A Place at the Table

Luke 14:1, 7–14 finds Jesus at a dinner party, watching guests scramble for the best seats. Instead of competing for honor, he calls us to humility, generosity, and hospitality that can’t be repaid. In this sermon, we hear the good news of God’s abundance: a table so wide that every seat is first-class, every place is holy, and no one is left out.

Transcript

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You're listening to The Word on Baker Street, a podcast from Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Bakersfield, California. Each week we share the good news of God's love through the sermons from our Sunday worship. Wherever you are in your journey, you are welcome here.

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The Holy Gospel according to Luke 14, 1 and 7 through 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 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 our 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 when the host comes, he may say to your friend, Move up higher, and then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table for you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who are 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 sisters or your relatives or your rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, 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, the gospel of the Lord. Let us pray. Loving God, may these words and the meditations of all our hearts draw us closer to you today. Amen. So our lesson today: Jesus is invited to a dinner party, and it's hosted by a religious leader, and it sounds like there's quite a few people attending this meal. I don't get a sense that Jesus is in any way the guest of honor, but he's also not a stranger to them. I mean, at this point, Jesus is fairly well known. He's a popular itinerant preacher. He's been healing and teaching everywhere that he goes, and it also seems that he gets invited to dinner a lot. And guest of honor or not, something always seems to happen at these meals. Several times women crash the party and they they pour oil on Jesus and then they wipe it with their hair. Strangers will come in off the street asking to get healed. There might even be crowds of people demanding to get inside. Asking, you know, they want Jesus to come out. And there's all this commotion surrounding Jesus when a dinner is happening. And it happens so often that I'm actually surprised that Jesus keeps getting asked. Unless maybe this host is deliberately looking for a way to kind of spice things up in that guess who's coming to dinner kind of way. Jesus doesn't disappoint. Today's lesson it skipped over a couple of verses, and in them, a man enters the dinner party who has severely swelled up feet, and Jesus heals him. And did I mention that it's a Sabbath dinner? So yeah, here's Jesus one more time healing on the Sabbath. And of course, there's some that are upset, but really they seem to be more worried about where everyone is gonna sit than Jesus. He's simply kind of watching this whole thing happen. People coming in and trying to figure out where they're gonna sit, each watching the best place they can get. And you know, they're not wanting to embarrass themselves and sit in the wrong spot. You know, then they'll be asked to move or something like that. Everyone's checking out the cool table. You know, who's sitting there? Could I get to sit at that table? And does anyone else think this sounds like a middle school cafeteria? When Jesus sits down, he criticizes all of it. And then he adds, when you throw a party, don't invite your friends or your relatives or the rich. Invite the poor and the blind, invite people you don't know, people who can never return the favor. In doing this, Jesus is criticizing the social and the political practices of the time. The ancient Near East was a culture built on honor and shame. And this meant that every single move that people made was calculated to either increase their honor or to decrease their shame. And it was especially true at dinner parties. Who you would you invited and who got to sit where, it was a really big deal. These details would dictate the guest list and the seating chart for the next person's dinner party. Everything was kind of a quid pro quo and pay-to-play environment. Every interaction was calculated to provide this maximum benefit to a person's reputation. In her book Gratitude, Diana Butler Bass explains how ancient Rome was structured, structured politically like a pyramid, with the emperor way up on top, and everything good flowed down from the emperor. And by the time it reached the masses at the bottom, there really wasn't much left to go around. And what flowed up then as a form of gratitude for what came from the empire was taxes and debts. Like it or not, our society is still a lot like this. When democracy was first set up, I think they wanted it to be a more equal system than patronage or feudalism, but along the way, all these commercial interests, they they got in the way of democratic ideals and gratitude got mutated. I mean, I think about how our politicians are captive to groups that give them money. I still can't believe how powerful the NRA is. Shooting after shooting after shooting. Another one this last week in Minnesota, and still nothing changes because of who owes who their place of power. Our country's founders may have hoped to create a society that operated differently, but desire for power and position is seductive. And when we think about it, it's not much different than those people at that dinner party with Jesus. You know, they're all jockeying for the best place at the table. And of course, it's uh it's easy to look at politics and see that scramble for the place of power and at the table. It's much harder to turn that scripture on myself. The more I read and reread this lesson, the more I don't like what Jesus is asking. I mean, so what? Don't exalt myself, don't judge my worth or the worth of others based on what they wear or where they live. Don't maximize my social capital at every opportunity. Don't network, don't schmooze, don't try to get attention, open my heart and home to people who can't do anything for me. I mean, if it's not what's in it for me, then or being first or being the best, then what's the point? And I can apply this to just about everything in my life. From how I evaluate and judge other churches and their locations and their attendance, the size of their buildings, the message, to the feeling of pride that I get when I say that my kid lettered in tennis his freshman year. And there is our new truck. It's a 2024 four-wheel drive to Toyota, Tacoma. It is all black. Now, to be fair, our old truck was deemed unsafe to drive. So we needed something safe for our teenage boys to drive. And nothing says safe more than mom's hand-me-down Subaru Forester. Because, yeah, the truck's mine. Practicality aside, that this truck is totally badass, and I love the way I feel when I am driving it. And and those semi-trucks, the ones that I complain about all the time, on more than one occasion, since I've been driving this truck up the hill, they've moved aside for me to get by them, and then they swing right back out in front of a little car. I mean, talk about getting moved to the front of the banquet table. It's a slippery slope. Those good or bad feelings that we use to judge ourselves and one another, it's seductive and nearly impossible to let go of. And yet Jesus insists that we do. Jesus says it's God's desire to reverse our priorities and upend these hierarchies and challenge our values. God turns us inside out and upside down because there's no end to the miserable human game of who's in and who's out. God knows that our scramble for greatness will only lead to more anxiety and more suspicion, more loneliness, more hatred, more division. Why is it so hard to trust in God's abundance? Jesus keeps telling us that God's kingdom is not built on scarcity. It's all about abundance. Now, money, that might be a pie, and our time, that's a pie. But God's love is not a pie. There are no winners and losers. There's no insiders or outsiders, only abundance, where every single one of us is already welcome, already loved, already known, already cherished. And in God's realm, the currency isn't arrogance, it's humility, it's not stinginess, but it's generosity, not fear, but hospitality. And at the center stands a table that is so wide with so many places of honor that none of us needs to scramble or exhaust ourselves to claim a seat. Every chair is first class. Every seat is holy ground. One of the things that mucks us up in all of this are our own thoughts about humility. We often confuse it with shrinking back or low self-esteem or even silence in the face of injustice. And even when we manage to define it in a healthy way, it slips away the second that we claim it. Our culture, it isn't known for humility. So it makes it so hard to do it. Do this. It's always the loudest and the flashiest, and who get rewarded. And we idolize the best, the biggest, and the most. I mean, is it possible to lay that down? I don't know. What I do know is that when we dare to sit at Jesus' table, we are making a quiet but powerful protest against the culture of providing ourselves and competing for its worth. It's not easy work. It asks something of us every day to eat and drink with God is to live in tension, intention with those pecking orders that define our workplace and our schools and our politics and even our churches. It's tiring. But it's also holy. Because how we sit at the table matters. Who we welcome to sit beside us matters. Jesus says, favor those who cannot repay us. Prefer the poor. Step out of the spotlight and choose a place that doesn't flatter our ego. After all, this is God's world. And nothing here is ordinary. In God's realm, that ragged stranger at the door is an angel in disguise. Beloved, the world will keep telling us to climb higher, to prove ourselves, to protect our own seat. But Jesus shows us another way. Humility that frees, generosity that heals, hospitality that changes lives. Let's rise from this table ready to live as if God's abundance is true. Because it is. And when we do, the kingdom breaks in right here and right now, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

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Thanks for listening to the Word on Baker Street. If this message has spoken to you, share it with a friend. More sermons and reflections can be found at emmanuelbakersfield.org. May God's grace and peace be with you today and always.