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14th Sunday after Pentecost

The Good News Written

Sirach 10.14-15 (NRSV)

¹⁴The Eternal overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their place. ¹⁵The Eternal plucks up the roots of the nations, and plants the humble in their place.

From the wisdom of Monica Baldwin

What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us; it creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God.

Luke 14.1, 7-11 (NRSV)

¹On 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. ⁷When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. ⁸“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; ⁹and 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. ¹⁰But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he [or she] 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. ¹¹For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

The Good News Proclaimed

Preached by the Reverend Doctor Robert Griffin at the Sunshine Cathedral on Sunday, August 29, 2010.

When I was new to ministry, this one time, a young fellow called my office and said he needs to speak to me.  He said that he felt like a complete failure and just need to talk, but he didn’t want to meet in my church office, he asked, would you meet me at a bar close to the church.  I was a little hesitant but I said sure.

I walked into the bar, saw the young man sitting at the bar and just after I got hello out, he said, Pastor, I`m a complete failure. I was late to a meeting, and my boss fired me, this is the worse day of my life. And I said, well that not so bad, there are other jobs to be had.   Then he said, when I went to the car park, I found that my car had been stolen and I don’t have any insurance, this is worse day of my.  Then he said I took a cab home and left my wallet in the cab. When I got home, I found my partner in bed with the milk man and then my dog bit me, and he said, this is the worse day of my life.  At this point, I ordered a cape cod.

Then he said, so, I wanted to come bar to work up the courage to put an end to it all.  And I said, what on earth do you mean, but it all to an end.  He said, well, just before you arrived, I ordered a drink and I’ve drop a capsule in it and watched the poison dissolve as we’ve talk.  Just then a big guy comes up to us and grabs the drink, downs and says, so what are you two doing in my bar ; my friends looks at me and then looks at the guy and says, finally, someone whose going to have a worse day then me.

As we continue our journey through the gospel of Luke, we discover that Jesus really had no set standards about the people with whom he would socialize. And, maybe when you think about it that was a standard within itself, to have no standards. Sort of an open admissions policy, believing everyone deserves a chance to be noticed, to be cared about, to be affirmed.

Jesus was reared in a culture that prided itself on rituals, traditions…standards.  There was the tradition of washing the feet of guest before a meal. Foot-washing was not primarily a ceremonial custom but it was important because people walked in sandals through dusty, muddy and manure-filled streets. Your feet got dirty and stinky and who would want that at the meal table? This standard practice was also considered being hospitable to guests.

Now, as hospitable as one was expected to be to guests, not everyone was allowed to be a guest! Table fellowship was to be shared only with certain kinds of people. It was something meaningful to be a guest in someone’s home. And Jesus challenges that standard of etiquette. He says that in God’s heart, and the table in one’s home represents the heart, there is room for everyone.

Jesus tells this parable based on this passage from the Book of Proverbs: “do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the space of the great; for it is better to be told, ‘Come up here,’ than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.” In antiquity, it would be a great honor to be noticed by a prince or governor, but a mere peasant would never dare to expect such an honor. Receive it graciously if it should happen, but don’t overstep your class or station in life. That is the status quo that seems to be defended in Proverbs, and Jesus, as Jesus does so well, takes that biblical image and turns it on its head! He suggests that in the kin-dom of God, tradition shouldn’t be used to keep people at arms’ length, but tradition should be challenged to make more room for more people!

How one sat at the table was a status of wealth: Reclining represented the posture of wealth and privilege; thus only a free citizen of that day could recline at the table leisurely, while women, children and slaves, if present at the meal, must sit upright for the duration of the meal without complaint. Sitting up right for a meal might not seem like a big deal to us today, but in antiquity it represented status and your position of class.

Meals were important social ceremonies.  Little was left to chance.  As we can see from the Gospel of Luke itself, people noticed where one sat, with whom one sat, where one washed before eating, and so on.  All of these social etiquettes signified one’s social position.

Those who wanted Jesus to be a revolutionary, one who would raise an army and toss out Roman occupiers, and establish a new government also assumed that since they would be on the ground floor of such nation building, they would have places of honor. They would be generals and nobles and bureaucrats and diplomats…they would be the ruling class! Finally, after being the oppressed peasantry for so long, they would one day be the ruling class, and then they could look down their noses at people, and decide who was in and who was out in their country club set. They said they were longing for freedom, salvation…but really, they wanted privilege. They didn’t want to be equal; they wanted to be the ones who had privilege for a change. They wanted a life of dinner parties with preferred seating. They didn’t want to share; they wanted to receive.

Now, if you were having someone as important as Jesus over for dinner, naturally people are going to look at the name cards to see who is sitting near to whom.  I mean let’s face it, who would not want to sit to the healer/preacher who is developing celebrity status…at least in the backwater. He’s been criss-crossing the region, healing lepers, slaves, women, children, preaching to large crowds, even ministering to people who believed their lives where plagued by demons. But even though Jesus has achieved local celebrity status, look who he often chooses to eat with: tax collectors, prostitutes, and people labeled “sinners” by the religious crowd. All kinds of unsuitable, unacceptable, unwelcome outcasts wound up being dinner companions for Jesus. You can imagine that he isn’t impressed with the would-be social climbers imagining themselves as the new nobility in God’s kin-dom.

But, then again, maybe the celebrity status has gotten to Jesus in some ways. Maybe he’s actually saying, “don’t embarrass yourself by wanting to be on the same level as me…I’m the one people love around here, so they’ll be reserving the guest of honor spot for me. Know you’re place, where it is, and where it is not!” While we celebrated the divine Nature we encounter in Jesus, we tend to forget that he was human, and humans like to be recognized, appreciated, and even treated a little special now and again. Maybe Jesus, son of a unwed mother, part of an illiterate class, living in an occupied territory, is thinking that he’s earned his spot in the limelight, and he doesn’t want others crowding in on that.

Or maybe, because Jesus knows personally what it is like to feel unimportant, unwanted, unloved, and he knows the temptation of trying to earn affection, ask for it, or even steal it if possible, he’s using his own insights from his own feelings to say, we must be mindful to not make people feel unimportant, to do what we can lift up those who have been worn down. What can we do to SHOW love to those in our lives who so desperately need it? Sounds consistent with the thinking of a healer to me!

Now, some theologians think that Luke added this particular section to get the attention of the gentiles who would have been his audience; but there is a very common message here in Jesus’ teaching: “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

It should also be noted that it was not just the Pharisees and the Gentiles trying to find their place of honor. All the gospels report the disciples argued amongst  themselves as to who is more important; the mother of James and John even comes to Jesus and asks to have her sons sit at his right and left hand in the new Kin-dom (Matt. 20: 24-28). In Luke’s recounting, the disciples are even arguing about “which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest” at the last supper! (Lk. 22.24).  So attempting to even be near Jesus, the celebrity was not something new.  Even still, we use rituals like communion to feel close to Jesus, hoping that if we can get close enough him we’ll be more like him, or at least experience some benefit from being near him.

But before we can even begin to claim our place at the table, we need to realize that it isn’t a place for us over against others. It’s a place for us, and then in that place we are the ones meant to invite others…all others. For just a moment, let us figuratively describe our nation as the table today.  A goal of our nation might be to say “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” That is the first line on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It’s from a poem called “The New Colossus” written by Emma Lazarus.

For a long time it symbolized the way that our nation was meant to be open to all kinds of people. And as one interpreter says, “Just as Lazarus’ poem gave new meaning to the statue, the statue emitted a new ideal for the United States. Liberty did not only mean freedom from the aristocracy of Britain that led the American colonists to the Revolutionary War. Liberty also meant freedom to come to the United States and create a new life without religious and ethnic persecution.” 

Today, we are all immigrants at the table of this nation; maybe it is time to question our place of honor in our nation. To claim our place at the table, as a nation, might require that we not sit idly by and allow rights to be taken away, without due process, when our own rights, as a group of people have not yet been fully obtained.  The right as a same gender loving person to marry, the right to adopt, the right of survivorship, where the rights of basic human living conditions go unmet.  And, yes, as a nation, we work very hard to continue to achieve greatness, but our table is not yet set because it is still filled with too many forms of isms that have yet to be addressed and overcome because too many are still left out, put out, or shut out of the American dream.

For just a moment, let us figuratively describe our church as the table today.  We work at a denominational level and at a local church level to give some glimpse hope for what it means to be a place for all God’s people.

Forty-seven years ago yesterday, hundreds of thousands of Americans joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and witnessed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” Dr. King said that “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

So whether we hear words of challenge from the Statue of Liberty or from Dr. King, we today are still setting the table for all of God’s people.  And sometimes we have to do the roll call to remind ourselves just who we are setting the table for.

We are the table for all the so-called sinners, tax collectors (and those who depend on tax supported programs for survival), prostitutes, immigrants, Christians, Jews, Muslims, people of every color, men and women, same-gender loving people – all kinds of people, even (and maybe especially) those who have been called unsuitable, unacceptable, unwelcome or unwanted in other houses of worship.  We are the table for the outcast!

We are the welcome table for the immigrant, for the gay or lesbian person, for the person recently diagnosed with HIV and the one who has been living with it for decades; we are the table for the single mom, for the divorced, for those who have had to face the difficult choice of whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy; we are the table, for heterosexual friends, siblings, children, and parents of LBGT people; we are the table for the transgender, for the jobless, for the elderly, for the person whose relationship has hit the rocks; we are the table for those who suffer from loneliness and depression, for those who have been betrayed, disappointed, forgotten, unloved, abused, or abandoned; we are even the table for those who are in or have been in prison.

We are the hope of Emma Lazarus…the table welcoming those yearning to breathe free.

We are the hope of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr…the table welcoming those who wish to be judged not by their skin color, their religious label, their gender identity, or their sexual orientation, but appreciated simply for the content of their character!

We are the hope of Jesus…the table where all are welcome, where we are all one.
Amen.

The Good News Affirmed

Today is my day!

It is my day of release!

It is my day to breathe free!

It is my day to receive all that is good into my Spirit!

Today I claim my place at God’s table.

And so it is!

Amen.

Audio readings and sermon (http://sunshinecathedral.org/sermons/audio/20100829_2.mp3)