12th Sunday After Pentecost

Luke 14:1, 7-14

Here we go again, we heard more from the Gospel of Luke today and guess what he is taking about, power, privilege, class and hospitality.  Why are we not surprised.  This time also unsurprisingly it is in the context of food.  Which is one of the things I like most about the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is always eating.  He spends far more time eating, feeding others and talking about food in the Gospel of Luke than in the other gospels.  Thus, Luke captures a special place in my heart as I absolutely love food, cooking and anything to do with feeding people. 

But here is the thing, in the ancient world, much more than today, talk about food was in fact still always talk about money, class and power. Because food was and in certain ways still is the very center of our social world.  Perhaps today in the world of drive-thrus, and tv diners and where most of us gathered here have never had to think very hard about where our next meal is coming from, food has become a slightly less pressing issue, but in the ancient world it was definitely the center of it all.  And today’s Gospel story centers not so much on food itself but the equally important question of how one ate it.  You see how one ate or shared a meal in public was a huge deal in both the Jewish and Roman culture of Jesus’s time.  There were no restaurants yet so when and where one ate was a carefully choreographed dance of honor and shame, respectability and status.

There was a very specific way to do things especially in the home of a Pharisee.  Men and women dined separately with only Jewish men with ritual purity allowed to eat in the main room with the host.  Honored guests would be allowed to sit, or rather recline around the head table sitting in order of social rank with the most revered closest to the host and on down the line to the end of the table.  Jesus as a rabbi would likely be invited to a place at the host’s table, but his lower class disciples would likely been given seats around the edges of the room or at a lower table.  Even lower status people, employees and servants would have eaten elsewhere, while the poor and unclean waited outside in hopes of snagging leftovers that would otherwise be given to the animals.  Everyone had a set ranking that controlled your access to the host and to the food.

Now granted, our society doesn’t function quite like this anymore.  We have traded in these strict rules for a much less defined hierarchy, signals and codes about who is important and who isn’t have gone underground, claims of egalitarianism soften and mask roles but make no mistake we are still just as susceptible to social climbing and exclusion as our ancient forebears.  And while these sorts of strict rankings no longer exist, social stratification absolutely still does.

Questions of who gets listened to in meetings, whose ideas get taken seriously, who is asked to lead, who is expected to do the grunt work, whose needs are considered first, whose preferences are taken into account, and whose taste defines what is permissible still dominate our society and control the way we function.  Often the cues now are so subtle we barely notice it is happening, especially if we are lucky enough to find ourselves near the top of the social pyramid, but it still does.

And in the first part of the story Jesus offers some practical advice for living within the human system of social hierarchy.  Err on the side of humility.  Don’t try to grab the highest place, but start at the bottom in hopes of being invited up higher rather than risk being demoted for being too greedy.  Now this part is not very difficult.  It’s really just common sense.  And this idea exists elsewhere as well, in the book Proverbs for one, but also in countless other places in modern and ancient literature.  Don’t upstage your boss in a meeting, don’t mouth off to your teachers, don’t act like an expert on a subject you know little to nothing about and so on. 

And see none of this is very hard because in the first parable we are all only really talking about the head table.  It is not all that hard to be humble and gracious around those who you already consider your equals or betters.  There is nothing radical or groundbreaking about giving way to those you already consider worthy of respect.

But then Jesus, being Jesus, goes and throws a bomb out there that shatters the whole paradigm.  He tells the host to go and invite everyone else to the head table, all those previously excluded and then to go sit at the foot of the table.  And Jesus’s choices here are clear, he tells the host whenever you give a luncheon or a banquet, the basic everyday noon meal or a formal occasion, so all the time not just as a special exception or a charitable act but as an ongoing part of your regular daily life.  And he should invite the poor, and the crippled, lame and blind, so not just people who currently can’t afford to come, but also those who are permanently ritually impure and therefore expressly excluded from your current arrangements. 

Now imagine how the first parable changes with the new guest list.  It costs relatively little to humble oneself in front of your peers or betters but imagine what it would be like to choose the lowest seat among those we currently disregard or exclude.   Now this is truly a radical change.

What would it be like to truly invite those who are currently on the outskirts of our community and those who are currently well outside of our community to not only be present at our table but to lead it?  To put their interests, needs, desires and ideas ahead of our own.  Instead of just giving material help to those in need to really take the time to listen to those we serve, to learn about their wants and needs instead of just assuming we know.  To ask people who currently don’t have a church home, what their faith story is like and what they yearn to experience in a church rather than just telling them about ours.   To be truly open to the reality that a growing church is a changing church, is a messy church, is a church filled with people quite unlike ourselves.  And then to follow Jesus and do what is needed to make sure that they too are fully welcome at the table.  Amen.