In about four weeks, we’ll celebrate a wedding here at Redeemer. Chrissy Bigelow, who is a daughter of our congregation, and her fiancee Steve DeNitto will be married here on September 25th. It’s always an exciting time. Over the last several months, Chrissy has shared on her Facebook page the stories, hopes, and challenges, and myriad of details they face in putting together the big day. With all the planning and many considerations that go into a wedding, the service is actually one of the easiest things to plan – what with invitations, travel, transportation and all the reception details. I remember from our own wedding that the guest list and the seating chart are the stickiest parts of wedding planning: who to invite, who sits where, with whom? Do you think they’ll find something to talk about? How close to the front should they sit? Will they feel snubbed if they’re at the back.
Jesus’ Meals
In this morning’s Gospel’s lesson, we find Jesus at a Sabbath dinner hosted by a leader of the Pharisees, and Jesus is giving a little advice on wedding etiquette, and, in particular, where to sit. He says, if you are invited to a wedding, don’t sit down in a place of honor, but take the lowest place, so that your host can invite you up to a better, more honored seat. Jesus tells them this parable because he observed how, when they sat down to eat, how the guests chose the places of honor first. In Jesus’ time, it was very important where you sat, not only at wedding banquets, but any meal. It was the custom that the more esteemed guests, people with greater rank or honor in the society, would sit in the central place, near the host, where they could be easily served. The greater your status or social rank, the better your seat. So, the meal was really a reflection of the larger community with the more highly esteemed at the head table, as it were, and the rest seated further out. Meals reinforced the social order and a person’s role and status in a given community. But they were also opportunities to improve your rank and honor, to improve your stature. Indeed, if you were invited up to a better seat, to the head table, it would be a reflection of your increased honor within the community, which was incredibly important to your work, your influence, your family, and even marrying well. Even moving up one seat higher up could make a significant difference.
So when the leader of the Pharisees called everyone to dinner, we can imagine all these people jockeying for position trying to get the best seat, thinking, “just one seat higher than last time, just a seat next to this leader or that.” Even before dinner, they were probably hovering over the places they wanted to sit. However, Jesus tells them that honor is not about where you sit, about being at the head table. Jesus says that true honor comes from honoring others. He says that “we are called not to seek places of honor for ourselves, but to seek to honor others more.” He calls those there to humility and deference.
As they eat, Jesus gives them more advice. He says to them: when you host a meal, don’t just invite people like you, or people of higher social rank that you are trying to impress and become like. Don’t host a meal just to get ahead. Do not invite those that can repay the favor, just so you can stay on the dinner party circuit. Rather, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Then, you will be truly blessed. For, your honor will grow in the kingdom of God, and that’s what matters.
Of course, this is not just good advice. The thing is: since the meal was a reflection of the larger community, society and culture, Jesus, in calling for a change to the way things are done a mealtime, was calling for a change in the way life itself was lived, how communities regarded and treated people. Those of higher rank should defer to those of lower rank. Those people of privilege should seek to place privilege for others. He says, invite people that can’t repay you. Practice hospitality for its own sake, expecting nothing in return. Invite and sit with the outcasts of the community, those with no rank – the sick, the poor, and the scorned. This was radical in this culture, to follow Jesus in this was, as one commentator put it, “cultural suicide”. For, if one behaved in these ways, one would be “socially ruined.” It is quite possible, even likely, that none of the people at that dinner followed his teaching. And it is hard for us too.
The moral of the story is that we should show humility in our daily lives and practice great and open hospitality. But, as one commentator points out, it raises a much deeper question: “How do I know my place?” How do I know my place? How do I gauge my place or my position in life? Is it my age, my job, my family? Does my place come from how many dinner parties or weddings I’m invited to and where I sit? Is my place in life a result of my education, my job, my salary, the community I live in? “How do I know my place and who decides where my place is?
In our own ways, we can be very much like the people at Jesus’ dinner party jockeying for position around the table, hoping and trying to just get a little bit ahead. We jockey for position in our work lives, home lives, social lives, and even church lives. And it is not always with an eye to socio-economic climbing. It is not always about greed or power. Sometimes it is just an attempt to feel safe, to feel like we belong somewhere.
The people at this dinner party that Jesus is teaching are not the most sympathetic people in the Gospels – far from it. They really invited Jesus to eat with them as a kind of set up, so they could watch him, catch him in the act of transgressing the religious law. But, the thing is, Jesus was also watching them and he sees right through them. And he had sympathy for them. They were people that lived with a great uncertainty about where they belonged in life, about their rank, people struggling for every drop of honor, and living with a constant fear of losing it. Their whole lives were a project to gain honor and avoid shame. But Jesus says to them and us: that’s no way to live. There is a better way. Jesus invites us, urges us, to stop our jockeying for position. He says that you and I already have a place at the table. It is not a place that we have earned. It is a place that we are given by him. And when we find ourselves sitting in the lesser seats, Jesus invites us up to a place of honor – not for what we have done, what we have accumulated in possessions or power – but out of his great love for us. At Jesus’ table – this table – there is no distinction, there are no places of greater or lesser honor. Honor belongs to Jesus alone, and he shares it with us generously. For, there has never been a position of greater honor that being God’s one and only Son. And yet, in his life, Jesus never even owned a table. He ate where he was invited and sometimes invited himself over. He ate with every kind of person. So that whatever rank he had as a teacher and rabbi, healer and miracle worker, he freely gave away at those meals for the sake of others. Likewise, he freely gave the rank and honor of being the only Son of God away on the cross. In doing so, he transformed a place of shame into a place of honor.
On the cross, God takes us “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish” all of our days.
And at his Communion table, everyone is welcome. Everyone has a place. Everyone belongs. Everyone is honored, not for what we do, but for who God is and that God invites us.
Conclusion
In the next couple of weeks some of us will be going back to school, finding our place in a new class, new school, new college. Some of us will be doing our jobs with a renewed focus that the fall season brings. Some of us will be looking for work, trying to find a place to use our gifts and skills. Some will be trying to understand what changes in their health means for them. Some have lost loved ones and are figuring out their place without them. In those and countless other ways, we will all be trying in the weeks ahead to find our place in this world.
But, in all these things, we remember and cherish that we already have a place in this life – one that cannot be taken away, one that is secure. Our place is with God – and God with us. Amen.
