This week’s readings are Proverbs 25:6-7, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, and Luke 14:1, 7-14. As on the previous occasion I preached on this text, I found helpful this commentary on the Gospel reading by Mitzi Smith, Cory Driver’s lectionary blog at Living Lutheran, and Carolyn Brown’s comments in the book Forbid Them Not: Involving Children in Sunday Worship, Year C.
Worship this week was at Living Hope Lutheran Church. You can watch the whole service livestream here or just listen to the sermon audio.
How many of you have ever had the joyful experience of planning a wedding reception? I have twice.
The first time was my own wedding. Before I got married, I had no idea how many details are involved in a wedding reception. I figured we’d pick a place, ask what they had for food, tell them how many people, and that’d be about it.
If you’ve ever planned a big event, you know how naive I was. There are so many details to think about, like how many food choices to offer, where in the room the cake goes, all the way to who’s responsible for lighting the little floating candles in the centerpieces. (Ask me or Christin later how that turned out!)
I realized the process was getting ridiculous when we had to decide whether or not to rent a specific serving utensil to cut the cake.
Then, a few years later, my sister got married, and I learned about a whole new planning challenge. We’d done a buffet at our wedding, but at Lynn and Todd’s wedding, each guest had pre-selected an entree, which meant that for the servers to distribute the correct meals, there needed to be an assigned seating chart.
It turns out, making a seating chart is hard! If this person is with those people, do they have anything in common to talk about? If the families with kids leave earlier, will someone else be left alone?
Who’s likely to eat fastest—can we seat them on the dance floor so their table can be moved? And most importantly, who gets to sit up front near the wedding party, and who gets stuck in the back corner behind the post? Can you put the second cousins from our side closer than the second cousins from his family, or will they be offended?
The last thing anyone wants to do is dishonor a great-aunt, but there’s only so much room at each table!
Today’s gospel reading finds Jesus at a big dinner, and apparently, the host has not gone to the effort of preparing a formal seating chart.
But, everyone knows where the best seats are. In that culture even more than ours, honor and social status are important. Where you sit is a big deal.
So when Jesus notices all the guests are trying to get the best seat, he takes it as a teachable moment. He tells his followers, when you go to a wedding feast, don’t put yourself in the highest place, because if someone shows up after you who outranks you, you’ll be embarrassed by being asked to move down. Better to put yourself in the lower place and perhaps be asked to move up higher.
This is good social advice. Smart guy, that Jesus!
He’s obviously read that first lesson from Proverbs, which I think is the only lesson in our lectionary focused entirely on table etiquette in a royal court. Better to be told in the king’s presence, “Come up here” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble. True enough, but tot a topic likely to have much life-changing impact for any of us!
But Jesus doesn’t stop with some advice to his disciples about exercising humility at dinner parties.Instead, he turns to the host who invited him over, and he says, ““When you throw a party, don’t invite people who might return the favor. Don’t use it as an opportunity for networking, or gaining status.
Instead, invite the people who are usually left out. Invite the people on the margins, the people no one wants to associate with, the people who can’t repay you.”
Now, just for a moment, imagine how awkward this must have been.
Will Willimon says, “Imagine you invite me, the preacher, to your home for dinner. You spend most of the day preparing the meal. I show up and, no sooner has the food been served, than I ask, ‘Why didn’t you invite some of the homeless from the streets of our city to your home tonight? They need this food more than I…’ The job of the guest is to graciously receive the gracious hospitality of the host, not make judgments on the quality of the host’s hospitality. And yet, that’s just what Jesus does.”
Jesus has this habit of disrupting things when he’s invited in. He’s never satisfied to leave things or people alone.
Of course, the lesson Jesus is teaching is about more than dinner etiquette or social standing—it’s about the kingdom of God.
Over and over in the Bible, God’s kingdom is described as a great banquet, and what Jesus is describing is what God does.
God invites the people who don’t have anything to offer in return. God invites the poor, the broken, the sinners, the very young and the elderly, and the socially awkward.
God invites the people who only talk about themselves, and the messy, and the despairing, and the beggars. God even invites people like you and me!
If we want our world to be more like heaven, maybe we should try doing the same.
I’m pretty sure Jesus did not bring up seating charts and honor because he wanted to give his followers a way to cheat the system and obtain honor by humbling themselves so they’d get lifted up. I think he actually wants us to be humble.
He actually wants his followers to put others ahead of themselves, and let God worry about the honoring. He actually wants us to care about those who don’t get invited, the people the world says don’t matter. Those are the people who are important to God.
In a world where you can become a VIP—a “very important person”—and get special access at a concert by paying a little extra for your ticket, or where people donate to get their name listed in a newsletter, Jesus calls for something different.
As Hebrews tells us, Christians are called to show hospitality even to strangers. We’re called to pay attention to the people others ignore, the inconvenient ones, people who are in prison, people who are suffering.
In our churches right now, we’re talking a lot about reaching out to our neighbors, inviting people to come to church—and please do invite people!
Invite people to come to the rally day stuff on September 11—we’ll have a bounce house! Weekly worship services at each building start on the 18th—that’s a fantastic excuse to invite people. If you know someone who’s drifted away from church during the pandemic, or someone with Sunday School aged kids, please, invite them!
But as we reach out and invite people, I think there’s a caution for us in this story.
If you invite people for dinner so they’ll invite you to their next party in return, that’s not true hospitality. The hospitality Jesus is talking about is sacrificial, not for our benefit.
If we invite people to church hoping they’ll join so we’ll have a bigger church, or we’ll have an easier time dividing Sunday School classes, or so they can help pay the mortgage, that’s not hospitality. If we jump on a newcomer because a committee has an opening or we need someone to cut the lawn, that’s not hospitality, that’s recruitment.
If hospitality goes well, we’ll get more people who don’t have the money to give their share of the offering, who don’t have the time to volunteer.
Us being welcoming and inviting isn’t like providing customer service so we get repeat customers; our hospitality is about us not getting the way of people encountering God. As a church, we exist for the benefit of others, not just for ourselves. We are here to point people to the love of God, who is much better at loving people than we are.
Jesus says to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. The beauty of Jesus’ teaching here is, of course, that that list includes us. On a heavenly scale, Jesus invites all of us to God’s banquet, where he is the host.
We are all the ones in need. We are all the least of these. We belong in the lowest seat in the back of the room, yet Jesus calls us forward to his table.
Thanks be to God.
Amen