Who's Coming to Dinner at Our House? August 29, 2010

Luke 14: 1, 7-14

Who’s Coming for Dinner at Our House? August 29, 2010

God, lead us in the way of welcome. May we be as welcoming to the stranger in our midst as you are welcoming to us. Give us ears to listen and eyes to see. Amen!

When I was in the sixth grade I was an outsider. During lunchtime, we sat at long tables with benches. Each table held six children. At the far end of the line of tables—closest to where the next class came in to line up for food—thus providing the best opportunity to be seen and envied—at the end of that line of tables was THAT TABLE. At THAT TABLE sat all the cool girls—the ones already wearing makeup and getting their hair done. I wanted, more than anything, to sit at THAT TABLE. But, alas, I was never, never, never invited. This so upset me that my mother had me talk to the school counselor—she did her best to convince me that the really cool kids sat elsewhere, but when you are 12—those kinds of arguments go nowhere. I knew then and I know now, that if I had ever ventured to sit at THAT TABLE, I would have been asked to leave, there was no room for me with the elite.

I survived, of course, probably not too much the worse for wear, but I never forgot what it felt like to be excluded from those most popular. Jesus is calling us today to stay away from tables that are only open to the elite and powerful and we are challenged to look at what this means for us as Christians and as a church. Just as in my sixth grade lunchroom, there was much meaning attached to where one sat to eat. Whom you ate with, where you sat at the table, and how you behaved were all judged critically in the society of Jesus’ day. Your place at the table was a symbol for your place in society. If you ate with less than desirable people, you were deemed less than desirable. At a banquet such as the one Jesus was attending, you could tell who was important by who sat the closest to the host. But Jesus, as he often did, took a common assumption and turned it on its head in order to get his point across. He not only ate with people who were shunned by others, he encouraged his followers to do the same. Invite the poor, the crippled, the sinners, to your banquet he tells us.

Just like I refused to believe the 6th grade counselor that life was better among the less than elite, most of us, and many churches stumble over Jesus’ words in this passage. In the midst of a bit of commotion at this dinner when Jesus has healed again on the Sabbath, people are trying to decide where to sit. Now this may seem unimportant to us, but it was not unimportant during Jesus’ time. Where you sat was who you were. Jesus, seizing the teachable moment, commences a brief homily on proper table etiquette at least as far as where one sits. But as Jesus always does, his talk goes far beyond mere table manners or the dinner at hand. He applies this simple advice to how we are to act when we are in God’s presence—with humility and thought for others.

Notice then that Jesus takes it a step further. He informs us that if our banquets are to reflect the values inherent in God’s reign of justice, we will invite the very folks that the religious leaders didn’t even want Jesus to heal—much less invite to the table. Jesus tells us twice in this passage that we are to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. We must not lose sight of the fact that Jesus was turning everything they knew upside down—for physical infirmity was equated with sin and sinners were not welcome at the tables of these righteous religious bigots. Any of this begin to sound familiar?

And here is how our summer of our study of blessings ends: Jesus says that when we invite these people, the very people who the religious leaders hate and scorn, the people who have no way to repay our kindness, we will be “blessed”. Blessed because we have opened wide the doors to God’s reign of justice on earth. Blessed because offering kindness to folks who have no visible way to repay us sets our relationship with God on a right path. And so, who’s coming to dinner at our house?
Jesus calls us to re-evaluate who the guest of honor is every time we sit down to partake of God’s banquet, which most often for us is expressed in our gathering together to partake of communion. Jesus calls us to engage in a spiritual understanding that the person who needs us the most is our guest of honor at each banquet. Beyond that Jesus reminds us that it is our assignment to reach out and find those who need what God, and we have to offer. “Invite some people who never get invited out” are the words in our modern translation. We had a phrase that we used to use to refer to children in the foster care system who were hard to place—we called them “hard to love”. These “hard to love” folks are the ones Jesus calls us to embrace and invite into our gatherings.

Jesus calls us to turn our celebrations upside down—to challenge the prevailing standards and invite everyone into our banquet hall. Who’s coming to dinner at our house? This might not seem radical to most of us. After all, inclusion is one of the core values of our denomination—I can’t help but wonder though, if we’ve figured out how to be inclusive of all of us—rich, poor, educated, not so much education, white, black, Pentecostal, catholic, conservative, liberal, single, married, gay and even straight—what’s the clue that we’re missing to have a truly and completely inclusive congregation? I believe that we might find it in the word “honor”. Jesus tells us to give the place of honor away—let’s think about that for a minute as we ponder who’s coming to dinner at our house.

Jesus reminds us that when we throw a party, we shouldn’t invite just those that somehow look, think, and act like us. We should invite the isolated, the poor, the marginalized. And then, the double whammy appears—lest we think that we get by with simply having outreach and mission programs, He tells us that we are to honor others more than seek the place of honor for ourselves. Now I will be the first to admit that “honor” has lost some of its meaning when compared to the culture in which Jesus lived, so it’s important for us to look beyond the way we use the word today. Though we use the word today in titles such as “your honor” or “the honorable so-and-so”, it had a much broader sense when Jesus spoke about it in first-century Palestine. Honor referred to the esteem in which the community held not only you, but your entire family and was necessary not only for social interaction, but, in some cases, for economic survival.

And so Jesus calls us to seek out those who have been dishonored—to invite them in—to dine with us at the banquet of life and to give them a place of honor. That would bring big changes in our world and in our church—simply to model this one behavior that Jesus showed us so plainly in His life, ministry, and even death on the cross. We do not need to look far to find people who need this radical respect to turn their lives upside down and call them into a place of healing and love. There may be some of us, sitting here tonight, who need reminding that we are loved and cared for by the God who created us and that we are honored by God’s people.
As we walk through these next exciting days, and my friends, I believe that we are entering into a new stage on this wonderful journey, we will be talking about vision—what we want this church to be. My friends, we already are a living, breathing, creation of God, reaching out to love and be loved, to touch and be touched. And so we worship in loving, caring, yes, even accepting ways, that encourage us to follow the ways of Jesus—to give honor to the stranger, or to the one whose ideas differ from ours—to come together to the banquet of life as one body—with many very different parts. And so we come, with excitement, with expectation with joy! Let us move boldly forward resting in the promise of Jesus: “you will be blessed!”
Amen and amen.