August 29, 2010

Look Who's Coming To Dinner: Dinner Manners and Guest Lists

Pastor Phil Holtan

Proverbs 25:6-7; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14

Have you ever been at a really nice dinner? Like maybe 8-10 pieces of silverware at each plate, forks disappearing into the horizon. As I was thinking about this lesson, I was remembering a $100 a plate dinner I once attended. Long enough ago that it would be $200 a plate today. A member of my church couldn’t make it and thought it would be a shame to waste the ticket so he gave it to me. It was a political dinner with a senator as the speaker. I remember looking around the room at all the beautiful people there, and being sure I didn’t belong there. My clothes all of the sudden felt cheap. I was self conscious wondering if it was obvious that I got a free ticket-What would the others think of me? That I don’t really deserve to be here. Who else got a free ticket? Could I pick them out?

One of the fun experiences I had when I was at Concordia was helping with a royal visit by the King of Norway. I got involved with who sits where at a couple of events, as I was praying there. It was a huge deal, with the Norwegian consul and an etiquette and protocol expert helping decide who gets to sit closest to the king, and then the next person and so on. It gave me a taste of how important dinner manners and guest lists can be.

You heard the gospel text read. That’s what it’s about-dinner manners and guest lists. It’s about protocol, who sits where and who gets invited to what? In this story and many others too, Jesus uses meals as a down-to-earth way to talk of God’s kingdom and how God’s rule is different from business as usual, then and now.

The setting for the gospel story in Luke is a festive Sabbath meal that Jesus attended in the home of a religious leader. The other guests were watching him closely, it says, in order to catch him breaking the Sabbath law. Fun meal, sort of like eating with a roomful of Emily Posts or investigative journalists. It was part of the cat and mouse game that was Jesus’ ministry. They were trying to catch Jesus breaking the rules and he was watching them too. He had a different criteria for evaluating their dinner and that was whether it included the least of these, poor and left out people who Jesus believed were beloved of God.

You need to know something. Let me play Emily Post for a minute. When a really important person is eating dinner, the person at their right hand is the second biggest cheese there, then the person on the left side, and so on back and forth. It’s even a bigger deal if the host lets you drink from their cup, which is what newly married couples often do at their wedding receptions, when they share the loving cup.

Well, anyway, when Jesus noticed how the guests all chose the places of honor he did what he often did, he told them a parable. “When you’re invited to a wedding feast, or probably any big doings, don’t sit at the places of honor.”

We get that. It’s the dinner after a wedding, at Lakeside. The wedding party is greeting people as they come in and you see there is a head table up in front with lots of open places. Is that a good place to sit? Probably not. The wedding party will eventually take that place and have to ask you to leave. How embarrassing. How much better to be modest. Like if you’re retiring from the high school or ACS, sit in the back corner at the retirement banquet, and then the MC say, “Fred, what are you doing back there? Please come on up to the front. You’re our honored guest.”

This is a common bit of wisdom from the ancient Near East. You’ve probably figured it out on your own. But Jesus says it is also a parable, a window into the way God’s kingdom operates. Status seekers and social climbers don’t fit into God’s plan. Those who claim to have it all, to have the world by the tail, may find there is no seat saved for them, while the humble will be invited higher. Remember the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. It was the one who begged for mercy from God who was welcomed, while the one who felt he was better than others was turned away. The dinner is a parable, a metaphor for behavior in God’s kingdom.
Now if the first half of Luke’s story is advice for dinner guests, the second half of the story is advice for the host of the dinner. Jesus plays Martha Stewart. When you put together the guest list for your dinner party, don’t invite the obvious ones, the ones everyone always invites. Then he lists four obvious groups--our friends, our siblings, our relatives, and our rich neighbors. And Jesus says, “Don’t invite them, because they’ll probably invite you back and you’ll be repaid.” Now does that reasoning strike you as odd too?

I mean this is strange. Do you see what this does for us for the royal visit. No friends, nobody we already know. No siblings or relatives, nobody we’re already related to. No rich neighbors, and since almost all Americans are in the top 5% of income worldwide, by almost any standard, we have cut our guest prospects down a lot. Oh no, who can we invite? We’ll be embarrassed if the guest hall isn’t full.

So Jesus lists four more groups who are not such obvious prospects for the guest list. He says instead invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Now I know some of you have been to the Science Museum in St. Paul to see the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are the writings of a rival religious group at the time of Jesus, the Essenes from the Qumran community. Amazingly enough, if you could read in those Dead Sea Scrolls, you would find this exact same list there that says these are the people that definitely shouldn’t be invited. It was pretty much the rule among most religious people that those groups could have no place in the kingdom because they were blemished.

And this isn’t the only time Jesus talked this way. Including the poor, the handicapped, and other left-out ones is a thread that runs through all of Luke Acts, to say nothing of the other gospel, the prophets, the psalms, everywhere. But especially in Luke, story after story reminds us of God’s love for the poor. One sixth of all the verses in Luke and Acts deal with themes of wealth and poverty. It’s pretty hard to ignore Jesus’ words that God loves the poor and marginalized and we must also.

How would it change our life to revise our guest lists? To invite them to join us?

What would it mean to invite the least of these into our church? What would it mean to invite the poor into our heart and even mind? So that when we think about things, anything? they are part of our equation?

How about communion? Just including people just like us is a scandal. They say Sunday morning is by far the most segregated time of the week. Jesus must weep to hear that.

I told you earlier about the fancy $100 a plate dinner I once attended. I was self conscious because I felt I was the only one who didn’t deserve to be there. The rest had all earned the right to be there and paid for their own ticket while I was a freeloader.

Then, thinking of this gospel text, it hit me. As Jesus looked around his festive dinner, he knew something no one else seemed to know. He knew that at God’s festive dinner, everyone was there on a free ticket. No one paid their own way. It wasn’t that some paid their own way and others were freeloaders. All were there by God’s amazing grace and forgiveness. So people, we can’t claim that we are the ones who deserve to be here and others don’t. We don’t need to crowd the head table to be recognized and celebrated. Because we all got in by our finger nails. We are all happy to be here by God’s unmerited love for us.

That’s true today in this worship, or at communion, or even in our place in the creation. That’s why these table manners and guest lists make sense. When we find we feast not because of our hard work but because of our generous host, we can be generous and hospitable to our fellow guests.

We have had quite a week at Calvary. On Thursday, guess who came to dinner? Not to dinner exactly, but certainly for food. About 160 families came and received a semi-load full of food. The United Way of Otter Tail county and the Community Action Council from New York Mills worked with Calvary to put this together and it was a feast of joy and being included. We gave away 125 backpacks and have requests for another 40-50 more. I was so proud because many of you were there. 55 of our Perham high school football players spent a couple of hours there and were just excellent help, often carrying food to people’s cars for them. The ones of you who helped had a genuine sense of hospitality and I think that day really helps us see what Jesus meant about who to invite for dinner. Thanks to all of you.

And what’s next for Calvary? How can we continue to invite to dinner those who we might easily forget or ignore? On September 26 we will have one of two Faith in Action Sundays this year. We will have many projects, but many will seek to help those who are not usually included. I hope you will look for these and other opportunities at Calvary to expand our guest list.

And there are none of us who don’t have opportunities during the week to include others. You young kids are starting school soon. I think the lunch room is one of the most cruel places for those who are left out. Think about who mostly sits by themselves. Think about those that others tease or say bad things about. Like Jesus you can be different and you can include them. You can invite them to sit with you or you can sit down with them.

When I was growing up our dinner table was always full. There were ten of us, eight kids and my parents. But that number was always changing and my mom had a kind of mathematics that she used. It was always 10, our usual number, minus maybe one or two of us who were gone for something, and then plus maybe one or two. Our exchange student, or may grandma, or some friend, or someone who stopped by and got invited to join us. So it was like 10 – 2 + 3 = 11. I’ll bet some of you do that at your house too. I think the mathematics of the kingdom is to add people to our list of who’s coming to dinner. To add the most unlikely people. Not just to dinner, but into our circle of friends. Into our circle of care.

Finally, to close, we thank God that we have been invited to dinner, to Jesus’ dinner, of forgiveness and amazing grace. We thank God we have been invited to feast in God’s love and generosity. May we with joy also invite and include others, even the most unlikely, to the feast.