In November of 2005 The Rt Rev Charles Jenkins, then bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana - who became a passionate advocate for social justice and suffered for his candor after Katrina ripped apart the fabric of life on the Gulf Coast - made what is perhaps the most prophetic statement of his Episcopate.Bishop Jenkins said: “The “old normal” of being the Episcopal Church with our doors locked, being a church that existed for we who were in it, will be no more.That washed away with your refrigerator.Our new normal is a church engaged, a church that is a servant church, and a church that lives not for itself alone, but for all for whom Christ died.” Today is the fifth anniversary of the greatest disaster at least in monetary terms that this country has ever seen.At this hour five years ago New Orleans East, the upper and lower 9th wards, Treme, Arabi, St Bernard and Plaquemines parish were under 20 feet of water.The water in Biloxi, Gulfport, Waveland, Pass Christian, and Ocean Springs had begun to rise to the 31 ft surge of water that washed away everything along the 150 miles coastline.Over 1500 lives had already been lost and it would not be until the following day around noontime that the flood waters in New Orleans would finally stop rising as the level of water in the city evened off with the level of water in Lake Pontchartrian. The day is permanently etched in my mind.I was sitting at my desk at Youville Hospital and watching the news, glad that John and Brett, my son and his partner, had left New Orleans the afternoon before.They would be safe, I reasoned, as they were at Brett’s family home in south central Mississippi over 100 miles from the coast.But reason soon gave way to concern and I called John’s cell phone, but the news he had did not still my anxiety.The winds were howling at 125 MPH, the electricity was gone, but the house was holding together.And then the call went dead.I did not speak with John again until the following Friday when he called from a pay phone to say that he and Brett by a stroke of luck, had secured some gasoline and were driving out of MS headed for MA.I would learn later that they had spent five days with rotting food and little water to drink.They would drive straight through and would arrive on Saturday. The next call I got was from the Red Cross telling me that I was to be deployed to New Orleans and my plane would leave at 6 AM on Monday.The next following three weeks are a blur of tears of gratitude, fear, grief, and joy – all mixed up together.I was glad that John was safe, but the loss of life and property and the lack of response to the suffering of America’s poorest in the hours and days after the storm, tried my faith mightily. Brian Williams an ABC news commentator who was in New Orleans and witnessed the worst of the tragedy, called for a national conversation on the issues than Katrina uncovered.Brian said, “If we come out of this crisis and in the next couple of years don’t have a national conversation on the following issues: race, class, petroleum, and the environment, then we in the news media will have failed by not keeping people’s feet to the fire.”That conversation has yet to grow teeth and now with more disaster in the Gulf as oil threatened the coast and the marine life – faith communities must continue to lead the way in having those conversations. Awful as it was, standing here five years later, I know that some good has come from the tragedy named Katrina.Bishop Jenkins’s words speak to us today as we hear this story about Jesus going to the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees to share the Sabbath Meal.The message of ill-fated hubris is for us individually, but it is also for us as a church and as a nation.It is a message that is etched across the pages of scripture from the prophets to the wisdom of solomon.If we believe ourselves to be better than another - then we will demand the best seat in the house, we will put up barriers to fellowship, and we will choose again to neglect the most vulnerable of our community when tragedy strikes. And the result of our arrogance will be that when God comes calling, we will find ourselves at the bottom of the guest list for the heavenly banquet. In the years that have followed since Katrina our doors have begun to open, but we have a long way to go.Karl Barth, a German theologian and one of the founders of the Confessing Church, the group of pastors who openly opposed Hitler, wrote about Christian community, Koinonia, or fellowship.He said that when we engage in Christian fellowship we mirror the fellowship that God established in Jesus Christ.This mutual relationship, witnesses not only to God’s relationship with creation but also the mutual relationship between human beings as God intends it to be. Barth, who was probably one of the wordiest theologians ever, expanded on this concept by addressing the divisions in our society that exist along cultural, economic, and racial lines.He said that as the Christian community reaches out across those barriers, we are rejecting the idea that people can be divided up into artificial groups where one might have hegemony over another.Barth said that in living our lives in community, as we are taught by Jesus, we put aside the distinctions that separate us.Such hospitality provides tools with which to heal the wounds of division and make us whole. That are not many places where the wounds of division run deeper than in New Orleans.The city is a place where the gap between the haves and the have nots is wide.Poor people, people of color, people from other countries who speak a different language are often sidelined by the institutions that thrive on power and wealth.Katrina not only took our refrigerators, but she took the cover off the sins of racism and elitism and sexism in America.Katrina exposed those evils and allowed us to work for a new way to be in community. On the coast we were fond of saying that Katrina was an equal opportunity destroyer and we who did the work of the recovery needed to be equal opportunity rebuilders.Honestly, you and I both know that it was not an equal opportunity rebuild, but in many places our efforts paid off in big dividends and those thousands of volunteers who were awakened to the joy of humble service got a glimpse of the Kingdom.This past month many of the camps and programs that found and gave life after Katrina are closing up shop.That is a good thing.But it is important that we remember and stay vigilant for the next time – whenever or wherever it might happen. I think that is exactly what Bishop Jenkins is trying to tell us.The “new normal” a church engaged, a servant church, a church that lives for Christ and not for itself is here to stay.All of our baggage that we carry – our pride, our arrogance, our material possessions, our sense of self-sufficiency – all of that is for naught – it all went out with the refrigerators – thank goodness.What really matters is our vision of community engaged in humble service.It is in being focused on the single vision of a just and equitable recovery that we built community after the storm and that community, stretching across the nation, continues to be the churches with the open doors, the churches engaged in the community. In our lesson today Jesus enters into table fellowship with both his friends and those who were against him.As always he turns the world view of his listeners upside down.God’s Kingdom he says is not to be a race for the head of the table – God’s Kingdom is the place for those who would seek out the weak, the lost, and the destitute and honor them.Barbara Brown Taylor calls it the Luminous Web, God united with humanity through the person of Jesus, the author of Hebrews call it “mutual love” and reminds us that when we open the doors of our heart and the doors of our church, we will entertain angels without knowing it. Amen