Sermon — September 25, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“[The rich man] called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’” (Luke 16:23–24)

There’s a lot to say about this story of Lazarus and the anonymous rich man, but there’s one detail that always stops me in my tracks: The rich man knows Lazarus’s name. He knew who Lazarus was in this life, he knew his name, and he did nothing to help him as he lay dying outside his gates. He knows who Lazarus is when he sees him in the afterlife, and he knows his name, and he won’t even address him. He begs for mercy, but he doesn’t beg Lazarus for mercy. When he speaks, he doesn’t say, “I’m sorry, Lazarus.” He doesn’t say, “Now I know how you must have felt, Lazarus.” He continues to ignore Lazarus, just as he had in this life, and speaks to Abraham instead: “Send Lazarus, won’t you, to bring me something to drink.”

This is not an abstract story about the tragedy of economic inequality, about the notion that someone somewhere else is starving while you have enough to eat, and so you should feel guilty, young man, if you don’t clean your plate of all that delicious liver and onions. It’s a very concrete story, not just about inequality but about inhumanity, about what it means to look at another person, to know another person, and to treat them as if their life is worth nothing to you.

In a way, Jesus’ story almost reads like the sermon illustration he would use if he were preaching on the passage we heard from Paul’s first letter to Timothy, although of course the letter isn’t written until long after Jesus is dead. “We brought nothing into the world,” Paul writes, “so that we can take nothing out of it;if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these” (1 Timothy 6:7–8) But here’s the rich man, not just content with having food and clothing but feasting sumptuously and dressed in fine linen and royal purple; and there’s Lazarus, longing to eat even a crumb and clothed only in his sores. “As for those in the present age who are rich,” Paul advises, “command them not to be haughty.” (1 Tim. 6:17) Yet the rich man presumes to order Lazarus around as if he were a servant, even as he suffers in Hades and Lazarus rests in Abraham’s embrace. The rich man is rich in goods, but he’s certainly not “rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,” as Paul says. (1 Tim. 6:18) He has not “[stored] up for [himself] the treasure of a good foundation for the future.” (1 Tim. 6:19) He’s spent his treasure on himself in this world, and he’s now paying the price in the next.

Of course, Jesus isn’t actually preaching on Paul. But they both take for granted what was, without a doubt, the mainstream Jewish opinion of the day, and still is: Both societies and individuals have a moral obligation to help those who are poor. When someone is hungry and you have food, you feed then. When someone is cold and wet, and you have clothes, you share them. When someone needs medical care, and lying in the street, you don’t send the dogs out to lick their wounds; you heal them. This is what Abraham means when he says that the rich man’s brothers don’t need Lazarus to tell them to care for the poor. They “Moses and the prophets,” in other words, they have the Bible, they have centuries of God’s repeated instruction to use their spare resources to care for those who don’t have enough. Whatever we have in this world, we cannot take it with us to the next. Everything we have will one day be taken away, whether we like it or not. But we have a chance, now, to give it away. And that makes all the difference.

Easier said than done, right? We all have things we need or just want in this world. We all have bills to pay. We don’t want merely to survive; we want to thrive, to enjoy our lives, and if we have children, to make their lives easier than our own. It would be incredible hypocrisy for me to stand up here, and wag my finger, and tell you that money is the root of all evil, and then take a paycheck for it. But that’s not what Paul says, and it’s not what Jesus says. What Paul says is not “money is the root of all evil” but that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” (1 Tim. 6:10) When the love of money overpowers the love of neighbor—when you are so attached to your wealth that you will step over a man whose name you know as he is dying in the street rather than sharing it—then you are in trouble. Then you are already engulfed in flames.

So this is a sermon about stewardship.

Not about “stewardship,” in the churchy sense, as a technical term for a fall pledge drive or fundraising campaign. But “stewardship” in a much bigger sense. “Stewardship,” if it helps you to think about the origins of words, from an Old English compound meaning, essentially “being the one who guards the livestock pen”: a “steward,” originally, is a “sty-guard,” as in a pig-sty.

The steward is not the owner. She doesn’t have an absolute right to the property, to do with it whatever she likes. She’s been entrusted with it, to use it as the owner has instructed. So we are “stewards” of creation, given this earth as our home, but not entitled to destroy it as we are destroying it; it’s God’s, not ours. We are “stewards” of this building, given it for our use and for our worship, but not entitled to sell it or tear it down. And we are “stewards” of our own lives: of our wealth, as little or as great as it may be; of our time, as long or as short as it may be; of our talents, as great or as meager as they may be. We brought nothing into this world, as Paul says, and we can take nothing out of it. We’ve been temporarily entrusted with everything we have so that we can better love and serve God and our neighbors, so that we can be “rich in good works, and generous, and ready to share.”

This is not a sermon about “stewardship,” in the narrow sense. It’s not about the money you give to the church, at all. It’s about stewardship in the broader sense. It’s about what you do with what you have in this life. It’s about the neighbors you see and know, like the rich man knew Lazarus, and what they need that you can give; and it’s about the neighbors you don’t see and don’t know, and what they need. It’s about what it looks like to live a life of “faith, love, endurance, gentleness,” good works, generosity, sharing; what it looks like for you already now to “take hold of the life that really is life.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon — September 18, 2022

The Rev Greg. Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“The manager asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him,
‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’” (Luke 16:5–6)

Debt relief is as hot a topic today as it was in Jesus’ time. You may have heard this summer about the Biden administration’s new plan for student-loan debt relief. But there’s been another kind of debt in the news recently, one that’s less controversial and, in my opinion, much more interesting: some churches are building a movement to purchase and forgive huge amounts of unpaid medical debt.

What makes medical debt relief so interesting is that it costs almost nothing. It works like this: There are a huge number of outstanding hospital bills in this country that will simply never be paid. Imagine, for example, that you don’t have much money and you have bad insurance or no insurance, and you have a heart attack that leads to emergency heart surgery, and maybe the cardiologist or the anesthesiologist on call is out of network. You may end up with a bill that you simply cannot ever pay. After a few months, the hospital can hand your debt over to a collection agency, but there’s only so much they can do. Medical debt collection is a tough business to be in. After all: they can hound you with phone calls, they can trash your credit score, but they cannot repo your heart. Not yet.

So there’s this huge and strange market for medical debt that’s premised on the idea that it’s better to get something than nothing. You can buy and sell big bundles of debt for literally a penny on the dollar, and if only 1 or 2% of it ever gets paid off, you’ve done all right.

Or—and here’s where the debt relief comes in—you can buy someone’s debt, and then simply forgive it. One church in Durham, North Carolina, for example, is including medical debt relief in its capital campaign as part of their mission, because by raising just $50,000 in funds they could forgive $5 million in medical debt for people in their community.[1]

If you think about this like an economist, this all makes perfect sense. If you think about it like—no offense—a human being, it’s mind-boggling. After all, if my $10,000 debt could be sold to someone else for $100 and then forgiven, then why didn’t I just owe the hospital $100 in the first place?

Our parable this morning is the fourth in a series of five that Jesus tells in this section of the Gospel of Luke about the inextricably linked concepts of wealth, sin, and forgiveness. Last week, we heard the two parables of the “lost sheep” and the “lost coin,” two stories about people who lost some portion of their wealth, in livestock or cash, and then went out to find them and bring them home. Jesus explains them as parables about how God relates to us when we sin and repent, when we are lost and God comes looking for us. Next week, we’ll hear the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, in which the rich man begs God for forgiveness and mercy, having never cared a bit for the poor man Lazarus in his lifetime while he lay on the streets outside the rich man’s gates. And between last week and this week our lectionary skipped over the parable of the Prodigal Son, which we heard earlier this year, in which the younger son squanders his inheritance and then comes home, begging forgiveness from his father, who treats him to a lavish party in return.

These parables can be confounding, this morning’s especially. Jesus seems to commend some very shady dealings. It seems that this dishonest manager been running his boss’s affairs for some time, and abusing his power to line his own pockets. The boss hears some rumors and asks him to show him the books. So the manager goes around and retroactively edits all the loans, using his authority to forgive huge portions of the people’s debts.

It’s a little hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. Is it like the situation of medical debt, where the boss has already written these loans off as unlikely to be repaid, but the manager manages to squeeze out a fraction of what’s owed by forgiving the rest? Is it a last-minute attempt to cook the books, hiding what the manager has stolen from the loan repayments by pretending it was never owed? Is it just a spending spree in which the manager uses the last moments of his power to buy the loyalty of the people in the community, before he’s thrown out the door? At the very least, that last part is what Jesus picks up on, and he’s right. These neighbors are now in the manager’s debt, not just the master’s. They owe him, not jugs of olive oil or containers of wheat, but some serious favors down the road.

Most parables are hard to parse. We sometimes assume the biggest and the most powerful person in the story is supposed to be God. And that can create some very weird theology. Say that God is the master, the one in charge. Is Jesus the steward, who goes around practicing forgiveness and mercy. So God is planning to… fire Jesus for mismanagement? But then he’s pleased when it turns out Jesus deceived him? You didn’t have be at Thursday’s discussion on the Nicene Creed to sense that maybe that’s not how the Trinity’s supposed to work.

Like the lost sheep and the lost coin and the Prodigal Son, this is often read as another parable of sin and forgiveness. And in fact “debt” is very traditional language for sin. The text of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, actually reads “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) This “debt = sin” image is just so ingrained in theology that we translate it “trespasses” or “sins” instead. Parables are tricky to understand. But if this story about the forgiveness of debts really does have something to do with forgiveness writ large, then there a few things about it that I want to point out.

First: we are all deeply in debt to one another and to God. It’s one thing to say that sin is like a debt. If I’ve wronged you or mistreated you, in some sense, I owe you some kind of repayment. But it goes much deeper than that. Simply by being alive, we are deeply in debt to those who came before us: to those who bore us and raised us, to those who built our cities and our churches, to those who fought and struggled and died for our freedom, in battles and protests and courtrooms. And we’re deeply in debt to God. There is no price that we could pay to purchase for ourselves a life. It is a gift from God.

Second: it costs a lot, in time and money, to repay our debts. It takes just minutes and pennies on the dollar for someone else to forgive them. No farmer in the world could’ve offered to pay that manager 50% of his debt and call it even without being laughed out of the room. But it only takes the manager a second to cut the price in half. Although, to be fair, he is committing fraud. It costs only pennies on the dollar for someone else to buy your hospital bills, when you could never in your lifetime pay them back. And what’s true for debt forgiveness is even true for forgiveness forgiveness. There may come a time in your life when you mess up. (Maybe you already have.) And you can work so hard to make things right, you can try and try and try to be perfect, to never do it again; but even if you succeed, you will never be free from that debt until the person you have wronged forgives it. And they can grant that forgiveness so much more easily than you can earn it.

And third: the forgiveness of a debt creates transforms a relationship. The dishonest manager knows this. That’s why he does what he does. He’s purchasing a literal social safety net for himself after he’s thrown out of his old job. That church in North Carolina knows this. They weren’t just doing this alone, they were organizing other white churches to raise money to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars medical debt, primarily for poor Black people in their state, trying to transform their relationship with a community they’d kept in chains. Forgiveness doesn’t just roll things back to the way they were. It begins to build a new relationship for the future.

All of this is what Paul means when he writes that Jesus, as a “mediator between God and humankind…gave himself a ransom for all.” (1 Tim. 2:5–6) He means that in Christ, God forgave our debts. To whatever extent we owed God something—for the gift of our lives, or as the debt owed for our actions or our inactions—in Jesus’ life and death, God paid the bill. God chose to forgive us our debts, knowing that we could not ever earn enough to pay them off. And God invited us to forgive one another as we had been forgiven.

So maybe there’s a debt that someone owes you that will never be paid off. Maybe they wronged you long ago, but they’re no longer alive, and you’re left with your resentment. Maybe they nearly ran you over or cut you off in traffic on the way here, but you’ll never see them again. Maybe they owe you a literal, actual debt, but you know they just can’t pay. What would it cost for you to forgive that debt? What would it look like to write it off? Would it do anything to transform them? More importantly, maybe— Would it do anything to transform you?In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] https://sojo.net/articles/churches-are-forgiving-medical-debt-pennies-yours-can-too

Sermon — September 11, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I once heard an interview with a baseball umpire who’d been recruited to test out a new ”electronic umpire” system in the early days of its development. It used lasers and cameras and computers to detect exactly where the baseball crossed the plate, then communicated wirelessly with a headset in the umpire’s ear, which played a little noise after each pitch. Right down the middle? Ding! Way outside? BAAAAH. The company was just testing things out, and this guy was an umpire for one of those leagues that’s so minor it’s not even technically “minor league.” They called him up with a proposition. “Hey, you have a double header on Thursday, right? How about this? The first game, you call, the way you’d call it, but with the headset in your ear. The second game, for every pitch, just call exactly what the computer says.”

And by about the third inning of that second game, he was convinced: This machine was going to ruin baseball.

His reasoning was simple. While the strike zone is, in theory, a geometric concept, in practice it’s a human one. Negotiating the exact boundaries of the strike zone is part of the game, as the batter tries to shrink it down and the pitcher and catcher try to make it wider. The umpire’s job isn’t to apply an algorithm to determine whether any given pitch is a ball or a strike. It’s to preside over a healthy game. If the pitcher hit the last batter, the umpire might call a few balls on the inside to discourage the pitcher. If the batter keeps mouthing off about bad calls, the umpire’s going to stand his ground, and then some. And let’s face it, baseball is a spectator sport: there are certain pitches that can be called as strikes in the top of the second inning but really need to be balls in the bottom of the ninth, if the batter’s team is down by two, because this is a game, and not a computer simulation.

You may not agree with this umpire. But you can at least understand his point. There are times when the best way forward is not the precise and strict application of the rules, but a certain kind of flexibility. There are times when we think fairness is the most important thing, but in fact it’s forgiveness. There are times when what we want is justice, but what we need is mercy.

If you think there’s nothing more important than calling balls and strikes as precisely as possible in life, then today’s parables might be disappointing. The lost sheep and the lost coin tells us something about what God values, after all. And if this is the way that God behaves over “one sinner who repents,” (Luke 15:7, 10) then our God is an unfair, unjust, unreasonable god. And everybody knows it.

Consider the lost sheep. “Who among you,” Jesus asks, “if you had one hundred sheep and lost one, wouldn’t leave behind the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one who had been lost?” (Luke 15:3-4) And every shepherd in the crowd is looking around, like… Should I raise my hand?

This is a very bad idea! No reasonable person would do this. For the sake of saving one in a hundred, no one would leave the other ninety-nine out alone in the wilderness, vulnerable to wolves or thieves or simply to wandering off themselves, which sheep, it turns out, are rather apt to do.

And what he does next is worse! He takes the sheep, and puts it on his shoulders, and where does he go? Back to the rest of the flock, to make sure they’re still okay? No! He carries it home! Into his house! And he calls his friends and neighbors and he says to them, “Rejoice with me!” And they show up and they’re like, “Man… Where are your sheep?” And he’s like, “I don’t know! Out there! I hope! Isn’t this awesome!?”

The woman with the lost coin behaves in a slightly more methodical way. She only has ten coins, and she’s lost one of them, but there’s no risk to the other nine. So she lights the lamp and she sweeps the floor. She scours her apartment looking for that coin and when she finds it, she is filled with joy. And she calls to her friends and her neighbors, and she says to them, “Rejoice with me! I’ve found my coin!”

But the more you think about this story, the stranger it seems, too. She invites her friends over to celebrate, and how do you celebrate but by throwing a big party—by eating together, like Jesus eats with the tax collectors and sinners? But how many friends and neighbors can you feed for one drachma? It seems to me that the woman may have spent a huge amount of energy searching for this one lost coin and then spent it right away, by throwing a party to celebrate having found it.

And so it is, Jesus says, with God.

We so desperately want things to be fair. We want balls to be balls, and strikes to be strikes. We want people to be held accountable for their actions, punished for their wrongdoing. We want them to apologize so that we can feel justified in forgiving them. We want the ninety-nine sheep to be rewarded for their good behavior, and the one lost sheep to have to deal with the consequences of its actions.

But God is unfair. God’s like the woman who’s lost the coin: she’ll light a lamp to drive away the darkness so she can look for you the instant she realizes you’re lost, even if you’re not ready to be found. God’s like the shepherd who’s found the sheep: he’ll throw you over his shoulders and carry you back home, bleating furiously, without a thought for the rest of the flock. When you have wandered far away, God is so delighted at the prospect of your return that he doesn’t even wait for you to realize you’re lost; he just goes, without a thought of fairness in his mind.

God doesn’t call balls and strikes according to an algorithm. God practices mercy, more than justice; forgiveness, more than fairness. And Jesus invites us, in these parables, to consider whether we might do the same.

There are, no doubt, many situations in which clear boundaries need to be set. There are relationships in which the appropriate response to being wronged is not “It’s okay. I forgive you,” but, “That was wrong. It’s not okay. You need to stay away from me.” Absolutely.

But we spend most of our lives on the edges of the strike zone. And we see the world like typical baseball fans. We think that we are pitching strikes, and they are throwing balls. We think that we are being wronged, when we’ve done nothing wrong. We think that if only life were more fair, if only someone were out there really calling balls and strikes, then—Well, then what? God would smite our neighbors or our spouses or our friends for their thousand tiny wrongs?

Because that’s the thing. We crave justice, but sometimes justice doesn’t do very much for us. What we really need is mercy. We stick to our ideas of fairness, but knowing that we’re right doesn’t do much for us. If we can let go, and forgive—if we can sweep the floors of all our resentments and search what we’ve lost—we might have a chance at feeling a tiny fraction of God’s joy.

God in her mercy has given us the power to forgive, to be as irresponsible and unreasonable as God is, with one another, to display, as Christ did, “the utmost patience” with one another. (1 Tim. 1:16) Not because it’s easy to forgive. Not because the other person isn’t wrong. But because God has displayed the utmost patience with us. Because God has swept the floor and searched diligently for us. Because God has sought us out when we have gone astray and carried us home on his shoulders, rejoicing.

So “to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” (1 Tim. 1:17)

Sermon — September 4, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:25, 33)

I’ve always wanted to suggest this as a reading for someone’s wedding…

I’m joking, of course. I can’t think of a worse choice. But this is exactly what’s so baffling about Jesus’ words. Most people in our culture encounter Christianity primarily as a kind of family religion. They go to church for family occasions like a baptism, a wedding, or a funeral. They go to church on big family holidays like Christmas; maybe even Easter or Mother’s Day. But if you’re among the faithful few who show up on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, you’re treated to this perplexing message: if you do not hate the ones you love, you cannot be my disciple.

Most of us are here to do the opposite. We know that Jesus taught us to love God and our neighbors, and we want to do it. We recognize, as well, that we need some help learning to love, or at least learning to love more gently, more patiently, more humbly. So we come to church and we listen for a word or wisdom or we say a prayer for compassion. Or maybe we just like the music. But none of us, I’m sure, are here to hate.

It’s possible, of course, that “hate” isn’t quite the right translation. Jesus seems to be talking less about emotions and more about priorities. He goes on to explain things in terms of “cost.” If you’re going to build a new tower for your vineyard, don’t you get a few bids first, to see if you can afford the work? If a king’s going to wage war, doesn’t he try to figure out if he’ll be able to win? “In this same way,” he says, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” (Luke 14:33) Following Jesus isn’t easy. It’s not cheap. It will take everything you have. So if you’re not willing to give up everything to follow Jesus—your family, your possessions, your life itself—isn’t it better not to set out after him in the first place? “Which one are you going to put first?” the wedding homily goes. “The deeply beloved person you’re about to marry? Or Jesus?”

Let’s be honest: if this is how we measure discipleship, there haven’t been very many Christians ever. People will sometimes preach this text as if you can just say, “Discipleship is hard. There’s no cheap grace. You have to give things up to follow Jesus.” And then rattle off a few of the saints and martyrs of the church: Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mother Theresa; Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Just be like them. But none of them would tell you they measured up to this. No one has. No one can. You can actually see it already in the Gospel. It’s part of Luke’s point. Jesus is on his final journey to Jerusalem. At this stage, “large crowds” are traveling with him. (Luke 14:25) But by the end, they’ll all be gone. No one in the crowd, none of his disciples, not even the closest members of his inner circle, take up a cross and follow him to his death. And he redeems them, nevertheless. Jesus is right. If this is what it means, we cannot be his disciples. We are not strong enough or single-minded enough to follow him down the road that he walked. And yet he loves us, and cares for us, and works in our lives nevertheless.

This is why I love the letter to Philemon so much. It’s a strange little letter. This is the whole thing. And it’s a little confusing, because while Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus clearly know what’s going on, we don’t have the whole picture. Some things are clear. It’s clear that Onesimus is enslaved, and Philemon is his enslaver. It’s clear that Paul is in prison. It seems to be the case that, while in prison, Paul has met Philemon and converted him to the Christian faith. And now Paul writes to Philemon, saying that he’s sending Onesimus back—presumably carrying the letter.

We don’t know how Onesimus got to Paul. Some suggest that Philemon sent him to Paul in the first place, maybe to bring a letter or to care for him in prison. Others argue that Philemon may have run away, perhaps after stealing or mishandling some of Onesimus’s property. And it’s not clear what exactly Paul wants Onesimus to do. Does he want him to welcome Onesimus back to slavery but treat him as a Christian brother, if such a thing is even possible? Does he want to send Onesimus back to Paul? Does he want him, perhaps, to free Onesimus? Is this what Paul means when he says he should receive him “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother”? (Phlm. 16) The letter is ambiguous enough that it was claimed by both sides in America’s 19^th-century debate over slavery. “Look! Paul sends back a runaway slave!” pro-slavery Christians said. “But wait!” replied abolitionists, “he tells Philemon to set him free!”

Paul’s actual advice is tentative. But at the same time, he makes a sweeping claim: by entering into God’s family, we have become one another’s actual family. Read alongside the family-hating language of the gospel this week, Paul’s use of family language is striking. “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” he writes. (3) I’ve “received much joy and encouragement from your love…my brother,” he tells Philemon. (7) I appeal to you for “my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become.” (10) Perhaps you will “have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” (15-16) We are now equals: “Welcome him as you would welcome me.” (16) Oh and by the way, get the guest room ready; I’m going to come check up on this situation. (17) (Oh and by the way, Mark and Luke say hi.)

This is a huge transformation. In the highly-stratified society of ancient Rome, it would be extraordinary to call a man who’d been your slave your brother, let alone to actually treat him as your brother. It’s unclear how exactly Onesimus got to Paul and the first place, and what exactly Paul’s asking Philemon to do now. This is not a simple, sweeping statement of emancipation. But it comes with a theological punch. If we are siblings, truly siblings in Christ, how could one human being keep another in chains?

I wonder whether this is the kind of “hate” of family Jesus means, the kind of re-prioritization that puts the family of God at the center of our lives and moves our own families toward the margins. I’m still not sure I like the idea, but I am sure that to if Philemon took Paul’s advice, his brothers would have experienced it as hate. It would have been an insult, for this slave to be treated as if he were their brother. They would have been aghast to see him elevated to their rank. But in this new family God is creating, there is no rank or title or class: only innumerable siblings, treated as one.

So I don’t know whether any of you will become great heroes of the faith—the Saint Anthonys or Saint Francises who hear words like this and immediately really do go out and sell everything and give the money to the poor, the Martin Luther Kings and Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Oscaro Romeros who know what’s right and really do follow it, even unto death. But I do know that all of us face Philemon’s question: How do I live faithfully amid the messiness of ordinary life? What price am I willing to pay? What would it mean to welcome, to forgive, to embrace someone the way that Paul commands? What would it mean to really live as if the whole human family were my family? I can’t be Jesus. I don’t need to be Jesus. But maybe… just maybe, I can awkwardly, ambiguously, tentatively feel my way toward the kingdom of God like blessed St. Paul.

Sermon — August 28, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Page

In every wedding planning process and at every wedding reception, there is a moment that has the power to distil and clarify decades-long relationships into a single decision: the seating chart. For months, the happy couple (or maybe just one of them and an in-law-to-be) have spent hours standing around the kitchen table, moving tiny names around the map as they factor in every variable. We’ll put the college friends over here, they say, and the neighbors over here, and the really strange second cousins somewhere over there. The bridal party goes here at the head table, and our immediate family right next to us, and—wait, wait, wait! We can’t put Uncle Jim next to our old high-school friends. Not after last time.

And then on the other end of the process, there’s the moment when the guests walk into the reception dinner and find their table numbers and sit down, when they finally see exactly what their friends or family think of them. Which table are they at? And, perhaps more importantly, who else is at it? You can tell pretty quick when you’ve ended up at “Random Family Friends Table #4” rather than in the place of prominence you think you deserve.

(This is one good reason to do what we did, and follow Alice’s family tradition of a stand-up reception, with a few tables scattered around for the grandparents.)

In Jesus’ time and place, wedding banquets worked a little differently, but there was just as much room for drama. From his words in the Gospel today you may be able to imagine the scene. At a typical classy event in the ancient Mediterranean world, the guests wouldn’t have been seated at separate tables, but reclining on their sides couches in a large U shape. The host would be seated at one end of the U, with places of honor on either side. If you were way down at the other end, not only would it be hard to participate in conversation, but you’d be facing away from the host and guests of honor.

One can imagine that in such an honor-focused society, the seating at many events was assigned. But Jesus describes a banquet with no assigned seating. You can imagine that when you entered the room, you had to think: am I the most important guest at this banquet? Am I the third-most important? The tenth? If you guessed too high, you’d embarrass yourself. Because if you walked in and took a great seat, and then someone else came in who was the real guest of honor, you’d be bumped to the first empty seat, which would most likely be the worst seat in the house.

So, Jesus gives some very practical advice: Go in and sit in the worst place instead, so that when the host walks into the room, he says to you, “Oh come on, scooch in a little closer,” and rather than being embarrassed, you look important and cool. (Luke 14:7-11)

It’s a neat trick. I’m not sure I’d call it a “parable.” (But we’ll get back to that.)

Then Jesus offers up a second piece of strategic dining advice, and this one is counter-intuitive but straightforward enough. When you throw a dinner party, he says, don’t invite your friends or siblings or relatives or your rich neighbors, because then they’re going to invite you over for dinner, and they won’t owe you anything anymore. (Luke 14:12) Instead, invite the people who can’t repay you, the ones who are poor, or who are living with various physical impairments. (14:13) And because they can’t repay you in this life, you’ve successfully tricked God, who’ll be forced to repay you in the next.

I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but to me this just feels a little… icky. The Gospel today reads like one of those click-bait ads at the bottom of a webpage: “Pastors hate these two easy ways to get into heaven.” Shouldn’t our motives be a little purer than this? Does Jesus really need to give us advice on how to fake humility so we look good in front of everyone else? Shouldn’t we extend our hospitality to the people who need it most because it’s the right thing to do—or maybe because we might be entertaining angels, as Hebrews says! (Heb. 13:2)—but not just to store up points in St. Peter’s account book? Can’t we be trusted to be good for goodness’ sake, and not out of self-interest?

Well, just to pause there for a second: What Jesus describes would be as remarkable in our culture as it was in his. When those of us who have more money host a dinner or a lunch, we really do tend to invite our friends or relatives, or neighbors who are more or less like us. We don’t really invite the people who can’t afford to pay us back. When those of us who don’t have much money are invited over for a meal, it’s not typically an invitation from the super-rich. In our society, we institutionalize a certain amount of generosity through non-profits and charities and a social safety net, but there’s very little real face-to-face encounter across our various divides; and in fact, outside a select few neighborhoods, most of our world is structured so that people who are poor and people who are rich don’t even see each other, don’t even live in the same place, let alone share a meal together.

And so if this sermon inspires you to “let mutual love continue,” to “show hospitality to strangers,” (Heb. 13:1-2) to host a radically diverse banquet and to choose the least prominent seat, then… Jesus would be pleased! We should probably do more of that! Maybe not for the self-serving reasons Jesus gives in his advice, which is so focused on our own honor and our own salvation. Maybe because it would be a beautiful enactment of so much of what Jesus teaches about the kingdom of God.

And in fact, I think there’s a little more going on here. It’s not so much that some of us, who are rich in possessions, should give banquets and invite others of us, who are poor, out of the goodness and generosity of our hearts. It’s that Jesus himself, rich in spiritual abundance beyond our wildest imaginings, is inviting all of us, who are poor, and hungry, and blind, to his wedding banquet. Luke calls this a “parable.” (Luke 14:7) Mere practical advice on how not to look like a fool isn’t a parable. A parable is about how God relates to us.

And in Christ, in Jesus’ very own life, God chose the humblest place. Jesus gave up the riches of heaven to become a simple, fragile human being. And he went beyond the lowest seat at the banquet into the most shameful places in the world, onto the cross, into the tomb. And when God said, “Friend, move up higher,” (Luke 14:10) he did, and brought us with him on his way. We are the poor, all of us, whom he invited us to feast on the riches of his grace, and we have feasted, and we cannot repay him. But we can turn around and invite other people to celebrate with us and to feast at his table.

So, yes, choose the humble place, not so that you will be exalted but because the One who humbled himself for you has chosen to exalt you. Yes, share a meal with those children of God with whom you might not otherwise come face to face, because the One whom we do not yet see face to face is even now inviting you to share in the holy meal of his Body and Blood. “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have,” as Hebrews writes, “for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” (Heb. 13:16) Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for God has shared God’s whole being with you, and he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” (Heb. 13:5)

Even if you find yourself sitting at Table 17.