Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost (C) – Luke 14:1, 7-14
I hate this shirt. The one I’m wearing now, I mean. Which isn’t to say it’s not a comfortable shirt. It’s made by R.J. Toomey, a manufacturer based out of Shrewsbury of all places, until they closed a year or two ago. It’s extremely comfortable, for a dress shirt. The collar isn’t complicated like most; it’s just a plastic strip that slips in easy. And the shape of the shirt itself is like it was made for me; just the right size for the slightly-but-not-grossly-overweight upper body I carry around. So, as clergy shirts go, I love this shirt.
But it’s the “clergy shirt” part of it that I hate. There are some pastors who will stop at the grocery store on the way home from church, or drop in a restaurant for lunch. But after church is over, I always go directly home to change. I get out of this shirt as soon as humanly possible, and get back to my usual jeans-and-T-Shirt look. (If you can call it a “look.”) The occasional instances where I can’t help but stop by Stop ‘n’ Shop or CVS on the way home, I spend the whole time on edge, feeling like my skin is going to shrivel up on my body, or like I might pass out. Usually, even if it’s somewhere like the drug store that I need to get to on my way, I will still go home first, and then get back in the car and go back to the store that I’d passed ten minutes earlier.
You see, when I’m wearing this shirt, I am not an unobtrusive 36-year old young man. I am a “PASTOR” with a capital P, a holy relic, ordained and set aside for a particular way of life that is obviously radically different from everyone else’s. I get called “Father” by complete and total strangers. I am not their father. And if they are people of faith, most of them been faithful longer than I’ve been alive, have lived lives of faith that make them MY spiritual father or mother. The only thing that makes me different from them is that I work at a church, and they work as a plumber, or whatever.
But it’s not even that I’m identified as a religious leader. It’s that, when people know what I do for a living, they usually get this idea that they automatically also know everything about what I believe, how I live my life, how I look at other people, and so on. And those assumptions they make about me are usually all wrong. For a while, I was attending a board game club down in Norwood. Then they found out what I do for a living, and suddenly every conversation was about the evils of social conservativism and the differences between religious traditions and viewpoints. I don’t go anymore; it stopped being fun. Another time I was actually out on a date, and it was going really well, and then he asked what I did for a living. In the hour that followed, I heard a tirade about what Christians had done to gay people, I was accused of being part of a sect that colluded in the massacre of the Jews, and I was treated to a detailed description of why the Bible was useless. There obviously wasn’t a second date. There are some pastors who enjoy the prestige and admiration that can come with the job. But I hate it.
Our society determines social status in ways that are very different from most older cultures in our world, and certainly in the history of Christianity. Here in New England we still have a few of our old, wealthy, quasi-aristocratic families, but most of that has gone by the wayside. There are still ways in which we look at doctors or lawyers as somewhat more important, and service workers or janitors as less so. We do treat people with higher personal wealth as if they have greater value, but most of that has to do with the real purchasing power they have, and not with some intrinsic sense of character worth. Maybe we still do consider status, but we do it in other ways. Which is to say, that when it comes to a dinner party, we might think the host or a specially-honored guest should sit at the head of the table, but otherwise, status doesn’t generally enter into it. We sit with the people we want to talk to, or wherever there is an empty seat.
So this story in today’s Gospel lesson is rather odd, from our point of view. If we’re being honest, we can’t really wrap our heads around how someone would know where they were supposed to sit. If you’re in a room with people you don’t really know, and you’re supposed to sit in order of your social worth, how do you figure out where squeeze in?
The process was complex and involved a lot of different factors—observing how a person was dressed, listening to the accent with which they spoke, hearing the register of words they used, examining the cut and style and even cleanliness of their hair, the sort of perfume they used, the way that they looked into your face (or down at the ground) when they spoke to you, and on and on, so many little indicators that we would be hard-pressed to notice—although we use some of them too, to judge others—people in the ancient world had a great deal of practice at it, and would have experienced these determinations as extremely important. The entire culture of ancient Rome and ancient Judea was based on honor and shame. Each person had a certain place in the society, and a person kept their self-respect not by choosing what was morally right, but by choosing what was expected of someone in their station.
In this context, Jesus’ teaching at this wedding banquet almost makes sense. He is saying, it seems, that it is better to choose a spot that’s too low, and be told that you’re better than that and should move up higher, than to choose a spot that’s too high, and incur the shame of being moved down the table to a lower spot to make room for someone more important.
Except that there’s one little problem with that. Choosing a spot far below your station would have been shameful as well. It’s hard to explain this in our terms, because we don’t rely on shame for social structure in America. Think, though, what it would be like if a wealthy young professional, maybe a doctor with a certain specialization that makes her one of only a few people in the country that can do her sort of surgery, or a lawyer who is a partner in one of the most prestigious firms in the nation, if someone like that decided to move into a run-down one-room apartment in Worcester Main South. What sort of things might we think about them? Are they trying to save as much money as possible, for some kind of overinflated sense of vanity and wealth? Maybe they have a nasty drug habit, and they’re trying to be close to the supplier. Maybe there’s something wrong with them, though we can scarcely guess what kind of wrong it is. What illicit activity is going on there? There must be something, because there’s absolutely no decent reason we can come up with that makes sense. Even if we are to guess at some sort of altruism—maybe he’s trying to understand the area so he can help revitalize it—this seems grossly misplaced, a foolish undertaking.
No, it’s clear that Jesus is wrong, completely wrong, that we should look for the place we’re assigned, that we should not take on some sort of false humility and lower ourselves to the state of those people, whoever those people are. Jesus can’t really mean what he’s saying, can he?
But Jesus doesn’t just preach with his words. He preaches with his life. Jesus is God incarnate, the creator and redeemer and sanctifier of the world made flesh, become human, walking among us. The Almighty and Magnificent, the Omnipresent and All-Powerful has absolutely no business taking on such lowly flesh and dwelling among the masses of humanity. He doesn’t belong at the head of the table; the whole table isn’t good enough for him. And yet there he is, sitting among guests at a wedding dinner party. One cannot help but wonder where, exactly, he’s sitting, who is seated at his right and at his left, how exactly James and John feel about that. What is he doing there?
And then we remember, too, that he was born not in the finest hospital or in the royal palace, or even a room at an inn, but in a stable, laid in a feeding trough, surrounded by livestock and the filth that comes with it. His mother was an unwed middle-eastern teenager, the best his father could do was carpentry at a vocational trade school. He was despised, rejected of men, persecuted by the religious authorities, labeled a political subversive, stripped, beaten, thrown on a cross, executed shamefully among thieves.
And what do you imagine happens to the table when the king comes and sits down, not at the head of the table, but at its foot? The king doesn’t take on shame because of his choice. Instead, the importance of each seat changes. What was now the worst seat becomes the best. Jesus doesn’t just invite you, “friend, [to] move up higher.” Jesus simply joins us at the table, and the lousy seat you had suddenly becomes the highest place.
In June of this year, I went to Indiana for the wedding of a dear friend from college. She took forever to find the right guy, and then took even longer to decide it was time to get married. I have to admit, when she first started talking about what this wedding would look like, I was a little bit offended. We had been best friends for years. At one point, our friendship had faltered, but instead of dying, we rebuilt it carefully into something even stronger. My role, she said, was to be the “best friend.” I would hang out in and around her dressing room before the service, helping to run interference so her family, people who she loved but with whom her relationship had become strained over the years, would be kept out of the dressing room.
That was my job. I should have been up there in front of the congregation as part of her wedding party. In fact, I felt like my place in her wedding was really right up front; I was her best friend, and her pastor friend, and shouldn’t I be performing the wedding? I wanted to wear THIS SHIRT! I knew where I wanted to be, and it was hard to accept the seat at the table that I was given. But it was her wedding, not mine, so I didn’t complain.
Just a few days ago, even though I told her not to get me anything, I received a gift from her. Just a photo, black and white, in a simple frame. I don’t remember the photographer being there at the moment this was taken. It’s Erica and I, walking down a hallway to the narthex in her church, as I’m escorting her from the dressing room to the back of the sanctuary so she can process in and begin the wedding ceremony. Her last moments before married life were shared with me. It is the most beautiful gift she could have given me, a picture commemorating one of the most intimate moments of our eighteen-year friendship. A moment that never would have been, had I been in the place where I thought I was “supposed” to be.
Jesus invites you to his wedding feast. And when you get there, Jesus puts you in the highest seat. But to truly experience that seat at God’s banquet, sometimes we need to first choose one that is quite a bit lower. Sometimes we, like Jesus, need to understand deeply, to truly believe that other people have great value too. Sometimes we need to put them first. Sometimes we need to give up the position and privilege afforded by our status, or our wealth, or our skin color, or our gender, or our health, or whatever, and place other people and their needs first. That’s what God calls us to do.
And that’s also, we discover, when we find our needs fulfilled best. Of course it is. Because Jesus gives us everything we need; and what we need isn’t status. It’s love.