This time of year stirs up a lot of back-to-school memories.
Here’s one: I am waiting for the school bus at the end of our driveway.
I’ve got a giant duffel bag over my shoulder full of heavy books.
I’ve got my lunch, my violin, my clothes for cross country practice.
The bus pulls up and I get on.
All seats are already full with at least two kids.
It feels like everyone’s eyes are on me and yet no one meets my eyes
as I walk the long aisle, bumping against the seats
and the other kids with all my junk,
trying to decide who to beg to move over
so I can sit down.
These school bus dynamics offer just one small example
of the exclusive and competitive culture that permeates our daily lives.
In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus addressed some of these same realities.
The first verse of the scripture makes a point of saying
that the Pharisees were watching Jesus,
perhaps with some mixture of curiosity and admiration.
After all, they had invited him to dinner;
as far as we know he didn’t crash this party.
Despite the fact that Jesus’ encounters with these religious leaders
in Luke were typically tense, there is also a sense of mutual respect.
It seems they saw each other as adversaries worth engaging.
Last week’s reading, about Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath,
occurred at this same meal, right before today’s teaching.
As Richard discussed last week, some argued that healing
on the Sabbath was a violation of the law —
because healing was “work”
and all work was to cease on the Sabbath.
Jesus knew; however, that in a deeper sense
the purpose of Sabbath is to provide a sanctuary in time
in which humans experience the world
not as a commodity dependent on their labor,
but as a gift freely received from the Creator.
Jesus taught that making someone whole in body or spirit,
including them fully in community, is not work;
it is a way of actively participating in the gift of sabbath.
Healing on the sabbath, we experience the world
as God intends it to be.
So even as the Pharisees were watching Jesus, Jesus was watching them.
He observed all the dynamics that unfolded as everyone gathered
for the sabbath meal.
Put yourself in the shoes of the host.
How would you like it if someone came into your home as a dinner guest
and then began to critique how people chose their seats
and to complain about the list of folks you’d invited?
That would be annoying, and offensive.
In the Bible study this week, though, we began to wonder
about Jesus’ tone.
Maybe he said these things with a smile and a twinkle in his eye.
Maybe his words weren’t meant to condemn or shame anyone
but instead to spark people’s interest and ignite their imagination.
As Sandy put it, perhaps we have to “soften our hearing”
of this text a bit.
It could be that Jesus was acting like a court jester,
clowning around in order to point out the absurdity
of the social situation they all were living under.
Diana Butler Bass puts the scene in historical context, explaining:
“in the Roman Empire, dinners were part of the economic system
known as patronage.
The wealthy and privileged issued dinner invitations
to those with lesser status in order to secure their loyalty
or some financial benefit;
the recipients of such invitations would be flattered
to receive the protection of the host.
A dinner invitation obligated the guest to repay the host —
in whatever way the host would see fit.
If you were a guest, having a meal with a patron bound you to that person
until the debt was discharged.”
So it seems that Jesus was commenting on more than just dinner.
He was using this Sabbath meal as a metaphor
for how society functions.
The point of any parable of Jesus is to challenge the status quo,
to break open and transform habitual patterns of thinking and acting.
So I think Jesus’ story about guests choosing seats
is meant to be a little bit playful in exposing the
maneuvering we do to gain power and influence at any cost.
If all the guests were humble; if they all chose the lowest place,
as Jesus instructed, then the competitive hierachy itself
would have been defeated.
And, similarly, the whole patronage system would have been toppled if
the host invited only those who could never repay him.
The events of this week are so heart-breaking; there’s no “why” that makes sense.
This tragic and terrible act is one more reminder, among far too many,
that we are all imprisoned in a violent culture
that thrives on economic and social exclusion and inequity,
and that promotes intolerance, bullying, and scapegoating.
Our collective failure to regulate guns appropriately is one symptom
of this culture.
This culture also manifests in the way we respond to moments
of terror and grief by blaming certain groups of people
we don’t understand.
Trans and non-binary people, people with mental health conditions,
are not more prone to committing acts of violence;
they are in fact more likely to be the victims of violent persecution.
Another way this culture manifests is in the epidemic of loneliness
in our country, in the fraying of community institutions,
in the atrophy of social spaces that draw us together
in genuine relationship that can hold both support and accountability.
In this time, we can take our cues from Jesus’ unsolicited advice to his fellow guests at the sabbath meal.
We can cultivate humility, aiming to listen and learn across differences.
We can build robust and inclusive spaces of mutual support
that may be able to contain and redirect people like the shooter,
people who are lonely, angry, and delusional.
We can surface and challenge the ideology of toxic masculinity
that harms people of all genders,
that glorifies violence as a sign of strength,
that causes people to stuff away difficult emotions,
to go it alone, and to lash out when hurting.
This is the work of building beloved community,
that we are called to do together as a church.
In times like these, I take comfort and draw hope from the fact
that we do create space for belonging all the time,
and we do it well – though we are always learning
how to do more faithfully!
Tonight a handful of us are bringing the inclusive, expansive
love of First Church to support the Neon event on campus,
assisting their student leaders in welcoming first year
University students, who probably feel excited and overwhelmed
and scared and curious all at the same time.
And demonstrating to them that faith communities like ours exist
and are actively bearing witness in the world to the authentic ways of Jesus.
The bottom line is: wholeness is God’s desire for our lives and for this world.
And the experience of joy and completion comes
from things like savoring a meal and spending time together,
not from lining our pockets and defending our social status.
Healing happens when we humbly enter into Sabbath together,
when we unlearn patterns of domination
in order to construct new social systems rooted in inclusion and equity.
I hear the essence of this teaching in the Quaker hymn, “Simple Gifts”
Listen again to these familiar words.
“Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free;
tis a gift to come down where you ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend
we shan’t be ashamed.
To turn, turn shall be our delight, til by turning, turning
we come round right.”
Amen.