Luke 14:16-24
Hospitality… it’s important, isn’t it? Welcoming someone to a meal, taking care with the menu, the guests’ needs; it’s a way to share friendship, to deepen relationships, and if you’re a foodie like me, to have fun experimenting with recipes and presentation.
Hospitality, meals, banquets were important in Jesus’ time as well as a constant theme throughout Scripture. This is, in part, because one of the predominant images in the Old Testament is how God’s feast would both signify salvation and protection against enemies. Did you know that it was common, accepted practice between warring nations that if your enemy was sitting down at table to eat, you would not attack them during the meal? That is why we find the line in Psalm 23, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies…” as it is the assurance of God’s protection and safety in those times we feel besieged.
We also hear a lot about hospitality in the gospels because the Pharisees loved to use meals as a way to entrap Jesus, just as Jesus used meals as a time for teaching about the kingdom of God and to show up the difference between Pharisaical law and God’s intent. This parable of the great supper we heard from Luke is a wonderful example of Jesus seeking to turn perceived beliefs upside down.
A householder was giving a very important meal, whether it was a wedding banquet or just an exquisite dinner, it’s not essential to know which but it obviously was a special occasion. The event would surely add to the man’s honor and standing as well as to his social indebtedness. The guests had been invited and had affirmed that they would be there, but then when the meal was ready, all of a sudden they came up with totally inappropriate excuses. Jesus’ hearers would have been very surprised as to why all the guests refused and would assume there had to be some good reason to insult this host of the feast. However, they would have been even more shocked at what the man did. Instead of admitting defeat, or finding other social peers to dine with him, he instead invites anyone and everyone! The poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame, the homeless, all those who can give him no honor. In fact, to snub the ones who were originally invited, the man gives up his place of honor by becoming one of the least. Or to say it another way, not just does God become one of us in the incarnation of Jesus, Jesus also invites his followers to do the same – to become one with those who are considered the least, with those who have nothing.
Now that is how Jesus’ original version reads. Yet Luke and Matthew can’t leave it as simply as that. Both have to add an editorial comment at the end, with Luke making a reference to punishing the guests who refused to show up, and Matthew insisting that even those invited at the last minute need to appear in the right clothes. But Jesus’ message, however was simply that the kingdom isn’t about only the wealthy and those supposed honorable ones being welcome at the feast. It’s about the startling truth that the giver of the feast becomes as one of the least and unlikely in order to show that the dinner is meant for everyone, especially those who believe they’d never have a chance to eat or belong or sit side by side at ‘the welcome table’. And as I pondered what it could mean for us today, I thought about hospitality in terms of who is or isn’t invited and welcomed to the banquet of opportunity, to the tables of plenty. Who is excluded, or feels excluded because of the color of their skin?
Even before the verdict in the George Zimmerman –Trayvon Martin case was announced a week ago, there have many conversations and discussions about the larger issues of race, identity and violence, and about just how significant the racial divide is. Depending on your history and the color of your skin, there are so many radically different experiences and perspectives when it comes to one’s sense of personal safety, power, and personal worth. Let me share two small examples of this difference. Last Saturday night when the verdict was announced, the 12 year old son of the Rev. Otis Moss, III asked his father a question that Moss said pierced his soul, “Daddy, am I next?” This young boy was afraid he might be shot if someone thought he was in the wrong place.
After Moss’ son asked his dad the question, the two talked about injustice and Moss tried to reassure his son. As they talked, the 12 year old then started drawing pictures of Trayvon he had seen on the Internet along with one of the great civil rights leaders, the late Emmett Till. The next morning in worship, Rev. Moss told his congregation, Trinity UCC in Chicago, “There might be a great lesson in the child’s art work for everyone. Despite our fear, maybe we are called to draw. Not to get angry, but to draw, to create a new world.”1
Contrast that with another UCC pastor, who even as he longs for the Church to find true and lasting unity between races, admits that as a white father with teenage daughters even as he might pray with a black colleague he might simultaneously fear that colleague’s children in his neighborhood simply on account of their race.2
It’s not just this recent Zimmerman-Martin case, our long history as a nation begs the question, “How do we as individuals and a country move beyond this fear and misunderstanding? How do we honestly engage the larger issues? What are the ways that we as people of faith, following Jesus’ example of loving people and meeting them where they were, accepting them, even moving beyond his own prejudice, can learn to listen to the painful stories of how discrimination shapes the entire experience of life, and not judge or explain those stories away? More importantly, how do you and I even begin to see and acknowledge the incredible privilege and power we have simply by being fair skinned?
To have such conversations in Maine is virtually impossible given we are ranked 50 out of 51 when it comes to diversity.3 Still, I believe that this parable is an invitation for us to learn more, to educate ourselves about issues of race and discrimination, maybe even to read together a book such as The New Jim Crow which explores why the US prison population is overwhelmingly African American. We also need to be able to speak out in faith and fact against any who would demean or exclude another by virtue of race, and we need to understand just how pervasive such exclusion is.
“The kingdom of God may be compared to someone gave a great meal and invited many. But guess who really came to dinner? Instead of inviting Wall Street bankers and stockbrokers, or GM and Apple executives, senators and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the host invited all the African American shoe shine workers in airports, the Hispanic hotel chambermaids, and the migrant workers and nursing home attendants and people of color in all their diversity across the land. And the host said to those who thought that they should be at the feast, “Until you can stop explaining away the reality of fear and discrimination for those with different skin color, and until you can accept your own racism, these others will share first in the feast. Still, we will wait and hope and pray for you to end your excuses and mend your ways because we long for ALL to join us.”
Dear friends, God deeply yearns for everyone to be included at the welcome table. What is our part to make that reality?
1. Chicago Tribune July 14, 2013
2. Greg Carey, Huffpost, July 18, 2013, The Zimmerman Verdict and the Unity of the Church
3. NY Times Dec. 22, 2011, Diversity in the Classroom