Luke 14:7-14
Strange Guest List
James Sledge February
18, 2024
Back in January, a question about dinner
parties ran in the Ms. Manners advice column in The Washington Post. It
read, “Dear Miss Manners: I must admit I’ve never understood etiquette’s
requirement to invite people to one’s home after being invited to theirs. When
my spouse and I host, we feel that it’s our idea — nobody asked us to make a
dinner and invite the group. We enjoy cooking and spending time with everyone.
“Is it not improper for hosts to expect
that they will be ‘repaid’ with invitations from their guests?”[1]
Miss Manners was not at all sympathetic to
the writer’s point of view. While she agreed that the response need not be
another identical dinner party, she said that it is completely necessary for
the recipient to respond in a way that says, “We were not just looking for a
free night out. We enjoyed ourselves and want to see you again.”[2]
Jesus is at a dinner party thrown by a
leader of the Pharisees in our scripture reading for this morning. Jesus has
already caused something of a stir at this party by healing someone. That might
not be a big deal except it happened to be the sabbath. The healing has just
happened when Jesus decides to broach the topic of dinner party etiquette,
reminding people that they should not grab the seat of honor and perhaps be
later demoted when someone more important arrives, but to take a lower seat and
perhaps be promoted to a better one.
Jesus isn’t saying anything new here.
There a very similar words in the book of Proverbs where it says, Do
not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the
great; it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the
presence of a noble.
I don’t expect anyone at the party was surprised or taken aback by what
Jesus says, but Jesus’ conventional words about humility are just an opening to
talk about a much more radical form of humility. “But when you give a banquet, invite the
poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. It’s probably worth remembering that in Jesus’
day, there was no social safety net and no real accommodations for
disabilities, and to be lame or blind typically relegated someone to a life of
begging and depending on the kindness of others.
That means that the dinner party Jesus suggests would look quite
different. It would not be made up of the beautiful people or the successful
and well to do or the in crowd, quite the opposite. But I wonder if Jesus
hasn’t moved past talking about dinner party etiquette. I wonder if he isn’t
talking about something bigger.
In the verses immediately after our
passage, Jesus tells those at the dinner party a parable about a Great Banquet.
It is clearly a metaphor for God’s kingdom, and the quest list also includes
the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind that Jesus tells his host to
invite.
Hospitality and table fellowship were a
crucial part of the culture in Jesus’ day. Wedding banquets and dinner parties
were the primary social events. Such events had much greater social importance
and significance than similar events in our day, but the process for coming up
with the guest list seems not to have changed much. People tended to invite
friends, relatives, people they wanted to impress, people who had invited them,
and so on.
But the ways of God’s new day are vastly
different. Conventional guest lists tend to conform to the status quo, tend to
perpetuate the insider/outsider boundaries of a society. And so those who want
to live by the ways of God’s new day must act differently.
This issue of table fellowship is crucial for
Luke’s gospel and its companion book, Acts. The risen Jesus is made known in
the breaking of the bread, and his new community is to be a sign of God’s
coming new day, and so it welcomes those once thought to be outsiders and not
on the guest list.
In our denomination’s foundational
documents there is a classic statement known as the Great Ends of the Church.
The last of these six ends or purposes is “the exhibition of the
Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”[3]
In other words, when people look at the church they should get a glimpse of
what God’s new day looks like, and one thing Jesus makes clear is that it will
be made up of lots of people who might not seem to be prime candidates for the
guest list.
Sometimes churches do a good job of this.
My previous church had a twice a month supper program that was open to all
comers. On the larger of the two nights, we would often have over 250 people
there. Some were working poor, and some were homeless. There were many
different nationalities and races. There were children and elderly, people in
poor health and those with disabilities. They sat at tables and members of the
church and community served them.
Open Table at this church does something
similar, and in both cases I think the gathering looks a little like what Jesus
says the Kingdom looks like, the sort of guest list Jesus says to invite to the
party. On Thursday mornings at the Meeting House and Wednesday evenings at
Falls Church Presbyterian, a glimpse of the Kingdom is on display at the
church. Everyone is welcome at the table. Everyone has a place at the table.
But what didn’t happened at Falls Church
was for Sunday morning to look like those Wednesday evenings. We sometimes made
very deliberate attempts to invite our Wednesday guests to worship or other
church activities, but those activities, worship especially, looked a lot less
like the Kingdom.
Churches tend not to look like the guest
list Jesus envisions for his banquet. There are wealthy churches and churches
where the members are of more modest means. There are Black churches, white
churches, Latino churches, Korean churches, and on and on. There are liberal
churches and conservative churches. Just about any division you can find in our
society you can see mirrored in the church.
Some of that may be understandable, even
necessary. If your primary language is Korean or Spanish, it makes a lot of
sense to attend a church where they speak that language. But I wonder how many
of the divisions in churches are not necessary, are actually a way that we look
more like the world than we look like the Kingdom of God, that we fail to be an
“exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”
Who is welcome
here? Who has a seat at the table? In an increasingly fractured and polarized
world, those seem to me important questions to ask. How can we be an
“exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven” if we don’t think about what will help us
look more like God’s new day, if we don’t think about the ways we, perhaps
inadvertently, let people know they aren’t welcome here.
During the Sundays in Lent (Sundays
technically are not a part of Lent) we are leaving the lectionary and preaching
from scripture passages highlighted in the book Meeting Jesus at the Table. (We’ll
also be using some of that book’s chapters for an adult education opportunity
on Sunday mornings as well as Wednesday evenings and Thursday mornings.) One
thing that both the book and the scriptures make clear, Jesus had some strange
ideas about who was welcomed to the table, about what the quest list is
supposed to look like. And we are called to build a community that mimics
Jesus’ guest list.
That call to build a new sort of community
is rooted in a bit of incredibly good news. In the guest list for God’s new
day, in the guest list for the Lord’s Table, the things that might seem to be
disqualifying aren’t. Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done or failed to do, whatever
doubts or worries you have, you are on Jesus’ strange guest list and have a
seat at the table. Welcomed at the table, let us welcome others, and create a
community of love and welcome for all.
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