“Feast of Faith”
Luke 14:1, 7-14 and James 2:1-6
September 6, 2015, First Presbyterian Church of Holt
I’d like you to imagine this scene, for some of you it might take thinking ahead to this upcoming week, for some it might take looking back a few decades: It’s the first day of school, you walk into the cafeteria and look around, try and gauge where your friends are sitting, or at least people who look like they might be friendly, and take your place. Why do you sit there? What happens when you can’t figure out your place? What would happen if you sat somewhere else? What happens if you sit with people who are higher up the social ladder than you see yourself to be? What happens if you sit with people who are lower down the social ladder than you see yourself to be?
Both of our scripture lessons today give us stories of seating arrangements. In James we hear of seating arrangements as a form of judgment, “2For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, 3and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please’, while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there’, or, ‘Sit at my feet’, 4have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?”
In the Gospel reading, Jesus offers this 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 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.” (Luke 14:8-11)
What would it mean for these ideologies to to play out in the cafeteria? For you to ignore the superficial markers that set people apart? For you to purposefully pick a less desirable table? For you to refuse to care about the social ladder? What would happen to your own standing? How would that impact the school year for you?
Particularly in high school these social orders can be quite apparent, but that doesn’t mean they disappear when we leave high school. It happens in workplaces and social gatherings and who invites who to a party and unfortunately, even in the work and worship of the church.
What does it look like to allow others to have a better place than you? What does it look like if on a Sunday morning you show up and someone has taken your seat? What if we sat somewhere else?
Jesus also questions who is invited to the table, challenging hosts to expand their guest lists: “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. 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.” (Luke 14: 12-14)
Luther College Professor, Rolf Jacobson had this to say about our scripture today, “In Urban Roman culture, patronage and the idea of status is everything. From how you’re dressed to how you present yourself there’s a clear demarcation of where you belong. So if you’re invited to a party it’s not like you’re going to look at all the chairs and say, ‘Hmm, I wonder where I’m going to sit.’ You know right away based on who you are and who everyone else in the room is, you just do. And to try to upset the balance of that threatens to shame you and shame your host… It sounds kind of weird to us and really calculating and maybe it was, but it’s just the way it works. So if you start to overturn that, and to mess with that and say ‘I’m going to invite people who could never ever pay me back or who could never return the political favor or the generosity or whatever,’ some people are going to start to get in their minds they don’t have to pay attention to those rules. So those who guard the social order, or those who are simply trying to find their way in the world soon find this is a dangerous thing. You don’t give hope to certain people. You don’t upset the balance… this isn’t just nice, that ruins the entire system for everybody else potentially… There’s an edge to this, there’s a threat to this depending upon how it’s carried out.”[1]
Changing the status quo threatens the powers that be and threatens the value of social currency. Inviting everyone to the table will absolutely change what sort of meal happens there, but it will also allow for a richness of diversity, a wealth of gifts, and a breadth of fellowship. Such a banquet may be chaotic, but it will be a life giving reflection of the Kingdom of God to come.
One winter, while I was in seminary we experienced our own sort of haphazard banquet. We were snowed in for several days right before Christmas break. Being here in Michigan, especially in the midst of a hot and humid couple of weeks it’s hard to imagine all of that snow or a community unable to deal with all of that snow, but that was how things went in Richmond, Virginia that December day. It hit Richmond late on a Saturday night and then of course the next day was Sunday morning, the morning most in the seminary community would spread out over Richmond, attending and leading worship throughout the 30 plus Presbyterian churches in the city. That morning, however, nearly every church had cancelled services.
And so, on that wintery December day we sent the word out that anyone who could get there would gather together for worship on campus. We put on our snow boots and walked across the quad to the campus chapel. Our service had a call to worship that was intended for a rural church 30 minutes outside the city, music from a praise bandleader who usually played in a suburban church, and a sermon from another church in the heart of Richmond. We cobbled together our prayers and praise and carefully prepared words and worshipped God in a very unusual sort of service.
Afterwards we gathered for a potluck. Since people had been getting reading to get out of town, each person’s cupboards were nearly bare. It was the strangest potluck I’ve ever attended. There was canned fruit and Ramen noodles, and macaroni and cheese. There was half of loaf of bread and half a jar of jam. Someone brought some hot chocolate packets. It was weird, but it was also wonderful, because though none of us had a lot of food, or even food that made much sense all together, we were all fed by the meal and nourished by the company. It was communion.
Preacher and teacher Sharron R. Blezard wrote this, “Serving God and neighbor is more like a community potluck than a gourmet meal in the finest restaurant. It’s less about perfection and more about improvisation. It’s less about form and more about function. It’s less about looks and much, much more about love. It’s has something to do with rubbing elbows with strangers and kin alike; after all, both can present challenges. Instead of a guest list carefully crafted to reflect our wishes and wiles, Jesus crafts a “grace list” that is an open invitation to the party. The point is this: At Jesus’ banquet table there is room for everyone. Great Aunt Mabel’s lime Jello salad can exist peacefully with vegan Valerie’s fresh green bean vinaigrette. Homemade mac and cheese can sit side-by-side with a bag of store-bought potato chips. Hamburgers and tamales and sno-cones co-exist and complement one another in delightful ways. When everyone brings his or her best offering, when we all show up, the banquet table groans with the goodness of God”[2]
Our congregation has had our own experience of this throughout this summer as we worship with our Wednesday night Open Cloister services. As we entered into our time of worship each week we would frame the service itself as it’s own sort of potluck, “a coming together of different flavors and recipes, with various levels of preparation, various histories behind the offerings of food and the offerings of spoken word and song.”
These services were tremendously life giving to me, because of the open format, they both challenged and enabled me to be fully attentive to the Holy Spirit, to get out of the way, as it were, and hear what God was saying to each person gathered together. It was a tremendous gift to get to know those who attended in that way, each of us daring to be open to God’s movement among us. There were times when we had no idea what to say, there are times when we had mostly desserts at our potluck beforehand. But at every service we were indeed fed in body and spirit. We brought what we had and it was enough.
This comic reflects the beauty of this radical kingdom banquet where all are invited. In this first picture the one sheep says “Jesus has good intentions, but really! what sort of party would you have if you just invited these down and out people.” And the other sheep says “uhh – you’d have the Eucharist, the offering of forgiveness and anticipation of heaven!” then the first sheep says “Huh! So Jesus does know how to party!”
When we come to the communion table we are all eating a common meal, bread and juice, but it is indicative of a much larger and more varied table. We come to this table in the midst of fellow Christians all over the world and all throughout time. At this table we offer up ourselves, our own ideas of who we think we should be, what we think we deserve. We forgo social conventions and pecking orders so that we may be brothers and sisters in Christ, so that we may fully partake in Christ’s grace.
At the communion table we celebrate the unconventional sacrifice of the ever-worthy Christ, for the perpetually unworthy sinners. We are fed and nurtured and renewed and valued in a way that has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with our own perceived worth, but has everything to do with the way God sees us and loves us and values us. We are an honored guest at this feast of God’s grace, not because of our bank balance, occupation, or social popularity, but entirely because of God’s love for us.
The message of the gospel is learning to see yourself as God sees you, learning to see that the systems of worldly standing don’t matter to God and your ability to break out of them isn’t the measure of who you are as a Christian, but it’s the way in which you actually can see the Gospel and can tangibly experience it in our presence.[3]
This is a table for the last, the lost, and the lonely. If you feel like you don’t belong, you’re in the exact right place. If you feel like you have fallen short, here you are more than enough. All of us and all of them, whoever the them of your life may be, are welcome to this table, and welcome to God’s larger kingdom. May it be so. Amen.
[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=432
[2] http://www.stewardshipoflife.org/2013/08/invited-and-inviting/
[3] http://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=432
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