May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)
SEASON: PENTECOST 16
PROPER: 20C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 23, 2001
TEXT: Luke 16:1-13 – Parable of the Dishonest Manager – “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”
ISSUE: The Parable of the Dishonest Manager is one the Lord’s more embarrassing ones. A dishonest employee gets commended for his shrewd, if not questionable management of accounts. Yet, it tells of all who are dishonest and how God is merciful and yearns for our shrewdness to be redirected in doing what is right and just, and having compassion and mercy, and developing friendship with both God and our neighbors.
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It is curious how God is depicted as doing some very strange things in the stories of Holy Scripture. Sometimes it is downright embarrassing. For instance, Cain kills Abel, and God gives to Cain a mark of protection. Abraham has two sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob cheats his brother Esau out of his heritage, and receives his father’s blessing, leaving Esau out in the cold. God selects David the Shepherd boy to be the King over all of Israel, and assures him that his lineage shall last forever, and David’s escapades with Bath-sheba made him the Bill Clinton of his time. In the parable that Jesus tells today in the Gospel account of Luke, we have a Boss commending one of his managers who is a crook for his shrewdness. Clever crooks should be condemned, hardly commended. What’s going on here? Even Luke doesn’t seem to be sure. Luke tells Jesus’ parable and then tries tacking on a list of moral points that try to justify the parable: “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? . . No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” What has all these morals, true as they may be, to do with the story is a real stretch. Luke is embarrassed by the parable too.
Let’s look at the story first in the context of the time rather than as 21st Century capitalists and moralists. There is a rich man, a boss, who has considerable property with peasants working his land. One of his stewards or managers is accused of squandering the boss’s property. “Squandering the wealth” sounds something like the Prodigal Son who was squandering away his inheritance. So we get the picture that this steward is something of a philanderer, a poor manager, and maybe even dishonest or taking more than his share of the profits. He’s going to get fired and he knows it, when the boss calls him in for an accounting.
“What shall I do?” he asks himself, again sounding just like the Prodigal Son. He sure isn’t comfortable with digging ditches, and begging is hardly honorable. He thinks and decides to himself, “I know what I’ll do.” His shrewdness goes into action. He calls in the people who owe the boss. They didn’t owe money; they owed produce. They were probably under contract for a fixed amount of produce per year. They kept some of the produce for themselves and gave a percentage to the landowner. The manager also got a cut or percentage of the produce. So the manger calls in the peasants and says to them what do you owe? The first says he owes 100 jugs of olive oil. The manager tells him okay, we’re feeling really benevolent today so just make it 50 jugs instead of 100. Good deal the peasant thinks; what generosity! The next peasant comes in and tells the manager that he owes 100 containers of wheat. So the manger tell him okay, we’re feeling really benevolent today, so just make it 80 containers of wheat. Good deal. And so it goes. The manager is really making a lot of friends here for himself. He may have been cutting his own percentage of the take, but in return he’s making friends. What’s more, he is also making friends for the boss. He’s making the peasant community hold him and the boss in high esteem for their great and honorable generosity.
You see, the boss could legally incarcerate the manager and go back to the peasants and refuse to give them the discount, if he dared. But the manager has cleverly brought great honor to his boss, and in fact to himself. Even if he is fired, he’ll have friends and honor. So will the boss-landowner. Honor was by far the great value at this time than money or possessions.
What you have in this parable is the boss who is very merciful, forgiving, and compassionate, like the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son. You also have a clever, shrewd, if not despicable character, who comes to his senses and realizes he must honor the boss, develop friendships for himself, and make a big change in this life, if he’s going to make it.
I cannot help but feel that this Parable of the Dishonest Manager that teaches the simple and profound truth that we need to love God and honor God with all of our being, and to love one another. The crook in the Parable finally figures it out. We may well be embarrassed by this story because we approach it from the standpoint that we are righteous and we think that bad people should all be condemned. But the fact of the matter is that we are like the dishonest steward. We are all sinners. We all have our imperfections and distortions. We too are often shrewd in our dealing with others in so many of our self-serving ways. Face it. The proverbial call to repentance is little more than the call to make changes in our lives. It is a call to respond to the grace and forgiveness of God, and to use the shrewdness, the cleverness of our lives for more positive honorable ends. There is more to life than possessions and money. If the Stock Market plunges, is life really over? If we are the people of God with friends we honor and love, then surely life is not over.
This parable calls us away from the belief that we are good, and there are other bad people. How dare God commend them and forgive them. We all share by virtue of our humanness in sinfulness, but by the grace of God who sends Jesus Christ to us we are justified sinners baptized or immersed into mercy and love. We are made righteous. God takes those who are bad and scandalous and uses them to proclaim the faith of the loving, forgiving, honorable God.
Right now we are living in a terribly confused world. We can spend our time feeling victimized and hurt, indignant and righteous. How could such terrible a terrible attack as occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, be allowed to happen to us. On the other hand we can realize that we share in the human condition, and that in spite of our own short comings, we are loved and in a rather crass way are directed to be shrewd in the world, shrewd in ways that reveal the honor of God who is a loving, giving, and forgiving God. Perhaps we need to be shrewd enough to realize that self-service reveling in our own troubles is not in our best interest, but using our cleverness to make friends, to love other people, to spend ourselves on human needs that surround us, and pay homage to the God that loves us. That’s the stuff of which our humanity is made.
From another perspective, the crooked manager might be seen as the Christ-figure. The religious world in which Jesus lived, and especially the Pharisees demanded respectability and righteousness, and the close keeping of the letter of the law. One of the sad aspects of all that has recently happened is that a group of religious righteous fanatics have become so rigid in their own ways and thinking, that they become vicious and hostile, impatient, and cruel, judgmental in such a way as to bring death, fear, destruction. But Jesus mentioned in Scripture to be thought of as a drunkard and squanderer. He did not follow the letter of the law. He broke the Sabbath. He associated with tax collectors, prostitutes and crooks. He died like a criminal on a cross. He entered fully into the human condition, that it might know his love. The world becomes aware, that he lived and died for all. He is the very personification of grace. It ends happily ever after for everyone. The peasants win and the boss wins. Isn’t it interesting how God uses scoundrels over the pious righteous to proclaim the Good News of his love. (See Parables of Grace, Robert Capon.) May God help us all to be shrewd in finding ways to bring the Good News of God’s love to the brokenness of the world.
Sunday, September 23, 2001
Sunday, September 16, 2001
PENTECOST 15
May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)
SEASON: PENTECOST 15
PROPER: 19C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 16, 2001
TEXT: Luke 15:1-10 – “Which of you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? . . . . .Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it. When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’
ISSUE: The twin parables of Jesus regarding the shepherd and the woman tell of the profound love of God who searches diligently for his people. Jesus, at great risk to himself, searches out the lost, and is a vision of the likeness of God. The world drastically needs repentance and change and a willingness to receive the love and grace of God in Christ. While Government searches out the perpetrators of evil, the Christian community must change and search for the lost in love. Just as rescue workers search the ruins at the World Trade Centers in New York and at the Pentagon in D.C., all of us must allow ourselves to receive God’s redeeming love and be trained searching out others. In the face of destruction and evil we recommit ourselves to Jesus Christ.
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It is difficult to know where to begin this morning. It has indeed been an apocalyptic week. The constantly repeated images of the blazing World Trade Center in New York City exploding and crumbling to the ground, the Pentagon ablaze in Washington D.C., and the removal of lost bodies, and the great shedding of tears, and the horrified faces will haunt us for a long time to come. The earlier part of the week was one of shock. I for one was dazed and took wrong exits off of the beltway. What we were seeing on the TV screen was like something you only see in the movies. Having to face the reality of this situation is shocking. None of the apocalyptic descriptions that appear in the Bible, in Daniel and Revelation are any worse than the images we say this week.
The next scene is this scenario will be the many tears, the feelings of sadness, and the dealing with our grief as human beings and as a nation, of our anger, of our frustration, and the desire to get-even. We have a humanly natural feeling and yearning for getting revenge.
What we are seeing played out this week is the terrible reality of human evil and wickedness. We see raw sinfulness. We may well feel naturally enraged by this terrible attack. We not only feel the rage of the moment, but other images of bad times return as well. Some here remember well the awful and evil attack upon Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s terrible holocaust, the assassinations of President Kennedy of Martin Luther King, the horrible Oklahoma Bombing. The raw human condition is ripped open once again. We are also caused to recognize that none of us are totally without sin. In certain instances, even white Americans who treated Native Americans and blacks as sub-human in our history, and our use of atomic weapons reminds us that we all participate in the sorry side of the human condition.
The other side of the story is the stories in the midst of this catastrophe. It’s what we might call the godly side of the story. At the very beginning of the event, hundreds of fire fighters in New York and police personnel rushed to the scene to do their job. Many of them gave their lives for the fellow human beings. People in their office buildings aware of their doomed situation picked up phones to call home to tell their family that they loved them. Even on the planes themselves, there are reports of passengers who dared in the face of great risk to abort the evil assault. Filtering out of the rubble and the horrific scenes will come the stories of great heroics, and of men and women dedicated to their jobs with great compassion. Thousands turned to God in prayer, and many people lined up to give blood. Still more will give funds to the various organizations, which will provide assistance to the victims of this Apocalyptic event as they struggle to rebuild their lives.
There is still another side to this horror. We have as Americans not experienced such an attack in a long time, at least not since Pearl Harbor. Maybe we can become sensitized to what it is like in countries where there has been long time terror and war, like the Israel-Palestinian situation, the problems in Ireland, and the political strife and hunger in African nations. Maybe from this terrible event, we too may become more sensitized to what real suffering is around the world. We are all vulnerable to human sin and suffering, and we all need to be changed in our thinking, minds, hearts, attitudes, and be there for one another beyond even our own comfortable borders.
Some of the images we saw this week were horrible. Yet there were other images of men and women searching the rubble. They are images similar to what we find in the Scripture readings appointed for this day. Jesus was challenged once again by some stiff necked religious fanatics. Why is he eating and associating with the sinners and tax collectors, and the unclean, and the general useless riffraff? He associates with human condition in such an unbecoming way. So Jesus tells the hotshot religious fanatics of his time a set of twin parables. Now, these Pharisees prayed daily thanking God that they were not born as a woman. Jesus confronts them with a whole new idea. God is like a woman! She loses one of her ten coins, which really didn’t have much value, a day’s wage maybe. But it’s valuable to her, so she gets down on the floor and searches the darkest corners of a very dark house risking spider bites and scorpions. She hunts and searches, and sweeps, and cleans and gets down on her hands and knees and searches in the rubble to find what’s she needs to find, in spite of its limited worth. And when she finds it, she throws a party rejoicing, and the party costs more than the value of the coin.
God, Jesus says to the Pharisees, is like a humble shepherd. God is like one of those bawdy imperfect, unclean, dishonorable trespassing shepherds, who dares to seek the lost sheep. What shepherd having a hundred sheep, - he must have been a pretty well off shepherd, but then I guess you can think of God as pretty well off – does not leave the ninety-nine to search for the one that is lost. Actually, that’s not really very good thinking as the world understands it, to leave the ninety-nine, but the shepherd does. He climbs hills and sinks into the lower gullies and valleys. He takes risks and confronts wild beasts with his rod and staff. He won’t give up until he finds the lost, returns home rejoicing and throws a party that costs more than the value of the lost sheep according to the world’s values.
The next time you see those images of the searchers in the rubble, think of God like an old woman desperately searching the devastated human condition trying to find and save, and renew and offer up so thankfully and joyfully the lost that is found. Next time you see the men trying to move a large section of concrete or a steel girder think of God’s Good Shepherd who comes in search of the human condition who comes at great risk to raise up, and resurrect his people loving and valuing them more than they could ever imagine.
May I add that in the Hebrew Scripture today the story is told that Moses went up the Mountain at God’s command to receive the civilizing law. While he was gone, the people cast themselves an image of a calf to be their image for God. God was furious and was ready to destroy each one of them. But Moses pleaded to God for his people: “Turn from your fierce wrath, change your mind . . . .” And the Lord changed his mind . . . If God himself in his compassion can change his mind, cannot we do the same? If the spirit of Christ could change St. Paul, a stiff-necked religious fanatic and man of violence and murder, cannot we all be changed? God yearns for a changed world, a world of compassion and mercy, and a world that is sensitive and seeks out the lost and raises it up, as if having great value and of more value than anything else. The good news of the Gospel is that God is searching for all of his people and loves them all. We are not doomed. We are not lost beyond his finding and his renewal. In spite of this apocalyptic event is the dawning of new hope, and awareness that the world needs repentance, change. We find our model in those servants who scavenger the wreckage for the lost, for our God in Christ has always and will always search us out and show us the way.
We have all come here today shocked and in grief. We have been faced with something most of us never dreamed possible. We are faced with the raw human condition and inhumanity. We know that evil needs to be stopped. We must step in with God’s help to cast out the evil spirits and the evil spiritedness of the world. Just as Hitler had to be stopped, so do the terrorists, but never at the risk of our becoming terrorists, or a people controlled by the cyclical sin of revenge. Rather, we enter the human condition with love, we join the search with Jesus Christ to find the lost and bring them into the Messianic Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of hope, to raise up that which is fallen to stand in the radiant light of the love of God. Faced with great evil, we recommit to Jesus Christ as the Way of our lives.
SEASON: PENTECOST 15
PROPER: 19C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 16, 2001
TEXT: Luke 15:1-10 – “Which of you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? . . . . .Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it. When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’
ISSUE: The twin parables of Jesus regarding the shepherd and the woman tell of the profound love of God who searches diligently for his people. Jesus, at great risk to himself, searches out the lost, and is a vision of the likeness of God. The world drastically needs repentance and change and a willingness to receive the love and grace of God in Christ. While Government searches out the perpetrators of evil, the Christian community must change and search for the lost in love. Just as rescue workers search the ruins at the World Trade Centers in New York and at the Pentagon in D.C., all of us must allow ourselves to receive God’s redeeming love and be trained searching out others. In the face of destruction and evil we recommit ourselves to Jesus Christ.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It is difficult to know where to begin this morning. It has indeed been an apocalyptic week. The constantly repeated images of the blazing World Trade Center in New York City exploding and crumbling to the ground, the Pentagon ablaze in Washington D.C., and the removal of lost bodies, and the great shedding of tears, and the horrified faces will haunt us for a long time to come. The earlier part of the week was one of shock. I for one was dazed and took wrong exits off of the beltway. What we were seeing on the TV screen was like something you only see in the movies. Having to face the reality of this situation is shocking. None of the apocalyptic descriptions that appear in the Bible, in Daniel and Revelation are any worse than the images we say this week.
The next scene is this scenario will be the many tears, the feelings of sadness, and the dealing with our grief as human beings and as a nation, of our anger, of our frustration, and the desire to get-even. We have a humanly natural feeling and yearning for getting revenge.
What we are seeing played out this week is the terrible reality of human evil and wickedness. We see raw sinfulness. We may well feel naturally enraged by this terrible attack. We not only feel the rage of the moment, but other images of bad times return as well. Some here remember well the awful and evil attack upon Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s terrible holocaust, the assassinations of President Kennedy of Martin Luther King, the horrible Oklahoma Bombing. The raw human condition is ripped open once again. We are also caused to recognize that none of us are totally without sin. In certain instances, even white Americans who treated Native Americans and blacks as sub-human in our history, and our use of atomic weapons reminds us that we all participate in the sorry side of the human condition.
The other side of the story is the stories in the midst of this catastrophe. It’s what we might call the godly side of the story. At the very beginning of the event, hundreds of fire fighters in New York and police personnel rushed to the scene to do their job. Many of them gave their lives for the fellow human beings. People in their office buildings aware of their doomed situation picked up phones to call home to tell their family that they loved them. Even on the planes themselves, there are reports of passengers who dared in the face of great risk to abort the evil assault. Filtering out of the rubble and the horrific scenes will come the stories of great heroics, and of men and women dedicated to their jobs with great compassion. Thousands turned to God in prayer, and many people lined up to give blood. Still more will give funds to the various organizations, which will provide assistance to the victims of this Apocalyptic event as they struggle to rebuild their lives.
There is still another side to this horror. We have as Americans not experienced such an attack in a long time, at least not since Pearl Harbor. Maybe we can become sensitized to what it is like in countries where there has been long time terror and war, like the Israel-Palestinian situation, the problems in Ireland, and the political strife and hunger in African nations. Maybe from this terrible event, we too may become more sensitized to what real suffering is around the world. We are all vulnerable to human sin and suffering, and we all need to be changed in our thinking, minds, hearts, attitudes, and be there for one another beyond even our own comfortable borders.
Some of the images we saw this week were horrible. Yet there were other images of men and women searching the rubble. They are images similar to what we find in the Scripture readings appointed for this day. Jesus was challenged once again by some stiff necked religious fanatics. Why is he eating and associating with the sinners and tax collectors, and the unclean, and the general useless riffraff? He associates with human condition in such an unbecoming way. So Jesus tells the hotshot religious fanatics of his time a set of twin parables. Now, these Pharisees prayed daily thanking God that they were not born as a woman. Jesus confronts them with a whole new idea. God is like a woman! She loses one of her ten coins, which really didn’t have much value, a day’s wage maybe. But it’s valuable to her, so she gets down on the floor and searches the darkest corners of a very dark house risking spider bites and scorpions. She hunts and searches, and sweeps, and cleans and gets down on her hands and knees and searches in the rubble to find what’s she needs to find, in spite of its limited worth. And when she finds it, she throws a party rejoicing, and the party costs more than the value of the coin.
God, Jesus says to the Pharisees, is like a humble shepherd. God is like one of those bawdy imperfect, unclean, dishonorable trespassing shepherds, who dares to seek the lost sheep. What shepherd having a hundred sheep, - he must have been a pretty well off shepherd, but then I guess you can think of God as pretty well off – does not leave the ninety-nine to search for the one that is lost. Actually, that’s not really very good thinking as the world understands it, to leave the ninety-nine, but the shepherd does. He climbs hills and sinks into the lower gullies and valleys. He takes risks and confronts wild beasts with his rod and staff. He won’t give up until he finds the lost, returns home rejoicing and throws a party that costs more than the value of the lost sheep according to the world’s values.
The next time you see those images of the searchers in the rubble, think of God like an old woman desperately searching the devastated human condition trying to find and save, and renew and offer up so thankfully and joyfully the lost that is found. Next time you see the men trying to move a large section of concrete or a steel girder think of God’s Good Shepherd who comes in search of the human condition who comes at great risk to raise up, and resurrect his people loving and valuing them more than they could ever imagine.
May I add that in the Hebrew Scripture today the story is told that Moses went up the Mountain at God’s command to receive the civilizing law. While he was gone, the people cast themselves an image of a calf to be their image for God. God was furious and was ready to destroy each one of them. But Moses pleaded to God for his people: “Turn from your fierce wrath, change your mind . . . .” And the Lord changed his mind . . . If God himself in his compassion can change his mind, cannot we do the same? If the spirit of Christ could change St. Paul, a stiff-necked religious fanatic and man of violence and murder, cannot we all be changed? God yearns for a changed world, a world of compassion and mercy, and a world that is sensitive and seeks out the lost and raises it up, as if having great value and of more value than anything else. The good news of the Gospel is that God is searching for all of his people and loves them all. We are not doomed. We are not lost beyond his finding and his renewal. In spite of this apocalyptic event is the dawning of new hope, and awareness that the world needs repentance, change. We find our model in those servants who scavenger the wreckage for the lost, for our God in Christ has always and will always search us out and show us the way.
We have all come here today shocked and in grief. We have been faced with something most of us never dreamed possible. We are faced with the raw human condition and inhumanity. We know that evil needs to be stopped. We must step in with God’s help to cast out the evil spirits and the evil spiritedness of the world. Just as Hitler had to be stopped, so do the terrorists, but never at the risk of our becoming terrorists, or a people controlled by the cyclical sin of revenge. Rather, we enter the human condition with love, we join the search with Jesus Christ to find the lost and bring them into the Messianic Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of hope, to raise up that which is fallen to stand in the radiant light of the love of God. Faced with great evil, we recommit to Jesus Christ as the Way of our lives.
Sunday, September 2, 2001
PENTECOST 13
May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)
SEASON: PENTECOST 13
PROPER: 17C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 2, 2001
TEXT: Luke 14:1, 7-14 – “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
ISSUE: The passage tells of another time that Jesus is tested. He is invited to the head Pharisee’s dinner party, and carefully watched. Jesus challenges the Pharisees concerning their honor obsession and dares to say that only God can truly honor a person. Worldly opinions are unreliable. Jesus, insulting the host, teaches him how to be a host by inviting the poor, lame, blind, the least, and last, who cannot repay. The teaching challenges the church and its people to embrace its true calling and mission. Here’s another great reversal.
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One of the important aspects of being a Christian is to be able to discern what is really important in life. It is an aspect perhaps of what any religion might well be concerned with, keeping focused on what are really the important things.
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus is again being tested. He is invited to a dinner at the home of a leading Pharisee. We are told that all the other gathered Pharisees were “closely watching” him. You will note well that very obviously Jesus was “watching” the gathered Pharisees as well. First, it is important to understand that for Jesus to have been invited to the home of a leading Pharisee would mean that he himself was considered to be of equal rank, or of equal status and honor with the Pharisees. You did not eat with people of lower status than yourself at this time. But, the fact that Jesus is being “watched” hints at the possibility that the Pharisees may have been setting him up to be shamed and discredited. They would have watched to see if he ritually washed appropriately. Where did he seated himself in the pecking order would have been noted. They would have been concerned with whether or not he was ritually clean. If they could find a reason to shame or mock him, his status among the people would likely have been lowered.
At the same time, Jesus is closely watching the Pharisees and he offers them a parable: “If you are invited to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, incase someone more distinguished than you has been invited by the host; and the host who invited both of you might come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But 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.” To us today, it would sound as if Jesus was teaching how to be honorable in a hypocritical way. It almost sounds as if he is teaching these people how to achieve a phony honor status: Pretend to be humble, that you might be called up higher.
I don’t think this is what’s going on. I suggest that Jesus may be being sarcastic. He knows that he is being watched. But he is also watching the Pharisees who come clamoring for places of honor at the meal. What people and the world thought of them was dreadfully important. I suggest that Jesus is teasing them saying: If you really want to get honor don’t risk being shot down. Pretend to be humble with the possibility of being called up higher. They knew well a proverb (Proverbs 25:6-7) from Hebrew Scripture: “When you stand before a king, don’t try to impress him, and pretend to be important. It is better to be asked to take a higher position than be told to give your place to someone more important.” Here again, you have a kind of reversal. The Pharisees are watching Jesus with the possibility of shaming him, but he in his acute sharpness shames them for seeking exultation versus being honorably humble. Jesus didn’t get crucified because he was a particularly nice guy. He is in fact saying that it is God who determines who is truly honorable, not the world; human opinions are not reliable.
Carrying this curious event still farther, Jesus ventures to insult the host Pharisee. To tell your host how he should run his dinner party was not exactly in good taste, even then. It was expected that when you had a dinner for your friends they would invite you back for dinner. Reciprocity was very important in this culture. It was a part of the economic system of the time. Favors were always paid back with favors. Says Jesus to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, (or perhaps even a bunch of phony’s like you have gathered here) in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when your give a banquet invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will then be blessed or honored truly by God.” The poor, lame, crippled, blind being invited to a banquet was unheard of. You did not associate with anyone below your status. Not to invite people who could pay you back, and your family as well was simply unheard of. This suggestion by Jesus was a truly radical and unacceptable concept for the time. It is another of Jesus’ great reversals. They gathered people would be dumbfounded, not to mention outraged.
Luke’s Gospel is writing these parables as an example to the early church. Honor comes from God, and what the world thinks is not nearly so important. We express the Gospel of love for all people without concern for our own personal worth and status, without expectation of being repaid. The world has its standards, but so does the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and his standards are often quite different.
What all this means for the church today is still quite important as we do our part to proclaim the Gospel of God’s redeeming love. First of all humility is now and always has been a Godly virtue. But humility is not groveling and being less than a person is. Humility is being what you are. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Even kings and people of high rank are simply people with a variety of skills and place in the world. We have often been led to believe that we live in a hierarchy, and it is important to move up the ladder of success. There is nothing wrong with moving up to what we are capable of handling in life, but it is also true that we do not live in a hierarchy of status. We are all needed in our various skills and occupations. We need a doctor as well as sanitation crews. Life is not hierarchical so much as it is understanding who we are and to what place in life we are called to serve the common good. Being a hotshot in the world is simply not what we are called to be, but a servant with Christ that embraces all people as brothers and sisters. There is a very powerful lesson from Philippians that we read as the Palm Sunday Epistle about the nature of Jesus Christ: (Phil. 2:6f) “He always had the nature of God, but he did not think that by force he should try to become equal with God. Instead of this, of his own free will he gave up all he had and took the nature of a servant. He became like a man and appeared in human likeness. He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death – his death on the cross.”
Right now, here at St. John’s we are in the midst of building a handicapped ramp, which is long overdue. While the church should have been the leader in handicapped access, it is one of the last of institutions that have been sensitive to special human needs. Often we hear arguments that it all costs too much. Building handicapped ramps, and giving to special human needs is costly, and its return is often negligible, if not annoying. We may end up with a meager crowd of retarded people in wheel chairs in our church. Maybe so. We may also end up with some of our very own folk who have been discouraged from being here to worship. But the point of the Gospel and how it addresses us today is not what we get in return, but what we do and spend in the name of Jesus Christ without concern for reward.
We need to carefully consider as Christians who our associates are. The majority of the time, I would suspect that we all associate with people similar in status, race, and thinking. This is normal and what you might expect in the world. We also plan many of our activities around the things that will amuse ourselves: worship, picnics, Bible study, coffee hour. But the gospel is a real challenge in terms of who do we invite to participate in our amusements? Who do we invite into our worship, to our Bible study, and with whom do we usually associate with at the coffee hour? We go for what makes us comfortable and keeps us relatively amused. Jesus’ teaching provides us with a challenge and mission beyond the usual, the comfortable, and the worldly. As a church community we have to keep working on our ways and means of providing Eucharist for all.
From an overall perspective of being a Christian Community in the world, we have to keep in mind that we are all simply the people of Jesus Christ, and through Christ there is a bigger family that includes all races. We need to work at opportunities for making friends and having interracial relationships. We need also to help to develop Christian Communities in our cities and among the poor. We need to seek out opportunities to develop and keep up relationships with older people, handicapped people, and people in nursing homes. The harvest is bountiful and the workers may well seem few, but it is in the very spirit of hope and determination to reverse the world’s thinking that we may really find ourselves, our purpose, our peace, and our place in the Kingdom we call Christ’s Kingdom, the Kingdom of God.
SEASON: PENTECOST 13
PROPER: 17C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 2, 2001
TEXT: Luke 14:1, 7-14 – “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
ISSUE: The passage tells of another time that Jesus is tested. He is invited to the head Pharisee’s dinner party, and carefully watched. Jesus challenges the Pharisees concerning their honor obsession and dares to say that only God can truly honor a person. Worldly opinions are unreliable. Jesus, insulting the host, teaches him how to be a host by inviting the poor, lame, blind, the least, and last, who cannot repay. The teaching challenges the church and its people to embrace its true calling and mission. Here’s another great reversal.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
One of the important aspects of being a Christian is to be able to discern what is really important in life. It is an aspect perhaps of what any religion might well be concerned with, keeping focused on what are really the important things.
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus is again being tested. He is invited to a dinner at the home of a leading Pharisee. We are told that all the other gathered Pharisees were “closely watching” him. You will note well that very obviously Jesus was “watching” the gathered Pharisees as well. First, it is important to understand that for Jesus to have been invited to the home of a leading Pharisee would mean that he himself was considered to be of equal rank, or of equal status and honor with the Pharisees. You did not eat with people of lower status than yourself at this time. But, the fact that Jesus is being “watched” hints at the possibility that the Pharisees may have been setting him up to be shamed and discredited. They would have watched to see if he ritually washed appropriately. Where did he seated himself in the pecking order would have been noted. They would have been concerned with whether or not he was ritually clean. If they could find a reason to shame or mock him, his status among the people would likely have been lowered.
At the same time, Jesus is closely watching the Pharisees and he offers them a parable: “If you are invited to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, incase someone more distinguished than you has been invited by the host; and the host who invited both of you might come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But 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.” To us today, it would sound as if Jesus was teaching how to be honorable in a hypocritical way. It almost sounds as if he is teaching these people how to achieve a phony honor status: Pretend to be humble, that you might be called up higher.
I don’t think this is what’s going on. I suggest that Jesus may be being sarcastic. He knows that he is being watched. But he is also watching the Pharisees who come clamoring for places of honor at the meal. What people and the world thought of them was dreadfully important. I suggest that Jesus is teasing them saying: If you really want to get honor don’t risk being shot down. Pretend to be humble with the possibility of being called up higher. They knew well a proverb (Proverbs 25:6-7) from Hebrew Scripture: “When you stand before a king, don’t try to impress him, and pretend to be important. It is better to be asked to take a higher position than be told to give your place to someone more important.” Here again, you have a kind of reversal. The Pharisees are watching Jesus with the possibility of shaming him, but he in his acute sharpness shames them for seeking exultation versus being honorably humble. Jesus didn’t get crucified because he was a particularly nice guy. He is in fact saying that it is God who determines who is truly honorable, not the world; human opinions are not reliable.
Carrying this curious event still farther, Jesus ventures to insult the host Pharisee. To tell your host how he should run his dinner party was not exactly in good taste, even then. It was expected that when you had a dinner for your friends they would invite you back for dinner. Reciprocity was very important in this culture. It was a part of the economic system of the time. Favors were always paid back with favors. Says Jesus to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, (or perhaps even a bunch of phony’s like you have gathered here) in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when your give a banquet invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will then be blessed or honored truly by God.” The poor, lame, crippled, blind being invited to a banquet was unheard of. You did not associate with anyone below your status. Not to invite people who could pay you back, and your family as well was simply unheard of. This suggestion by Jesus was a truly radical and unacceptable concept for the time. It is another of Jesus’ great reversals. They gathered people would be dumbfounded, not to mention outraged.
Luke’s Gospel is writing these parables as an example to the early church. Honor comes from God, and what the world thinks is not nearly so important. We express the Gospel of love for all people without concern for our own personal worth and status, without expectation of being repaid. The world has its standards, but so does the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and his standards are often quite different.
What all this means for the church today is still quite important as we do our part to proclaim the Gospel of God’s redeeming love. First of all humility is now and always has been a Godly virtue. But humility is not groveling and being less than a person is. Humility is being what you are. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Even kings and people of high rank are simply people with a variety of skills and place in the world. We have often been led to believe that we live in a hierarchy, and it is important to move up the ladder of success. There is nothing wrong with moving up to what we are capable of handling in life, but it is also true that we do not live in a hierarchy of status. We are all needed in our various skills and occupations. We need a doctor as well as sanitation crews. Life is not hierarchical so much as it is understanding who we are and to what place in life we are called to serve the common good. Being a hotshot in the world is simply not what we are called to be, but a servant with Christ that embraces all people as brothers and sisters. There is a very powerful lesson from Philippians that we read as the Palm Sunday Epistle about the nature of Jesus Christ: (Phil. 2:6f) “He always had the nature of God, but he did not think that by force he should try to become equal with God. Instead of this, of his own free will he gave up all he had and took the nature of a servant. He became like a man and appeared in human likeness. He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death – his death on the cross.”
Right now, here at St. John’s we are in the midst of building a handicapped ramp, which is long overdue. While the church should have been the leader in handicapped access, it is one of the last of institutions that have been sensitive to special human needs. Often we hear arguments that it all costs too much. Building handicapped ramps, and giving to special human needs is costly, and its return is often negligible, if not annoying. We may end up with a meager crowd of retarded people in wheel chairs in our church. Maybe so. We may also end up with some of our very own folk who have been discouraged from being here to worship. But the point of the Gospel and how it addresses us today is not what we get in return, but what we do and spend in the name of Jesus Christ without concern for reward.
We need to carefully consider as Christians who our associates are. The majority of the time, I would suspect that we all associate with people similar in status, race, and thinking. This is normal and what you might expect in the world. We also plan many of our activities around the things that will amuse ourselves: worship, picnics, Bible study, coffee hour. But the gospel is a real challenge in terms of who do we invite to participate in our amusements? Who do we invite into our worship, to our Bible study, and with whom do we usually associate with at the coffee hour? We go for what makes us comfortable and keeps us relatively amused. Jesus’ teaching provides us with a challenge and mission beyond the usual, the comfortable, and the worldly. As a church community we have to keep working on our ways and means of providing Eucharist for all.
From an overall perspective of being a Christian Community in the world, we have to keep in mind that we are all simply the people of Jesus Christ, and through Christ there is a bigger family that includes all races. We need to work at opportunities for making friends and having interracial relationships. We need also to help to develop Christian Communities in our cities and among the poor. We need to seek out opportunities to develop and keep up relationships with older people, handicapped people, and people in nursing homes. The harvest is bountiful and the workers may well seem few, but it is in the very spirit of hope and determination to reverse the world’s thinking that we may really find ourselves, our purpose, our peace, and our place in the Kingdom we call Christ’s Kingdom, the Kingdom of God.
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