Invitations to the Banquet

NOTE: This homily was prepared for a Service of the Word at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y., September 1, 2019.

My parents were the children of hardscrabble farmers in the Catskills. Both my mother and father were the first in their families to attend college, and Dad was a poorly paid schoolteacher in a tiny district in Central New York State.
   
Maybe these unassuming agrarian roots have unduly influenced me but few passages of scripture pop into my head more often than today’s Gospel reading.  

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 the host; and 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. (Luke 14:8-10).

Throughout my career as a lay bureaucrat in denominational and ecumenical work, this issue came up – at least in my head – every time I attended a reception or fund-raising dinner. Sometimes I was invited as a mere reporter with the expectation I would write about the event later. Other times I was invited to offer a brief greeting on behalf of the board I represented. And on a few occasions I was invited to be the main speaker. At all times I would dawdle uneasily around the head table, waiting for someone to tell me where to sit.
    
Seating protocols were never clear in ecumenical circles that included cardinals, bishops, pastors, and lay factotums
    
The first time I attended an Associated Church Press meeting at the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America on East 79th Street, I was escorted to a dark room in which there was a polished oaken table surrounded by a dozen wooden chairs. One of the chairs at the table was much taller than the rest, its wooden frame ornately carved with religious symbols and a thick purple pillow in its seat. 

Perhaps, I thought to in my Protestant naiveté, the chair was symbolic of the presence of Christ, or maybe Elijah.  

“No,” the editor of the Orthodox Observer magazine told me. “The chair is for the archbishop.”
    
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The American Baptist version of that was providing first class airline seats for the church’s head while everyone else flew coach. That simplified matters for the rest of us because we never had to wonder where to sit.
    
As we read the passage from Luke 14 this morning, we find Jesus attending an apparently crowded Sabbath meal “when he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor.” (14:7a)
    
There are several interesting things about this passage that, as a non-scholar, I never noticed before.
    
For one thing, Jesus seems to be no stranger at Pharisee banquets. This is one of three recorded instances that he joined the Pharisees for food and fellowship.
    
It strikes us odd because most of us assume Jesus and the Pharisees were bitter adversaries.  Yet Jesus seems to be quite comfortable not only hanging around Pharisees but joining in their social gatherings.
    
This leads some scholars, in fact, wonder if Jesus was himself a Pharisee.
    
Mitzi J. Smith, professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, writes:

   “Although Pharisees dispute with Jesus and sometimes express hostility toward him, Jesus continues to engage and dine with them. This kind of collegiality and friendship can be difficult to understand, especially in a rigid religio-political partisan atmosphere where, as in Jesus’ day, life is (de)valued differently and ignorance, tempers, and stereotypes often prevail. Readers must be careful not to stereotype and demonize the Pharisees as Luke sometimes does.”

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the Pharisees were “blue collar Jews” who believed in an after-life and adhered to the tenets of the law, including individual prayer and assembly in synagogues. They were – unlike the elitist Sadducees – working class Jews who took their religion seriously. They had a lot in common with Jesus the carpenter from Nazareth. Whether he was a Pharisee or not, he was obviously not averse to hanging around with Pharisees and happily engaging them – as rabbis do – in arguments about Mosaic law.
    
Perhaps this was because he knew them well enough to know they would be open-minded about his teaching. Their Pharisaical hearts would already be open to the travails of the poor, the disabled, the lame, and the blind. As specialists in Mosaic law, they would immediately see the logic of expanding their gatherings to include everyone whether or not they had the means of repaying their hospitality. They just needed someone they trusted to point it out to them.
    
Jesus began his discourse by chiding those in the gathering who assumed they outranked the others and deserved higher seats at the table.
    
But Jesus goes even further than that, relying on his audience’s working-class sensibilities to see the justice in what he was saying.

He 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. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14 And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Luke 14:12-14.

This declaration is so consistent with the laws of the Torah that I don’t think Jesus expected anyone to disagree with him.
   
These words of Jesus are, however, a little harder for us to take in our class-sensitive society. Too many of us have become comfortable with those around us who separate humanity into tiers of relative worth: the one-percenters at the top who control most of the wealth and insist they earned their fortunes through personal merit and honest work; the management class who work for the one-percenters and share in the bonuses; the great middle class who work for the companies owned by the one-percenters and struggle each day to pay their mortgages and put food on the table; the blue collar farm labor class who work 12 to 18 hours a day, often more than one job, often at minimum wage, just to survive; and the desperately poor class living constantly at the edge of poverty and wondering if they will be able to feed their children every day.
    
So many of the people in these tiers are either invisible to us or far from our daily consciousness. None of us agree with these tiers of relative worth or see that that they are unjust. We are just too distracted by our own daily challenges to give it much thought.
    
Jesus knew the Pharisees understood that God created all God’s creatures equal, and that God expected all God’s creatures to reach out and help those who were poor, those who were sick, those who were disabled, those who were blind, and those who could not afford to take part in weekly Pharisaical banquets.
    
Jesus knew the Pharisees could have no argument with any of that, and he knew they could listen with contrite hearts.
    
Jesus asks no less of us.
    
When I began preparing my homily this week, it has escaped me that this is Labor Day weekend.
    
I asked Martha, “Do you think Jesus would be a Union man?”
    
She said, “Of course.” I should point out that both Martha and I saw our lives improved by the unions our parents were in.
    
Whether or not Jesus would have been active in the Samuel Gompers labor movement calls for more speculation than is sensible.
    
But as we see him sitting among the Pharisees ad arguing on behalf of those of lesser rank who need more in order to survive and contribute to their communities, one thing seems sure.
    
He speaks like a shop steward. 

And he knows how to make management listen to him.