12th Sunday after Pentecost
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
In today’s gospel story, Jesus is the kind of dinner guest you hope you never have. First, he reprimands guests for seeking seats of honor for themselves. Then he is rude to the host, chiding him for his guest list. Jesus is rather confrontational.
On the surface, the challenge seems to be about etiquette. Where to sit at a dinner banquet, whom to invite to your house for a party: those are the kinds of queries one might direct to Emily Post or Ann Landers.
However, I am quite certain that Jesus was not engaging the Pharisees in a debate on table manners. This discussion goes much, much deeper.
This is the scene: Jesus is invited to the house of a leader of the Pharisees. This is a very prominent person. Chances are, he is a rich person. This man does not live in a row house in Jerusalem, but more likely in one of the ritzy mansions beyond the inner city. Maybe garnering an invitation to this man’s house was the ticket to get.
Jesus got invited. Why? Certainly not because he belongs to that class. I imagine it was either because Jesus had become famous and his presence added luster to the party and prominence to the host, or because this Pharisee and his colleagues wanted a closer look at him. This latter possibility is supported by the fact that the text tells us they were all watching Jesus closely.
Either way, Jesus was the odd one out.
In those days, the social rank of people within society was of the utmost importance. A class system of honor and shame told people exactly where on the social scale they belonged. One way to tell who belonged where was through dinner invitations. Who invited you for dinner? Whom would you invite for dinner? Whom would you never invite because being seen with that person would ruin your social standing? Whom could you invite to advance your own position? Dinner wasn’t just about food but also about asserting class.
That really hasn’t changed all that much in our day. We are past the days of society pages in the newspaper that used to list who went to whose house for dinner. But we still watch these things. We are still careful and sometimes calculating with our invitations. Who attends our parties says something about our importance. Getting invited to the right ball is a badge of honor. Being seated at the table closest to the bathrooms is a social slight. Certain restaurants we would never step into, certain invitations we would not accept because we just “don’t belong”, either because they are way above or way below us.
Even youth participate in this game. In the school cafeteria, you cannot be seen eating lunch with the nerd or your other friends will disown you.
Dinner parties visualize a line in the sand that must not be crossed. It is that line Jesus is challenging.
Why does he care? Because social ranking and class thinking separate people, keep them apart in separate worlds. As a result, people don’t know about each other’s lives, and that leads to not knowing or caring about each other’s problems. The rich Pharisee who invited Jesus probably has no idea what Jesus’ childhood as the son of carpenter had been like, or what Jesus’ fishermen friends went through to eek out a living.
We have the same problem in our nation today. Our population is divided into rich and poor, and a middle class in between. Often, these different population groups live within a mile of each other but have no clue about the other’s lives.
The book “What Every Christian Needs to Know About Poverty” opened my eyes to this. It taught me that the three different strata of our society require totally different skill sets for survival. The book includes tests, asking you if you could survive in another group’s world.
Here are questions from the page “Could you survive in wealth?”:
- I can read a menu in English, French, and one other language.
- I know my preferred financial advisor, legal service, designer, and domestic employment service.
- I know how to ensure loyalty and confidentiality from my domestic staff.
- I have at least two or three screens to keep people whom I do not wish to see away from me.
- I know how to enroll my children in the preferred private schools.
Here are some questions about surviving in poverty:
- I know which churches and sections of town have the best rummage sales.
- I know which grocery stores’ garbage bins can be accessed for thrown-away food.
- I know how to bail someone out of jail.
- I know how to keep my clothes from being stolen at the laundromat.
- I know how to live without a checking account.
- I know how to move in half a day.
Could you survive in either of these worlds? I know I couldn’t!
What these questions revealed to me is how little I know about the challenges of life in those other worlds, worlds that are close to here and yet far removed. I never had to worry about my clothes in a laundromat or about my domestic staff’s loyalty. I never had to bail someone out of jail or order from a French menu. People in those worlds and I live in the same country and in the same town, yet our lives, our needs, our aspirations, our expectations are vastly different.
This is a problem for our communities. When the middle class strives for good public schools, but the rich don’t care because they send their kids to private schools, then middle class and poor students suffer. When the poor need a new homeless shelter, but the rich want to enlarge the airstrip for their private planes, only one side can win.
Because our worlds and our needs are so different, we don’t understand each
other; as a result, we fight and we blame each other, blame the rich for being selfish, blame the poor for being lazy, blame the middle class for being too absorbed in jobs and kids to have energy to care. Class war often arises from simply not knowing about the other’s lives.
What could help this situation? Jesus suggests sitting down to dinner together. Just sit down and eat and talk to each other, and your eyes will be opened.
This sounds simplistic, but I have seen this at work. And I have heard stories about this at work. It is amazing how much can happen when people from different worlds sit down together to share a meal.
For example, many churches send their kitchen teams to serve at a soup kitchen. They swoop in for a day, serve the poor, and leave again. But one soup kitchen in a major city changed the rules. This place expected church folk not just to come and cook, but then to sit down with the poor at their tables and eat together. While eating together, the church members heard stories of loss and survival, of tragedy and hope, of struggles in the world of the poor and of simple changes that could make a huge difference.
Before long, some of the churches serving and eating meals at this soup kitchen began getting involved, actively working for tutoring in schools, for community budgeting changes, and for personal hygiene resources. These middle-class people had shared dinner with the poor; it opened their eyes to their needs; they saw a call to ministry and changed society for the better.
Another example: Many churches have sent mission teams into the Developing World. Often, they swooped in, built something, and came back. Then the mission model changed. Churches sent members to live with the people over longer periods of time. They stayed in their homes and ate their food and heard their stories. This opened the missionaries’ eyes to how our consumption of goods here is hurting people and environment there. They returned and began campaigning for fair trade, better environmental policies, and more responsibilities of rich countries towards the poor.
When we share food with people from other worlds, we get to know them and their joys and hopes, their worries and dreams, their challenges and successes. Only when we know those can we minister effectively, can we share the gospel with them in a way that is meaningful to them. Only when we realize that the way we live affects how other people live, can we become our brother’s and sister’s keeper and work for a fairer, more just, more godly world.
Jesus was constantly eating with people, with Pharisees as in today’s reading, with fishermen and tax collectors and sinners of every stripe. At those meals, he got to know people and reached out to them in love and invited them into a new kind of society, a society where it doesn’t matter anymore if you have the seats of honor or not, if you know the right people in town or not, if you have your life together or not. All people need the gospel, all people yearn to live in a fair, secure, loving, just community.
Jesus still invites people to come and eat. Every Sunday, we are invited to come and eat the meal of a new society, the meal of gospel love, the meal of forgiveness and hope and new beginnings. Around the altar of God’s presence, people of every walk of life come together as the one body of Christ, rejoicing in the new community Jesus invites us into.
Let us continue to eat with all God’s people in Jesus’ name. Let us do it here, invited by our Lord and Savior. And let us do it beyond these walls, passing on Jesus’ love by eating with those who hunger for food, for community, for hope, for the gospel. Meal by meal, we can foster mutual understanding and love, and bring a piece of God’s kingdom into this world. Amen.