Neill Morgan

Sermon Delivered September 2, 2007

Luke 14:1-14

14On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely. [²Just then, in front of him, there was a man who had dropsy. ³And Jesus asked the lawyers and Pharisees, “Is it lawful to cure people on the sabbath, or not?” ⁴But they were silent. So Jesus took him and healed him, and sent him away. ⁵Then he said to them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a sabbath day?” ⁶And they could not reply to this.]

⁷When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a 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. ¹¹For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” ¹²He said also to the one who had invited him, “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. ¹³But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

“Places, Everyone!”

In seventh grade, I got a part in a school play.  It was a silly little farce, and when I remember some of the lines, I still cringe.  But there was something about the stage that I loved in seventh grade, and it was all concentrated in a brief moment.  That moment came a few minutes before the curtain rose, when the backstage area was chaos.  People milled about, putting their props in the right place, making last minute repairs to the set or to costumes, and going over their lines one last time, trying to smooth them out so they sounded natural and not recited.

And then, it happened.  The stage manager announced, “Places, everyone!” and, like iron filings organizing around the poles of a magnet, everyone went to their starting point either on stage or in the wings.  In an instant, we all found exactly the right place where we belonged.  It was a moment of grace.

It was a moment of grace because it was so rare at 12 and 13 years old to feel that we were in exactly the right place, a place where we belonged.  There were a few students who excelled in sports and knew they would make the football, track, or baseball team; but, for most of us, seventh grade was the first time we had to try out to qualify for a limited number of places on a team, and more than half of us were cut after the first three tryouts, sent back to the gym for P.E. without ever getting to wear the uniform.  In the school cafeteria, if you sat in the wrong place, a ninth-grader was likely to come along and demand that you move. 

But, in the theatre, when the stage manager said, “Places, everyone!” we all knew exactly where to go, and we hit our spot and the play began, with every step, every word, every gesture memorized, rehearsed, and polished.  For that brief forty minutes of the play, I knew exactly where I was to be and what I was to say at all times.

Life is not like that; not very often.  It is just as likely to be more like the awkward situation Jesus describes when someone takes a seat at a wedding banquet and the host comes like some burly ninth-grader and tells him someone more important than you has arrived and needs this place. You can go sit with the other skinny four-eyed kids.

This parable, like many of Jesus stories, reminds us of how unlike the Kingdom of God this world is.  In this world, we live in an environment of rules unwritten and sometimes unspoken and unknown until we break them.  Class divisions separate communities, neighborhoods, which schools children get to attend, how we speak and the clothes we wear.  Competition is so deeply embedded in our DNA that, even if we live in a time less conscious of which seat at a wedding banquet is the seat of honor, we sometimes compete without thinking for things that do not make us happier, things that turn to ash when we get them.

An extreme case is James J. Cramer, a former hedge fund manager who recently published a book Confessions of a Street Addict.  His desire to win was so strong that for many years he never had time for his marriage and family, or even to enjoy the home he insisted they buy because their previous home, though nice by anyone’s standards, was not what he would call a “partner house.”  As his marriage and relationship with his son deteriorated, he finally realized that it was not the money he was working for.  His bank accounts held balances that were comparable to a small nation’s annual budget. 

It wasn’t the money.  It was winning.  It was status.  It was the pride of never losing.

He still has and earns plenty of money.  The change of which he writes in his book is the change of learning how to relate to others without competing against them all the time.  And, he has begun to use some of his time to participate in some of the charitable projects he has long supported with the 15% of his income he gives away.

The contrast Jesus presents between the life of human community and the Kingdom of God is so stark that it is hard to imagine.  People will come from East and West, from North and South, and sit together at the table in the Kingdom of God.  The poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind will sit at the table with the host, everyone together without regard to human divisions.

Jesus casts a vision of a community of such perfect humility that all that separates us one from another disappears at the dinner table.  It sounds so perfect and far away and unattainable that it is hard to imagine what it would look like.

Dr. Diane Komp tells the story of her young leukemia patient Bill and his divided family.

“My young patient Bill” she writes, “had four parents, but his prayer was for them to be one family, with one heart and a new spirit. At the time he was diagnosed with leukemia, Bill's biological parents and step-parents thought they were doing their best to survive divorce, remarriage, and the sharing of children. But they rarely shared a meal together.

“What helped this family most to survive was living far away from each other and limiting their social interaction to small-talk at drop off and pick up of the children. They were more successful than most similar families of our times, and Bill certainly did not seem damaged by belonging to a less than traditional American family unit. In fact, it was in the context of the reorganized family that he began to think about God.

“The initial contact of the quartet of parents in the hospital was highly civil. When the stress of former spouses in daily contact finally hit, this group did the unprecedented. They knew the root source of their stress, and rather than displacing their family anger onto the medical staff, they talked to each other. Kathy was shocked to learn that she had more in common with her ex-husband's new wife than any other woman in her acquaintance. The mother and step-mother formed a nucleus for reconciliation and communication.

“When Bill relapsed and his death appeared inevitable, he indicated a desire to die at home. In attempting to honor that request, we found that it would not be medically easy. He came to our hospital from a region distant from us that had no type of hospice care. With the help of a nurse in that community who volunteered to make home visits, the four parents lived under the same roof, sharing the nursing responsibilities. After Bill died,” Doctor Komp writes, “the family invited me to dinner.

“The two mothers worked together in the kitchen on the meal. Both homes were in need of repairs. During the last weeks of Bill's illness, the two fathers made significant progress on the house where we met to eat. In the spring, they were planning to start together on the other house. They had shopped together to buy me a gift and talked of their future plans.

“They talked about the holidays to come. No other friends or family members could really understand as well the anticipated emptiness of the year to come. Bill's birthday was near Christmas, and the holidays for all of them were irrevocably tied to that event. They planned to spend all the holidays from Thanksgiving through the New Year as an extended family. Through Bill and in Christ, they could come to feast together.”[1]

It is remarkable how a death of a loved one can either bring together or further divide a family.

And so it is with the cross.  And that, of course, is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”  To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to follow the one who humbled himself, even to the point of dying on a cross.

His death alone is sufficient to secure our future place in the Kingdom of God.  The good news of the gospel is that we do not have to wait a single minute before living in the Kingdom.  We can begin right now practicing the kind of Kingdom humility that does not hold on to past hurts; that does not let envy or status or the need to win drive our behavior; that dares to build relationships with even those from whom our society tells us to keep our distance.

Here at this table we remember.  We remember that we are connected by Jesus Christ who gave his life that we might be reconciled to God and one another.  In heaven and on earth, all over the world in cities, small towns and in rural churches, in upscale neighborhoods of Beverly Hills and the slums of Beijing, in brand new full suburban churches and dying old churches, people we love and people we find insufferable, people we know and people we have never met, people come from North and South, East and West and sit together in the kingdom of God, and there is no one who needs to vie for a seat of honor, for there is only one seat of honor at this table and it is taken by the one who died that we may live.  And when we hear the invitation, the call, we know where we belong.  Places, everyone!

Thanks be to God.  Amen.