Pastor Ed’s nephew was killed in a motorcycle accident yesterday. He called last night at 11:30 to ask if I could do this morning’s service for him. Please take a moment now and join me in a silent prayer for him and all his family.
Pastor Ed had to go identify the body today. I tried to determine from the Scriptures in the Lectionary what Pastor Ed might have preached on today and I see by the bulletin that we chose the same Scripture lesson.
Luke 14:1 (Living)
One Sabbath as he was in the home of a member of the Jewish Council, the Pharisees were watching him like hawks to see if he would heal a man who was present who was suffering from dropsy.
Luke 14:7-14 (Living)
When he noticed that all who came to the dinner were trying to sit near the head of the table, he gave them this advice: 8"If you are invited to a wedding feast, don't always head for the best seat. For if someone more respected than you shows up, 9the host will bring him over to where you are sitting and say, 'Let this man sit here instead.' And you, embarrassed, will have to take whatever seat is left at the foot of the table!
10"Do this instead--start at the foot; and when your host sees you he will come and say, 'Friend, we have a better place than this for you!' Thus you will be honored in front of all the other guests. 11For everyone who tries to honor himself shall be humbled; and he who humbles himself shall be honored." 12Then he turned to his host. "When you put on a dinner," he said, "don't invite friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors! For they will return the invitation. 13Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14Then at the resurrection of the godly, God will reward you for inviting those who can't repay you."
Both of these stories or parables are about power. In the first, Christ talks about the seat we take at the table. He is not really talking about food and a dinner. He is talking about the way we position ourselves in life. It could be at a gathering where we try to get the best seat, near the host, hoping to win some favor by being near others of power. Or it can be at a football or baseball game where we want the closest seats so that we can see better than anyone else. It can be anywhere, anytime when we want to put ourselves above someone else.
We don’t want to be the last in line or the person stuck in the back of the bus. We want the power and we want everyone to know that we have that power. We are all pretty good at looking down on others that we just know are not as good as we are. We are all pretty good at determining who should be above us and who should take their place below us. We instinctively know which people we are better than and which people we must work a little harder to surpass.
At least we think we do!
But Christ is telling us here that we are pretty stupid if we think that way. There is always someone who is better than us. And those we perceive as being lower, may be held much higher in the eyes of others. By pushing ourselves towards the head of the table, others around us may be thinking about how wrong we are to believe that we are as good as we think we are.
It is human nature to strive to be as powerful as we can be, elevating ourselves so that others will be able to see that we are in a position that is better in some way or another. Better than the homeless or the ignorant. Better than those who are not Christian. Better than the person of that other race and color. Better than the people that don’t come to church. Better than the person that cannot sing or the one who cannot read or the one who doesn’t make as much money, or the one who cannot count or make change for a dollar or make something as well as we can.
But Christ gives us a warning here. He says be careful because on the day when everything is judged and we are all held accountable for what we do, none of this will matter. Instead, it will be counted against us. Our race for the head of the table will only put us in a position of being asked to move to the foot of the table for He will judge us to be much less powerful than we ever thought.
Christ tells us to get away from that need for power, that need for recognition, that need we have to be better because it will work towards our destruction in the end. He tells us to become humble; to take our seat at the foot of the table; to realize that we are not the best or the biggest or the most successful or the only one that knows how things should be run.
He warns us because He loves us and He wants to see us in heaven with Him and all the heavenly hosts. He does not want to see us outside the gates staring in. We need to hear His warning.
His second warning is about accumulating power. We accumulate power by associating with others in power. We believe that if we invite only those who are the best of the best, then we will somehow get some of them to rub off on us. We are all very reluctant to invite people over to dinner that are not worthy of our time and effort. We will not ask the poor to come to our table because there would be no benefit. Instead we invite those who we believe can do something to elevate us in the church or community, in our job or in a classroom, in our leisure activities or in our everyday life. We want to be with those who are successful.
We shun those who are below our status. After all if someone saw us entertaining some poor or ignorant or menial person, we would be utterly embarrassed. And why would we want to get involved with someone who could not pay their way?
I had a vision a few years ago about a church that would be able to draw people in by offering them something for nothing. It was a silly, Saturday morning breakfast here at church. I wanted the community to witness what I thought a true church of Christ should be like. My vision included feeding people a great breakfast, filling the bellies of those who were hungry, offering them a place to fellowship and see, first hand what a body of Christians were meant to be. And I thought that money should never enter the equation. I would have been quite happy to see the church lose a few dollars every month just to show people the true meaning of Christian fellowship. This was more a mission than a vision.
But there were those that were concerned about the money. A free breakfast was OK when it only included a hand full of people from the church and took just a few minutes to prepare. But to open the breakfast up to the whole community would mean losing much more money. Could the church afford it?
My thought was that we could not afford to separate ourselves from the community and from those who were poor and those who were not on our level. I wanted everyone to be able to walk through our doors and feel welcome and comfortable and not feel as though they had to pay to see Jesus at work. Our Men’s group rose to the occasion and put on a feast for next to nothing. This has spilled over into the Men’s and Friend’s group and I am sure you are all aware of the success. We now get more people from the community than we do people from the church. We serve anywhere from 70 to 100 plus people on our Saturday mornings.
And a funny thing. . . We never lose money. There’s times when that Saturday’s donations may not meet the bill at the store, but that’s because we are buying other things for the kitchen that are used by other functions. The breakfast is a total success and brings many to our doors who may have never even been aware of us before. And some of those people may even come into our church to worship. All of those people leave here feeling welcome and take away a little bit of what the world could be like if we were to just follow the warnings of our Savior.
He is telling us in this second parable that we must feed and care for those who we perceive are at a lower level than we are. And it’s not just food that He is talking about.
And if we don’t wake up and reach out to those less fortunate or less powerful than we are, then we must be prepared to accept our just deserts at the resurrection of the godly. We must be prepared to stand outside the gate and look longingly at what we missed.
I don’t know about you, but I want to enter those pearly gates some day. I do not want to put myself in a position of power and wield that power over others. I want to be able to say to the Lord that I tried to humble myself and realize my station in life. I want to be able to say to the Lord that I was a good and faithful servant. I want to stand before the Lord and proudly say that I was able to serve His people no matter what their situation was in life. I want to be able to humble myself in the eyes of the Lord and have Him and only Him lift me up higher and higher.
I don’t know what you want, but I do know what Christ wants for you. Just listen to what He asks us to do. Listen with open ears and open eyes and open hearts. He will lead you to do the right thing. Don’t rely on your perceptions of what it means in this life to have power. Think about the power you will have simply by serving Christ.
