A Place at the Table

Proper 17C: Luke 14:1, 7-14

If there was ever a gospel reading that invited a polite yawn, today’s lesson from Luke might be it. In this passage, Jesus comes across like some sort of 1^st-century Miss Manners as he divvies out advice about where to sit when you’re a guest and whom to invite when you are hosting your own dinner.

Now, the first half of Jesus’ lesson seems to be sound, common-sense advice—how much better it is to present yourself as humble and then be invited to more prestigious seat, than to run the risk of embarrassment by appearing arrogant. The second half of the lesson turns the focus of the etiquette lesson from guest around to host, as Jesus suggests that hosts should invite the unpopular and unimpressive rather than the respectable and well-to-do. Okay, so this is a little more provocative. But on the whole, I still feel like we would all say a collective “ho-hum” after hearing this reading and move on.

Except.... Except that there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Knowing the right thing to do as a guest and as a host, after all, is not simply about manners in the ancient world; it's about honor and shame and social position and political standing. Back then, inviting the ‘right kind’ of people and being invited to the ‘right kind’ of parties was a reflection of the kind of person you are, your status in society. And status—honor and reputation—mattered more than just about anything.

You see, in a society like ancient Israel, maintaining honor and avoiding shame are of the utmost importance. It’s not simply about being embarrassed. Public shame could have tangible implications. A family’s business position or a child’s marriage prospects could be negatively, if the shame is significant enough. So by suggesting that guests take the seats of least honor and that hosts invite the poor and outcast, Jesus isn’t simply giving good advice here. He’s suggesting his listeners do something that doesn’t make any sense, that wouldn’t bolster their social status, and may even hurt it. What he’s doing is, he's turning convention on its head. He's challenging the status quo. He's inciting a social revolution! Well, maybe that’s a little much. But you can bet a few people would be upset by this, particularly those who commanded the highest respect, who were at the top of society…like the Pharisees and Sadducees. You can imagine they didn’t much appreciate Jesus’ not-so-subtle criticism—and him being a guest no less! And they would just as soon have someone shut him up—permanently if necessary.

I know that may sound a little extreme, but hear me out. We humans are naturally insecure creatures, and that insecurity, coupled with the instabilities of the world, means there are few things we crave more in this constantly changing world than order, stability. More often than not, we seek that sense of security by comparing ourselves to others. By achieving status in the eyes of others, we can find some measure of control. It gives us a sense of our place in this world; it tells us where we stand, how we're doing, how we measure up. It’s not that we want to be able to say, “We’ve made it!” But we do want to know we are at least keeping ahead of others. This is why social pecking orders are so important. Whether we love them or hate them, it's rare that we're not keenly aware of them and invested in the pecking order of the various groups we're a part of, whether that’s at the office, among our neighbors or in the school cafeteria.

I once knew a man who said that he was changing jobs because he figured that his days with his present company were numbered. He feared that the boss had it in for him and that he was soon to be dismissed. “How did you figure that out?” I asked. “I went to the annual company holiday dinner and picked up my name tag at the welcome table. I was seated at table 21, a hundred miles from the head table, table one. Not even table ten. I knew I was toast! So, I began looking for a new job the next day.”

It’s just human nature, something humans have always cared about. I was reading the other day about how it was when the stagecoach was the main means of transportation in the American West. Now, stage coaches, like other vehicles back then, were relatively small. At most, they carried six passengers. Nevertheless, tickets were sold for stage coaches just like they are today on modern airlines, with first and second and third class. The distinction, however, did not have anything to do with the size of the seat or the kind of food that was served—everyone got the same amount of space. Rather, what distinguished one class from another was what was expected of the ticket holder in case the stagecoach got into difficulty, which often happened, like when it came to a deep bog of mud or an incline too steep to climb. When the stagecoach got into a difficult situation, a first-class ticket entitled the ticket holder to remain in the stagecoach, no matter what. When you got the most expensive ticket, what you bought was essentially the privilege to not have to do any work. A second-class ticket meant that if difficulty arose, you had to get out and walk alongside the stagecoach until the difficulty could be resolved. The cheapest ticket—the third-class ticket—required the holder to take part in solving the difficulty. This meant they not only had to get out of the coach when there was a problem, but they also had to get down in the mud, alongside the driver, and do whatever had to be done to get the coach through the mud or up the hill. They were required to offer what today we would call "sweat equity" as part of their fare. Even in a rough and tumble, every-man–for-himself kind of place like the Wild West, people found ways to show their status off to others.

Now from the outside, status and what makes for high status can seem arbitrary, even laughable, such as sitting in a stagecoach while everyone else pushed.  But that doesn’t mean that status isn’t important or that it doesn’t have serious consequences even today. Like when, at a state dinner at the White House, some dignitary gets seated in the wrong place and it provokes an international crisis, which has happened more than once. There is a position, did you know, a major Whitehouse position, known as the Chief of Protocol, whose job it is to prevent such diplomatic faux pas. Jockeying for position is just human nature, it seems, a fact of life in the 21^st century just as much as it was the 1st century.

Yet Jesus refuses to play that game, and he has no problem telling off the guy who's invited him for supper -- how tacky! – telling him that his (and our) pecking orders aren't worth squat. More than that, Jesus is challenging this guy (and us) to defy the pecking order, to actually turn it on its head, to go to the bottom if you’re on top and to come on up if you’re on the bottom.

Yep, saying stuff like that is sure to get one branded as crazy or else dangerous, a threat to the order that needed to be eliminated as soon as possible. And Jesus was killed in large part because he dared to call the social order of his day-- and all social orders -- into question. Jesus proclaims here and throughout the gospel that the way we rank people has nothing to do with the way people are ranked in the Kingdom of God.

"All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted" (v11), Jesus says. "Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 18:4) And “some are last who will be first and some are first who will be last."

And that gets to the heart of the matter. Jesus isn’t talking here about social etiquette—guest lists and seating arrangements. He is talking about the Kingdom of God, about how it is when God’s rule is in effect in this world. This is why Luke has this odd comment about Jesus telling them a “parable” and then proceeding to give what seem to be a straightforward lesson on manners. By describing what Jesus was saying as a “parable,” Luke is alerting us that what Jesus seems to be talking about isn’t what he’s really talking about. As elsewhere, when Jesus tells stories about wedding banquets and party invitations, he’s really talking about spiritual things, namely, what it’s like to be invited to share in the great party awaiting us in his Kingdom.

Indeed, the point of the “parable” is that we have been invited to a heavenly banquet. Rather than being last on the invitation list, or even left off the list, the Lord welcomes us as honored guests.

And while that sounds at first take like it ought to be great news, we have to admit it can make us uneasy, anxious, even frustrated. Because it disrupts our normal sense of our worth—the insistence that we “earned it ourselves”—and it throws us instead into radical dependence on God's grace and God's grace alone. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus makes it clear that we can't stand on our accomplishments—our wealth, or strength, or our good looks, or IQ, or our place in pecking order. There is nothing we can do to buy our way into the party, to establish ourselves before God and the world, except to trust in God's desire to be in relationship with us. There’s nothing we can do to have a claim on God; nevertheless, we have been claimed by God and invited to love others as we've been loved.

As we see in today's reading, it is precisely because God has invited us into relationship with him—because God has given us a dignity and worth we could never secure for ourselves—that we are now free to do the same for others. We are free to put others before ourselves, to let them take seats of honor, to invite them to be our dinner guests, not because of what they can do for us, but because of what has already been done for us. You see, when our security is located in Jesus, in our being chosen by him, and not in our efforts to one-up each other, we become free, free to give generously to those in need, free to show hospitality to strangers, free to spend time with those who can’t do anything to advance our agendas. We are free to do this because we no longer fear that we will miss out, that we will be overlooked, that we won’t have what we need. Our place at the table is safe, secured by God.

It's a new world Jesus is establishing, a new world which has no place for our insecurities and cravings for order. Which is why Jesus’ words are so disruptive and why those invested in the pecking order are so threatened by him and why they concluded he had to be silenced, permanently. But this is Jesus, God's Son, and he will come back, lifting his scarred hands in eternal blessing, inviting us into a new vision and a new way of being, where there is no first or last, no honor or shame, only us, bound to one another in God's abundant love and grace.

Thanks be to God for showing us this love, this grace. Sometimes it frightens us, because we wish so desperately that we could be just a little bit in control of it all. But when we let go of our illusions of control, oh how wonderful is the new world that Christ has begun! Thanks be to God!