Come to Dinner

Sirach 10:12-18

The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. For the beginning of pride is sin, and the one who clings to it pours out abominations. Therefore the Lord brings upon them unheard-of calamities, and destroys them completely. The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their place. The Lord plucks up the roots of the nations, and plants the humble in their place. The Lord lays waste the lands of the nations, and destroys them to the foundations of the earth. He removes some of them and destroys them, and erases the memory of them from the earth. Pride was not created for human beings, or violent anger for those born of women.

Psalm 112

Hallelujah! Happy are they who fear the LORD and have great delight in God’s commandments! Their descendants will be mighty in the land; the generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches will be in their house, and their righteousness will last forever. Light shines in the darkness for the upright; the righteous are merciful and full of compassion. It is good for them to be generous in lending and to manage their affairs with justice. For they will never be shaken; the righteous will be kept in everlasting remembrance. They will not be afraid of any evil rumors; their heart is steadfast, trusting in the LORD. Their heart is established and will not shrink, until they see their desire upon their enemies. They have given freely to the poor, and their righteousness stands fast forever; they will uphold their head with honor. The wicked will see it and be angry; they will gnash their teeth and pine away; the desires of the wicked will perish.

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers. Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” So we can say with confidence, “The LORD is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?” Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

Luke 14:1, 7-14

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely…. When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “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; 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. 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. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” He said also to the one who had invited him, “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. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

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It’s beginning to look a lot like pumpkin spice season is upon us. Pumpkin flavored everything is popping up everywhere, from muffins to cream cheeses to ice cream. I guess summer is wrapping up. Which puts me in mind already for the holidays. Summer has been great, don’t get me wrong, but I love the chill in the air some mornings, and I look forward to sweaters and crunching leaves and an end to the humidity. Beginning pumpkin spice season also means we are getting close to stewardship season, looking at budgets, asking for pledges, preparing for charity events, food drives, and the like.

Do we do those things here? Is this parish connected to charity work? Or is it basically an individuals do as they can sort of thing? Every place does it differently. And everybody seems to have a different reaction to that word, ‘charity.’ Around Thanksgiving and Christmastime it’s the big thing on people’s minds when they want to ‘do good and feel good’ about themselves, but the rest of the year we basically call it ‘un American’ to receive charity or ask for public assistance. How many times do we need to hear about how lazy the poor are before we start to believe it?

I have a friend to tells the story of when his neighborhood church decided to do some charity work for the homeless in their neighborhood for Thanksgiving. The way he tells it, these well-meaning people figured the best thing to do would be to get dozens of frozen turkeys to donate, because who doesn’t want turkey for Thanksgiving? Except who can store and cook a turkey when they don’t have a place to sleep at night, let alone a working oven? And, really, in that time and place, socks would have been a far better gift to give, since those folks hardly ever took off their shoes to sleep, lest someone steal them in the night, and they walked all day and needed sturdier footwear more than they needed frozen butterballs. But this group of well-meaning folks sure wanted to ‘do good and feel good’ about themselves. They just didn’t actually think about doing the work of getting to know these homeless neighbors, building those relationships, learning how to address the roots of the issues that left the homeless out on the streets in the first place. A one-time tax-deductible gift was more in their line of thinking.

That almost seems to be what Jesus is advocating for here in the Gospel this morning, doesn’t it? I mean, he’s talking to a group of people who are seeking places of honor at the dinner table, and trying to look good in public. He’s talking to people who are vying for social status, and he lays out this plan for them to move up the ladder by first sitting with the poor and class-less. Everybody knows that who you eat with says a lot about what your value is and where you stand in the community. It’s basic even today. Gotta make a good first impression when school starts so you can sit at the cool kids table, right? Gotta sit with the right coworkers at lunch break if you want that promotion, right? Even at nursing homes there’s a hierarchy of who sits with whom and what that means. But Jesus tells the folks at this dinner that if they want to climb the social ladder they need to start at the bottom, to ‘look good’ to those at the top. Find the lowest class of people, sit with them, so you can be publicly called out as better.

That’s gotta make the poor, homeless, hungry ones feel real good about themselves, doesn’t it? To be a photo opportunity for somebody looking to look good, to be seen only for the way you can help somebody else gain status? Yikes, Jesus, I’m not sure that’s what the kingdom of God really looks like. I mean, sure, at least then the poor get fed, at least then the hungry are invited to dinner, but does community really grow when we use one another for our own position? Granted, the folks at dinner that night were already doing that with the wealthy, making sure to keep ‘good’ company, the way one might put up with the boss’ racist jokes at work because there’s a promotion on the line. But is this really the way to get ahead? Or is getting ahead really the point at all?

But can we really criticize Jesus, of all people? Isn’t that bordering on blasphemy? Don’t we have to agree whole-heartedly with everything he says so that we can climb that ladder to heaven? But if that’s the case, how are we treating Jesus any better than that racist boss who’s holding out on hiring the next manager? If we can’t call Jesus out on his words from time to time, how’s that different from following authority blindly into terrible things and not taking our own responsibility for our actions? No, we can’t make more of ourselves than we are, pretending to be the most important in the room by shoving others aside, but neither can we completely abdicate our power to reason, to challenge, to decide and act.

See, here’s the thing: the core of our teaching is this gift of new life, resurrection, forgiveness, and mercy that flows from the cross, right? But if we take that freedom and bind ourselves up again in rules about who deserves which position and what sort of treatment, we’ve basically spit in the face of God. God has created a beautiful, diverse, great big open wide world, and has made each and every human being in the Divine Image. Each and every one. Rich or poor, divine. Homeless or housed, divine. Hungry or overfed, divine. But these unequal value markers, these divisions between us, they are not of God, they are something that has been created by a few in power and sustained in our systems of oppression for generations. To the point that we believe these value markers more than we believe the free gift of God, even when it comes to knowing our own value. Consider the ways we believe the words we hear about ourselves: the way misogyny eats away at women who stand up to say women shouldn’t be in leadership, the way men wrestle with the fantasy that they simply must be the bread winners in order to have value in a marriage, the way people who aren’t pastors are led to believe it’s only the pastor’s place to pray.

But then there’s the other thing we say about Jesus: that he is God with skin on, right? So if we are all caught up in the idea that somehow we human beings have to prove our worth, have to reach for perfection in order to be ‘good enough’ for God, consider that God Herself became one of us, and that it was plenty good to Jesus to have flesh and bones and hair and teeth and aches and pains and hunger and a chosen family of people who didn’t always know what they were talking about and didn’t have much social status of their own. For God it was good enough to be a human being, why isn’t it good enough for us? How have we forgotten that we are, all of us, reflections of God’s creativity and love and compassion and complexity?

Let me say that again: No matter where you sit at the table, you are created in the image of a God who is creative and loving and complex and full of compassion. No matter where anybody sits at the table, we are all part of God’s kingdom, we are all holy, we are all deeply loved, we are all enough. Whatever place in the charity cycle you’re in right now, giving or receiving or ignoring, your worth is not in your status, not in your ‘usefulness,’ not in your position of honor or dishonor. And the same goes for our friends, and the same goes for the people we’d rather not sit next to at the table. What you do with that is up to you, but we all start from that same place of inherent freedom, that freedom which we Christians say was created in us at the beginning, lost when we decided we would rather earn our value by trying to divide each other into categories of worthiness, freedom restored to us on the cross, that freedom which we remind one another of every time we gather for confession and forgiveness, that free gift of grace which welcomes us all to the table of life everlasting.

Thanks be to God.