Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14
One sabbath when he went to dine at the house of a ruler who belonged to the Pharisees, they were watching him.
7 Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he marked how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, 8 “When you are invited by any one to a marriage feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest a more eminent man than you be invited by him; 9 and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give place to this man,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. 11 For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
12 He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. 13 But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
When was the last time you were invited, and accepted the invitation, to have dinner at the house of your worst enemy?
I would guess that your answer is: Never. In my not-quite 60 years of life on Planet Earth, I can truthfully say that I have never been in that kind of situation.
When I invite people to my house, it’s because they’re my friends, or people I like well enough to think that they might become friends. And the reverse is also true – when people ask us over to their home for dinner, it’s because they are friends of ours.
The dinner party that we read about today, though, is quite different. The first clue is right in the first sentence – “One Sabbath when he went to dine at the house of a ruler who belonged to the Pharisees, they were watching him.”
Jesus had deliberately walked into the lion’s den. The place was full of Pharisees, the very people who had it in for him and who had been plotting his demise for years.
The first question leaps right out at us: Why? Why would he do something like that? Why would he deliberately put himself in such danger?
The second question is: Why did this leader of the Pharisees invite Jesus in the first place?
The answer to that is actually pretty clear. All of the guests at this meal were what you might call “movers and shakers.” They were people of influence, the upper crust, the ones who “made things happen.” That’s why they were invited. The host of the meal invited them because he wanted to really impress them. He wanted to demonstrate to them that, he, too, was a man to be reckoned with. So he invited them to his house; he pulled out all the stops and had a lavish feast prepared. Everything was done just so; no detail was overlooked; no expense was spared. And this host went to such great lengths because he believed that, if he did so, there would be, down the road somewhere, “something in it for him.” The concept of patronage, of “one hand washes the other,” is nothing new. Perhaps he could score a favor. Perhaps he could wrangle himself an invitation to an even more prestigious dinner somewhere else, with even more important people. Maybe he’d even be invited to the palace itself! And with such invitations came access to those who made a difference.
And even the guests had their ulterior motives. Here we need to note that these dinner parties were not closed, “invitation-only” affairs. While the invited guests were the ones who were seated, the doors to the Pharisee’s house were left wide open, so that anybody could wander in and out. People would drop by if they figured there was going to be a good show – maybe a great debate or discussion on some big issue. Some people would come just to see who was there and be close to the “great and good,” as it were.
But I think there was also a more sinister reason lurking behind the scenes, and that brings us to why Jesus had been invited. The details given in the passage tell us that this occasion was staged. Once again, the words “They were watching him” are a dead giveaway. They waited for fireworks.
And Jesus did not disappoint. After two thousand years, what Jesus uses as an illustration to his host and the other guests doesn’t seem very controversial. It seems like just a lesson in etiquette, something that was just common sense.
But, believe it or not, in that day and name-or-shame culture, people were acutely aware of such things, and very sensitive about them, too, even more so than we are today. This example of Jesus would actually have been deeply offensive. Strange, but true.
There were few things, maybe nothing, more humiliating than to have your host come up to you, tap you on the shoulder, and say “I’m so sorry, but you’re going to have to move down the table.” This wouldn’t be just a momentary embarrassment; people would talk, and it would take a long time, maybe the rest of your life, to live it down. You’d be pointed out as someone who was a little “too big for his britches,” one who didn’t know his place; your reputation would take a big hit.
Today, most of us are embarrassed by being snubbed, sure, but we usually shrug it off. Peer pressure among kids and also adults, “keeping up with the Joneses” notwithstanding, our culture isn’t as unforgiving as the culture of Jesus’ day. At least, I hope it’s not. I hope we’ve learned something in the past twenty centuries.
But all of this was really just the preamble to Jesus’ real message. The answer to the first question – why did he submit to this ordeal in the first place – is that he took this invitation as a teaching moment to impart his real message. That real message was something that was even more shocking to his listeners than the talk about going up or down the seating chart at a banquet; and it’s even potentially shocking to us of today, too (even though we’ve probably heard it all our lives).
The real message Jesus had for those at the banquet and for us is this: Don’t do things with an eye for reward. Don’t take into account the social payoff.
Well, so far, so good. We get that. Once again, I find myself preaching to the choir, because nobody here needs to be told that.
But then Jesus says something that does maybe shake us up a bit – even though we’ve heard it before, too – and that is to welcome those who might be well outside our social circle, people we might not even think of even talking to, people who are outcast – the poor, the sick, and the socially undesirable, to name but three groups.
And this is hard for us. It’s hard for me. Here’s a true story:
Back in 1982, when we were living in Los Angeles, but I was still in seminary, I had to take a unit of what’s called “Clinical Pastoral Education.” CPE is professional training for clergy in a supervised setting, usually a hospital.
So, a few months before we moved from Durand, I pulled out my Rand McNally Road Atlas of the US and opened it up to the map of Los Angeles. I took a ruler and determined that where we were going to be living was about 3/8” from an available CPE site at the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys, in Whittier. “Well, that sounds pretty good,” I thought, “must be a boarding school or something.” So, I pulled out the directory of CPE sites all over the country, found the address, and sent off a letter of application. I very quickly got a response that I was accepted!
This should have set off some alarm bells.
So, we moved out to L.A. and got settled in.
Well, the day came when our good friend, Lydia Wittchen, drove me, along with Katie and our infant son, Nicholas, out to Whittier to the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys.
The first notable thing about that “school” which caused us some concern was the fact that the school was surrounded on all sides by a thirty-foot-high cyclone fence topped with bayonet wire. Then there was the gate, complete with guard station with a long automated arm blocking entry. The guard asked us what our business was; I told him; the arm lifted and we drove to the parking lot. We got out, went to another gate, this one with steel bars and yet another guard post. We got inside and found ourselves in a kind of waiting room. In front of us was yet another guard station with bulletproof glass, and another steel-barred gate.
By this time, our eyes were probably the size of dinner plates, and we were no doubt as pale as sheets!
With an indescribable sinking feeling, I walked over to the window, told the man behind the glass who I was, and he got on the phone. After a second or two, he hung up, and told us that the chaplain would be along momentarily. Then he stepped out of his booth, and handed me something that looked exactly like a garage door opener.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s your panic button,” he answered.
“What’s a ‘panic button’?” I asked (not really wanting to hear the answer).
“When –” he didn’t say “if” – “they take you hostage, you press the panic button, and the guards will come and try to rescue you.” “Try?” This did not inspire much confidence.
While I was digesting this, the chaplain arrived, greeted us warmly, and led me through the steel gates, which clanged behind us. I took a last glance back at my wife and infant son, whom I was sure I would never see again, and followed Chaplain Winkler into the bowels of the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys, which was, of course, a juvenile detention center.
(By the way, if you’re ever required to take a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, do NOT use the “Rand McNally Method” to select your site!)
Thus began my nine-month stint as a reluctant prison chaplain.
The reason I bring this up is that, if there were ever a time in my life where I was forced to be among people I would normally never even see, never even think of, people who were most definitely on the “outcast” end of the social spectrum, it was during those nine months. It was really very scary for a kid from the corn fields of Wisconsin, I can tell you!
But I learned a lot about a segment of our society that I had never been aware of. The one overriding feeling that remains with me to this day when I remember those days is sadness. Because, you see, this was a lockup for children, young boys from the ages of 13 to 18. These kids, who looked just like any of the boys that age you see walking on the streets of Prescott, had done some bad things – sometimes really horrible things – to warrant their presence there. As a chaplain, I had the authority to look at the files of the kids in my charge – which I did only once, and never again. The fresh-faced kid whose file it was had a rap sheet as long as your arm, which included murder. I handed that file back and never requested another.
The sad thing was not that being locked up at Nelles didn’t work, it was because it did – but then, after their time was up, these kids, who really had reformed, who really did want to lead a different and better life, were sent right back into the cesspools they’d been taken from, and in a matter of months, many of them were right back there. Others weren’t so lucky – whether it was a gunshot, a drug overdose, or whatever, it was life on the street that killed them.
It wasn’t until I did that CPE unit that I really understood what Jesus was getting at when he talked about “the least of these,” because there at Nelles, I met them face to face.
This is an example – an extreme example, for sure – of what Jesus is getting at in today’s lesson. Jesus was – is – all about inviting into the presence of God people who don’t expect – and in the judgment of the world, don’t deserve – that invitation. And here’s the shocking part for us – he expects us to do the same.
Who are the people in our community, the people you might know or at least know of, who need to hear that invitation? They might be down the road. They might be right next door. They might even be in your own living room. But they all might have one thing in common: They have been rejected, thrown aside, forgotten. The reasons – or lack of reasons – why this happened to them don’t matter. But they are hurting.
Jesus calls on us to help. He’s not expecting us to all go to California and become chaplains at the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys – it closed in 2004, anyway. He’s not demanding that we drop everything to become social workers. He’s asking us instead, as Teddy Roosevelt once put it, to “do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” More good is done in the world every day by regular people like us than by all the movers and shakers put together. To quote Mother Teresa:
“We cannot do great things on this Earth, only small things with great love.”
But we can’t be complacent. We have to be intentional. We can’t just figure that someone else is going to do it for us. Ministry is the calling of all Christians!
The good news is that we don’t have to do it all alone. That’s why we’re together today.
Together, we can do all things through Christ, who strengthens us!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.