The Holy Gospel According to St. Luke the 14th Chapter.
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. 7When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.
8When 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 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."
12He 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. 13But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."
He told them a parable. With those five words Jesus changes everything. Without those words this would be a nice lesson about how we should really try to have a little humility in our lives; about good manners and the social graces; about not having a big head. Without those five words this would just be a very nice guide to being charitable and kind to those who are less fortunate. Without those five words it would be a non-confrontational, non-controversial, easy to preach, easy to hear story that made no waves and ruffled no feathers. But there they are... He told them a parable... and because this is a parable... the luncheon... it’s not just lunch, the dinner... not really about the evening meal and the banquet Jesus is REALLY talking about doesn’t involve a choice between chicken and fish.
Jesus used parables to tell folks things that he knew would be hard for them to hear. He set a hard to hear truth in the middle of a more comfortable, more familiar story like eating lunch or attending a wedding banquet. That way he could gently invite them into a story and slowly work around to the hard truth they probably wouldn’t have sat still to hear if he had told it to them directly.
Because that’s the way Jesus’ parables work, they tend to get more challenging the deeper into them you go, so I think we better start like Jesus did, with just a light lunch. For lunch, Jesus says invite the poor, lame, crippled and blind. I’m sure you know someone who has had experience with life when the ends don’t meet; where worries about money and bills haunt them in the night. We all know someone who is fighting a life threatening disease, struggling with an injury, lives with constant pain or battles with the darkness of depression.
Those are the folks Jesus is concerned with here, but this lunch is a parable, and the harder to hear idea Jesus is trying to communicate here is that we will have trouble living life to the fullest when people around us are having trouble simply living. Just finding a person who is hungry and paying for them to have a one time meal is good, but it doesn’t meet Jesus’ deeper concern. Community is his deeper concern and Jesus is challenging us to open ourselves here to new long term relationships...to seek out those who are hungry or hurting and not just help them find momentary relief, but to make them a part of our everyday lives and work with them to eliminate not just the symptoms of their hurt, but the cause of their pain at the source.
The flip side of this parable may be even harder for many of us because this parable also challenges us when WE become the ones struggling with bills or pain or darkness to be more open about our pains and fears, our worries and our darkness, to set aside our pride and allow ourselves to be drawn more deeply into other’s lives, to be drawn deeper into community and not to go it alone.
You can see how Jesus works with his parables. He first invites us into a story... “Hey, it’s just lunch” but then it turns out to be a lot more than “just lunch” and now Jesus is about to draw us even deeper into the story by inviting us to a banquet. When Jesus talks about banquets and when Jesus specifically talks about wedding banquets in his parables he’s trying to tell us something about the Kingdom of God. Now, keep in mind, when Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he isn’t talking about something that happens after we die. He’s not talking about a place “up there” or “out there” or something that exists only on a spiritual level.
When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he is talking about this world, because the Kingdom of God is here in our everyday, figure out dinner, commute to work, pick up kids and do homework world... he’s talking about changing our world where a relatively few people have much and many, many, many others don’t even come close to having enough into the Kingdom of God. Do you remember when the disciples asked Jesus how to pray? Jesus told them, among other things, to pray, “Thy Kingdom Come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What Jesus was telling his disciples to pray for and what we pray for every week with that prayer is for that banquet, for God’s Kingdom, to happen here... we’re praying for nothing less than for the whole world to be transformed into heaven on earth.
The author and Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan describes the Kingdom of God as our world transformed into one of peace, banquet and equality. While all too often the human way of changing things is done with violence, God’s Kingdom is grown through peace; as we hear in Micah, Isaiah and Joel, God’s desire is for our world to become a place were swords are beaten into plows and spears are turned into pruning hooks. While the normal human ways of living in the world often leads to great disparities, with a few having way more than they need and many, many, many people struggling with far too little, God’s Kingdom is one of a great banquet, like the one described by Isaiah as a feast with meats rich with marrow and well aged wines strained clear... a world where everyone has enough. And while our human ways of living all to often offer overwhelming opportunity to a few and put up social and political systems that keep others from ever having a chance, God’s Kingdom moves everyone to a place at the table where everyone has equal worth and status.
You can see how this sermon would have been a lot easier if Jesus hadn’t, “told them a parable.” Just the IDEA of the Kingdom of God alone is one that has a tendency, as the saying goes, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I for one would have loved for Jesus to be a bit less challenging for my interview sermon, but easy was not what Jesus was going for and he’s not quite finished making things all parable-ly and difficult for us either.
Take a look at the end of this lesson again, remembering that “giving a banquet” is code for changing the world. Now, who is it that Jesus is having give this banquet? Jesus says, “When you give a banquet.” Yup, Jesus says this is our banquet to give... it is our world to change. At first that might seem overwhelming but it isn’t meant to be. Jesus isn’t asking us to do this all on our own, but we’re not supposed to wait for God to do it alone either. God is looking for us to collaborate on this and, as Martin Luther King said 50 years ago, bend the arc of the moral universe slowly toward justice.
One last food metaphor may just help us understand our part in all of this. This metaphor comes from the pinnacle of Lutheran stereotypes - the pot luck supper. With the stereotypical Lutheran pot luck no one person provides the entire banquet. Each brings their specialty... some bring Jell-O colored to match the season of the church year, others the green bean casseroles, some the fried chicken and others bring brownies, baked goods and bars.
In the same way, God is challenging us to imagine what would happen if every faith community had it’s own Kingdom of God speciality dish. If each faith community in the world worked to push just one small piece of our world to work more like the Kingdom of God... Then imagine what would happen if we brought our small, but wonderful pot luck specialties together; shared them with one another and with the world. Together we could make a banquet.
May all of you... you from Bethany who have been gracious enough to invite me in for the day and you, the folks from Faith, continue to perfect your congregation’s Kingdom of God pot luck specialties. May you both find that piece of the world you feel called to change from the way it works now, into the way God would have it work. May you both bend the arc of the universe toward justice and then get together with each other and with other faith communities of all different shapes and sizes and flavors and join your specialties and bend that arc further still until one day we all look up from our meal together and realize our banquet has become the Kingdom of God. Amen.
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