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September 2, 2007
Scripture: Luke 14:1, 7-14
Title: "When You Give A Banquet"

When I was in seventh grade, a dreadful fate befell me: I was sent to cotillion. The leather soled dancing shoes I had to wear were terribly slippery, to this day I remember the cold, clammy hands my first dancing partner had, and though the dancing didn’t come easy to me, over the next few months I learned plenty about which fork was which, how to go through a receiving line, the proper way to make introductions, how to sit, how to stand, how to walk, how to talk, how to be escorted, how to wear gloves, how to be seated in a restaurant or theater…

At first glance, this text looks like cotillion for disciples. Why is Jesus concerned about the seating protocol at a banquet? An interlude on table manners in the middle of the journey to Jerusalem, and one with such clear if-then statements too—it’s like Jesus is saying, this is how to get ahead, this is how to look good. This doesn’t look like our Jesus, or Luke’s Jesus. Why does the gospel go flying off into a tangent of triviality?

Luke gives us a hint to keep us on the right track—the quotation of Jesus begins with the words, ‘he told them a parable.’ That is our signal that there is more going on here than meets the eye. There are metaphors afoot—so stay alert, and be prepared for implications. This text is not about the social graces any more than the parable of the sower is farming advice. This is about the Kingdom of Heaven.

And the banquet setting is not insignificant, or merely a nice touch of atmosphere. Food and table are serious business for Luke—the Associate Minister of my home church would often reference Luke during her communion meditations, saying that Luke talks more about eating and eating related topics than any other part of the Bible. It seems that every important thing that happens in Luke happens around a table—the Last Supper, sure, but also the revelation of Jesus’ resurrection, the promise of the Holy Spirit and the Great Commission, and the early days of the Church.

We know that the gospel of Luke as a whole is the gospel most closely aligned to Greek culture, Jesus’ role as a teacher receiving the most emphasis. In Hellenistic literature a banquet is a common setting in which to set a philosopher with something to say. Plutarch wrote that character is most clearly revealed in the small, mundane incidents of life, and for us a belief in the Incarnation must confirm the significance of even the details of our lives that seem the most trivial. What we do matters, and lessons on what we do and what we’re supposed to do and the nature of God and the Kingdom of God abound whenever and wherever we stop and look around. How we behave at a banquet is important in its own right, but it’s also important because of what it can mean.

The parable can be divided into two parts—advice for guests and advice for hosts. The advice for guests I think is harder to pin a theological meaning to because it can seem so very shallow. Jesus says, if you start off at a high place and are asked to move lower, that’s going to be embarrassing. But if you sit at a low place and are asked to move higher, then everybody at the banquet can see how great you are. It’s very good advice—for cotillion. But it doesn’t seem like Jesus Advice.

Fred Craddock writes of the perils to be found in these verses. I think we could deal with this text more easily if Jesus simply told the people at the banquet that they ought not to be concerned about getting the best seat at the banquet and then moved on. It’s the idea that acting in a humble way will bring an immediate and material reward that makes this text seem odd. Craddock writes that it is too easy for us to read in these verses instructions on how to disguise our selfishness with humility. This is not a divinely approved plan for how to get what we wanted in the first place. And we know this because of what comes at verse eleven: ‘For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We hear it again in chapter 18, the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Just as it was the tax collector’s sincere humility that caused him to go home justified, rather than the Pharisee, it is the sincere humility and modesty of the banquet guests that will result in their being moved to a higher place, because, after all, we’re talking about the Kingdom of Heaven here. And we see these same words in Matthew, when the disciples asked Jesus who is greatest in the Kingdom, and Jesus set a child before them, and again when Jesus explains to the disciples why they are not to demand the homage given teachers and leaders, but act as servants.

My high school geometry teacher used to do something she called Fruit Basket Friday: on Fridays she would flip the seating chart, so that the front row students sat on the back row, the back row students sat in the front, and only the students in the exact middle got to stay where they were. In the Kingdom of Heaven, every day is Fruit Basket day. Why? Because we have known almost from the beginning of the story, when the younger sons of Genesis surpassed the elders, and when God heard the slaves of Egypt crying out for freedom and answered them in spectacular fashion, that God is on the side of the weak and oppressed. Because that’s the way it is. It’s a fact bound up in everything we can know about the nature of God.

And then there’s the advice for hosts, and this is the part that looks a little more Bible-y, and sounds a little more like something Jesus would say. And for today, I think it’s the part that speaks more to where we are and what choices and opportunities are before us. We have so much—we are wealthy not only in a material sense, but also we have such a spiritual and emotional abundance in our lives—when we want, we can throw some amazing banquets. We spread out our intellects and our experiences and our talents and we make each other welcome.

Everyone knows how much Midway Christian Church people love to eat. We had a banquet last week up at the park, and we had one awhile back comprised entirely of pie, and in another few weeks there will be one at the Nance house. We also have a banquet at 9:30 in the Fellowship Hall when we gather for Sunday School and everyone has something to say. It’s a banquet when we have a board meeting, and on cabinet and committee night, and when the kids are improvising a game of baseball out back and a home run is when you hit the ball through the propped open back door—yeah, that’s a banquet too. So seeing as how this is something we do frequently, naturally we should know what Jesus has to say about hosting a banquet as well as attending one.

Jesus is concerned about motivations, and Jesus is concerned about the guest list.

We have all at some time or another been faced with something that looked a lot like hospitality or generosity but was in reality something else entirely. Sometimes gifts come with strings attached, or with implications, or obligations, and we realize that we’ve landed in a difficult spot. Hosting, as part of the larger concept of giving, is a way of putting others in our debt. When we have done something nice for someone, it seems reasonable to expect that they will do something nice for us. When that expected return of niceness becomes our motivation, that’s a problem.

Even though this seems like more concrete, spiritual advice than the business about where guests should sit, we should remember that we’re still in the parable. This is still much more about the Kingdom of Heaven than about place cards and dessert forks. If the Kingdom of Heaven is like a banquet, then God is the host. God is the host, and we are all guests who should not be concerned with where we sit. And if God has invited us into the kingdom and given us a place at the banquet, with what answering act of kindness can we honestly expect to repay that? Because we are all guests at God’s banquet, when we give our own we should look through our pretense of being a host and therefore make no claims, set no conditions, and expect no return.

In the parable, Jesus tells us to invite to our banquets those who cannot invite us to theirs. For us today, that can also mean spreading our time and talents around in places where they will not be appreciated. If we get too used to gratitude and praise, we run a risk of those things becoming our motivation. So I think sometimes we need to cast our pearls before swine—we need to give everything we have and get it thrown back in our face, we need to pour all our strength into a task and have it not make a bit of difference, we need to walk into the teeth of betrayal and heartache and exhaustion because that’s the only way to remember what the point of it all really is—to remember, truly, why we do the things we do.

So who do we invite to these banquets of ours? The poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. The unappreciative, the uncomprehending, the strangers, the outcasts, the different. These are the Kingdom of Heaven people—we’ve known that since Mary sang her song in chapter one—‘God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.’ In this text, and throughout the entire gospel of Luke, we see that the clearest sign of acceptance we can give to each other is in our willingness to sit down at a table and break bread together. The unity of the early Church was not shown through baptism, but by whether the Christians were willing to sit down all together and have a meal. And this is still a powerful test to put to ourselves today. Is everyone who has ever been under this roof welcome in our living rooms? Will we sit down to dinner with anyone and everyone who calls themselves Christian, or calls themselves human?

Inviting someone to dinner is a different thing entirely from sending food to that person. It’s not enough to provide for the needs of the poor—we are to invite them to the banquet as well—the real banquet, the one we have with our family and friends. Fred Craddock writes that in the Christian community nobody is a Project. Probably, if you’re hungry, you don’t care where the food comes from, or under what conditions, but when we’re the hosts it’s our business to care about that.

And in these last two paragraphs I don’t think I’ve said anything you don’t already know. Prejudice bad! Keeping the people we help at arms length and then congratulating ourselves, also bad. Holding back our talents until they can find appreciation, putting limits on our inclusiveness, letting church be church and the world be the world, bad, bad, bad. We know.

But this is a snarl in the simplicity—the setting of the parable. Back at verse one, we read that this all went down at the house of a leader of the Pharisees, where Jesus had been invited to eat a Sabbath meal. A Pharisee! Jesus has infiltrated the enemy’s camp! Now comes the part when he starts cutting a swath through these ranks of hypocrisy and conventionality, right? No, not really. Sure, he speaks a parable, but it’s no harsher than the sort of things he says to the disciples. There’s certainly no explosion like chasing the money-changers out of the Temple. This is Jesus the dinner guest, making conversation.

This is the pinnacle of inclusiveness—that Jesus, even though he is clearly on the side of society’s victims, does not shut out the victimizers. Jesus wants to make sure there is room for the poor and oppressed at the table, but he does not create space by shutting out the rich and oppressing. There is room for everybody.

We who occupy this particular space in the world have the problem of being prejudiced in two different directions at the same time. We do have to guard against a tendency to get squeamish around the people we believe we have a duty to help and protect, but we are also apt to distance ourselves in indignation from those who we believe are the problem. Really, we’ve got to find some way to fight the good fight and still have room for everybody when it’s time to sit down at the table. God is on the side of the victimized, always, but we do not create love and compassion for those people by taking it away from others. Power dynamics certainly will shift in the Kingdom of Heaven, but the fact remains that the door will be opened to those who knock. That’s why we need to follow Jesus’ example of really and truly being open to all people we cross paths with. There is no place where we can draw a line; there is nobody we can refuse to eat with.

When we give a banquet, it’s going to be big and noisy and messy. It’s going to be the grandest potluck ever seen, and there will still be so many people there who didn’t have anything to bring that it will take a loaves and fishes miracle to get something on every plate. And when that miracle comes, it will have been so expected that we’ll barely notice, and they’ll be plenty of food for us to throw at each other when we start to disagree. And then we’ll laugh, and then we’ll clean up, and then we’ll decide what we’re going to do next.

Let us pray.

God of abundance, thank you for giving us so many things to share. Show us how we can create a place where everyone is equally at home. Amen.

Amanda Hatafield, Student Associate

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