hospitality - water to wash their feet. He asks Sarah to bake bread and has a calf killed and prepared for them, taking curds and milk to set before his guests. They lay out a feast before the three men, one of whom we know to be the angel of the Lord, the others presumed to be angels too.
Although this story is told in a few short verses, baking fresh bread and cooking meat will have taken time – this wasn’t a brief encounter. Abraham’s hospitality will have extended for most of the day - it was a generous hospitality.
After they have eaten, one of them tells Abraham that Sarah will conceive and have a child - given that Sarah has gone through her menopause and no longer bleeds, they are both taken aback, and Sarah laughs, probably more of a incredulous guffaw! Sarah has longed for a child all her life - she even gave her maidservant Hagar to Abraham so that she might have a child through her! We cannot imagine the pain and humiliation of being a barren woman in those times, how that will have affected her mentally, emotionally and spiritually - and yet the Lord says to Abraham: ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ and we know that Sarah did indeed go on to have a son Isaac, but that’s a story for another day.
Although this is just a short extract from Abraham’s story, throughout his wider story he consistently demonstrates his faithfulness to God, no matter what God asks of him. His story shows us that walking with integrity requires faithfulness, servanthood, service, and generous hospitality - qualities we to are called to share with each other and those we meet along the way, if we are to walk with integrity. As people of faith, it calls us to metaphorically stand under the oaks of Mamre, under the protection, and in the strength of God.
In the letter to the Romans, St Paul writes:
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
- Romans 5:1-6.
As queer people, we know only too well the lived truth of these words. Too many of us have lived, and continue to live, with persecution and prejudice, from both the church and society. And I’m not sure how easy it is to ‘glory from our sufferings’ not when people from our community are singled out - discriminated against, bullied, imprisoned, murdered, and tortured for just being who they are, for walking in the integrity of their authentic self. It is heinous, and I believe God cries out to the church and to society, as he did to Cain,
‘Listen; Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.’
- Genesis 4:10.
And yet we persevere. And perseverance produces character, and hope; and we see that hope realised, in this country, through changes in the law, and equal opportunities, and slowly, oh how slowly, changes in the church… these are times that call us to continue to have ‘perseverance’ and to trust God. To give thanks for God’s faithfulness to Open Table - for the fruit it bears and the witness it is in the church and in our world. So let us continue to walk with the faithfulness of Abraham, wherever God leads, whatever God asks of us.
Throughout the gospels Jesus was renowned for hanging out with the marginalised and excluded - he upset and enraged the powers that be, the pharisees, sadducees and rabbis of the day, he challenged everything they stood for and clung to. He demonstrated the love and power of God to the broken and despised - he was utterly countercultural! And he still is!
And we are among the very people that he brought that love to and for, we still sit on the margins, not fully part of the communion of the church. But, I assure you in the name of Jesus Christ, that we are fully part of HIS communion. And you are the living gospel, the good news of Jesus, lived out in the world as a witness for the whole of the queer community. You are the gospel that proclaims that the outrageous, abundant and scandalous love of God is for us all, made known to us through Jesus Christ.