August 28, 2016
Text: Luke 14:1, 7-24
It is my prayer today that I bring you the Gospel. That I essentially preach the “good news” as Jesus mandated. It is easy to to say what is wrong (for instance, Donald Trump, but God calls us to hear our own vulnerabilities in the scriptures and allow this same spoken, living word to empower us with compassion as we move forward in our shared weaknesses to something altogether new and unknown.
Today’s gospel from Luke is right in the middle of chapter 14 and is the second of three somewhat conflictual, reframing discussions Jesus is having with the Pharisees. It is so easy to see how the Bible is God’s sword. Jesus spends a lot of time slicing and deconstructing the practices and understandings of the Sabbath and the common table. The passage before this one, from last week’s lectionary, is about the Sabbath and is the third exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees about the illegality of healing on the Sabbath. Jesus really wants them to understand that God’s Sabbath law, calling for us to stop, pause, and ponder on the Sabbath, is in the service of restoring a right relationship with each other and God’s creation.
Jesus continues to call the Pharisees and ourselves into right relationship with God and each other through the next passage where Jesus and the Pharisees seem to be sitting at table together. In Jesus’ time, meals were a particular way in which a person’s social position was determined. Where did someone eat? With whom did they eat? Were they physically clean before they ate? In today’s gospel Jesus exposes the way the Pharisees made an idol out of this social positioning.
14:8 When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host;
14:9 and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, 'Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place.
14:10 But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.
14:11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Here Jesus is saying, “Guys, guys, what are you doing here?” “Who do we belong to in the first place?” Jesus exposes them. Even position two or three is not enough. Put yourself in the last position. Seek the recognition of God and know the hospitality of angels. It is much better than the rat-race of chasing the acceptance from our peers. True humility is a quality of life open to persons who know their need for God and value that over recognition from their peers. Jesus is asking us here to expect to meet God in each other, even and especially in the lowest positions. There we may find divine wisdom and light within each other as creations of God’s.
Jesus continues in the scriptures, tearing selfish tendencies apart and giving specific directions as to how to be community.
When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.
14:13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.
14:14 And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.
The community and sharing of life and bread that takes place at your table is too sacred to be perverted by the seeking of private advantage. If there is even the chance of repayment, Jesus says don’t do it. He names a particularly disenfranchised group, the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind that are also named in Leviticus 21:17-23, as people who were not allowed to “enter the Assembly of God” and are “unfit to occupy a place in the midst of the Congregation” which in this context meant they were not allowed to serve as priests.
This Gospel is meant to free us from the necessity to succeed in our culture’s contexts of power and esteem. They mean to call us to ignore and turn away from the over-under relationship and the attitudes and barriers that they create. Practicing this kind of humility destroys our social barriers and returns us to working on problems together, because we are all in the same boat – we are all poor, lame, crippled, and blind in different ways.
How can we recognize our poverty? In what ways are we lame? What kinds of blindness afflict us?
So even these very scriptures make me feel vulnerable because I had kinmd of thought I knew what meant. At the old Potter’s House, we tried interpreting these scriptures of biblical hospitality literally, we invited the poor inside for a free meal and we sustained the stagnant, non-profitable business of the Potter’s House. We also perpetuated layers of racist relationships in the employment structure and a dying church holding on to the past. We had no answers as the Potter’s House church. Here I where I felt my poverty and my blindness. At the same time, I could easily forget our failings as new people would walk in having read Call to Commitment and wanting to glean some inspiration and capture some of the creativity of the Potter’s House from the 1960s – the one that was open 6 nights a week, serving lattes to the rich, coffee and soup to the poor and providing a haven for the recovery community. I thought of myself a little bit like the Lorax, telling stories of abundance and sunshine within a rundown, used up setting. At the same time I was selfishly meeting God in the faces of Wallace Boyd, Elvin McKnight, Mary Easley, Edward West, Dot Cresswell, Randy, Tom Taylor, Christian Peele, and Diane Ford Jones to name a very few.
What if Jesus had walked in to sit down and given some direction at the table in the Potter's house like he did to the Pharisees? Would I have stopped talking enough and suspended my certainty about our original narrative to listen? Eugene Peterson, in Earth and Altar says that “the wise one is not the person who knows the right answers to things but one who has developed the right relationships to persons, to God. The wise know about patience and love, listening and grace, adoration and beauty, know that other people are awesome creatures to be respected and befriended, especially the ones that I cannot get anything out of.” This is straight to the point of the scriptures in most of Luke 13 and 14. Jesus calls us not to even have answers but to have compassion. Right relationship is a cultivation of compassion with each other.
Henri Nouwen has a whole book Compassion that as a sophomore in college called me away from seeking God in perfect and right theories of theology, learned and perfected with Campus Crusade for Christ into the messier journey of seeking right relationship with Jesus and everyone around me. In today's Gospel reading, Jesus is not only teaching about the putting yourself in the last position, he is exemplifying it by being God-with-us.
Jesus, tough he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name so that, at the name of Jesus. every knee would bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)
How do we follow that? This intimate relationship comes from a place of knowing our deep need for God. I began to know my need of God as a preteen when my parents got divorced, displacing me from the comfort of a functional family. After navigating and surviving high school, going to a predominantly secular college that drew most of its students from the Northeast, I was further displaced - now from the comfort of my Southern privileged culture. I found God in solitude. I found God in the many different people I met in and out of church. In his Compassion Nouwen suggests we become obedient from a place of gratitude.
Today’s scriptures call us to displace ourselves and find God in our newly displaced position. God will meet us in our poverty. What is our poverty? What is the good news right now that you can speak out of your poverty?