Sermon
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, AR
Pentecost 13, Proper 17
Seats at the Table

In one of the summers during my time in seminary, the whole faculty took a sabbatical trip to the Holy Land. It was an enriching experience for them. But for the next year, as each faculty member took his or her turn to preach for the weekly community eucharist, inevitably the preacher would begin to make a point by referring to, “when we in the Holy Land last summer...” It became a shared community joke. Preachers later in the rotation even apologized, “I know you’ve all heard enough stories about the sabbatical trip, but when we were in the Holy Land last summer...”
In the same way I’m going to have to ask you to bear with me, because when I was on my sabbatical last summer I read some things about first century life and customs that just seem too important not to share. So I want to talk a bit about the significance of meals, group meals or communal meals in the world that Jesus lived in.

A meal, such as this gospel describes, was an important community event. It was literally the vehicle for signaling identity. To sit at the same table with another person was to make a public statement of acceptance and allegiance with that other person. It wasn’t polite. It usually was political. Good people for conscience sake would refuse to sit at table with anyone whose lifestyle or theology was unacceptable to them.

Meals were significant – socially, politically, religiously, economically. The Christian movement would pick up on that later-on by making the Eucharist its central act of worship.

The seating order at community group meals was very important. It was socially critical to seat people correctly according to a hierarchical order of their value in the community. There was a place for the most important and the least important and everyone carefully graded in between. The Essene community conducted a formal annual performance review for correct placement. The ladder of seating from highest to lowest was a public declaration of one’s community standing. It was not a matter of individual achievement. Your value was established by the group. And for many, keeping or raising your place was a matter of survival. It was a fearsome thing to lose your place, to be embarrassed publicly, humiliated, having to take a lower place. In the east it is called losing face. It’s hard for an individualistic culture like ours to understand, but losing face was often worse than losing one’s life.

Now it’s a bit tricky to consider how we read this story of Jesus at the synagogue leader’s sabbath banquet. At first blush, Jesus’ words sound like some practical advice, something you might read from the book of Proverbs. Don’t risk demotion. Play it safe. Sit lower so you avoid the risks of embarrassment and increase your chances of being shifted up a notch. At that level of reading, this is just strategic advice to ambitious ladder-climbers. Act humble. It’ll get you far. Pure self-interest.

And then Jesus says something that might look like a piece of spiritual capitalism. If you’ll give your banquet for the poor and crippled, you’ll bank some big time dividend’s in God’s book of accounts. Kind of like covering your futures options by getting saved so you won’t go to hell. Maybe some of you heard a sermon like that when you were a vulnerable ten year old. That’ll get you down the aisle, won’t it?

I don’t think that’s what Jesus was up to. I think Jesus was having some subversive fun with the whole system. “Be careful where you sit. But this whole banquet is a scandal.” It’s some more of his radical ‘try winning by losing” message. Try living by dying. He’s upsetting the whole hierarchical apple cart and replacing it with new values. Values about loving and serving for the sake of loving and serving. It’s okay to love yourself, no false humility necessary. Just love your neighbor as your self, no hierarchies at all. And everything grounded in loving and being loved by God.
It’s a pretty counter-cultural message today, too. How do we do that? How can we make that happen? A few simple suggestions for practicing the values Jesus is talking about:

I think I’m at my least accepting and most hierarchical when I’m driving my car. I’m going to try something. Instead of moving craftily into the fastest lane and the highest spot, I’m going to try to give up the position of judging who deserves to be behind or ahead of me. I’m going to look for opportunities to make the drive easier, faster, and less stressful for someone else. Why don’t you try that with me? Let’s compare notes how it works.

Here’s another idea. Practice looking around for the person who you think may be the most uncomfortable and look for an opportunity to say or do something that makes that person feel genuinely honored and appreciated.

What if those of us who vote and express our values publically would look to others’ advantage rather than our own, especially to the advantage of the poor, the sick and the marginalized. Good people can disagree in good conscience about what the best strategies might be to serve the poor, but we can agree to be advocates on behalf the poor and weak, especially those who we think could never repay us.

And maybe a last piece of advice from Martha P. Sterne, an Episcopal priest at St. Andrew’s in Maryville, Tennessee.
The next time you have people to dinner, don’t ask those who can pay you back. Don’t ask anybody who can do you any favors. Ask the poor who won’t know how much money you spent on the hors d’oeuvres, only that they are delicious. Ask the crippled and the lame who won’t be dancing around worrying about which chair to choose, but will be grateful to sit down. Ask the blind, who won’t be watching over your shoulder to see who else is coming. Ask the powerless. Ask the empty. You won’t believe what a party you will be letting yourself in for.

The sophisticated crowd, the ones in the black ties using the right forks and saying, “Oh, no more for me... I don’t care for any,” are appalled. The elegant ones who know their place and know the rules look way down the table at the smiling man in the center of a ragtag party of hungry people feasting, “caring for” every morsel, singing, telling stories, crying or laughing until the tears stream down their faces. The ones who know just what to do and where to be and how not to make fools of themselves, they watch and wonder. What in heaven’s name is going on at the other end of the table?

Communion is going on. The deaf are buttering the biscuits for the blind. The leper goes to get more strawberry for the lame. And the poor toast the broken-hearted with fine, full-bodied wine.

The evening grows late. Etiquette lessons are over. Jesus stands up, and the one-eyed, crooked-legged, gap-toothed crowd stands with him. They are having a ball, the time of their lives, and they will follow him on because everywhere he is, there is a feast. And there is room for everybody at the table, nobody cares who sits where, and everybody shares in the abundance.

Here’s our banquet table. God has invited us, with all our blindness and brokenness and even elitism too. God has also invited the weary, the poor, and the outcast as well, and if they are under-represented, then we need to improve our invitation process. God has created a fabulous feast, filled with the abundant food that fills and heals, welcoming and accepting who we are, now. All are equal; we are one. Those in the front have the role of the servants, those who serve the honored guests of God. At this table, no one will be humiliated, no one hungry, no one hurt. But Christ’s friendship and hospitality is extended to everyone. Welcome to the banquet. Eat. Drink. Shalom!