Proper 17 C
Dinner Party Disaster (and Delight)
St. Luke 14:1-14
1 September 2013 – Redeemer
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Luke1401 Proper 17 C Dinner Party Disaster (and Delight)
There’s nothing worse than having a sick person at the table. Whether you’re at a fancy restaurant and the guy behind you is sniffling and sneezing or you’re at a Labor Day picnic and Uncle Bob is coughing all over the bratwurst. We keep sick people away from the table, feed them in their rooms, because you wouldn’t want to catch anything, unless you’re Jesus.
The Pharisees are already uncomfortable because one of their own, we’ll call him Bruce, showed up for the meal and Bruce had dropsy. We call it edema today. Fluids collect in the body making a person’s face or legs or hands puffy and swollen. Back in the Biblical day people suspected that you got dropsy from having sex outside of marriage. So there’s Bruce, the sick guy, the sinful guy, and nobody looks at him. Who wants to be reminded of sin and sickness and death while you’re enjoying the Coyote Moon Sunday buffet.
Then the dynamics of this dinner party take a disastrous detour. Jesus has been invited, to be impressed, to be watched. It is a high honor to be invited to dinner with the Clergy and the Lawyers – Think Gray, Plant and Moody meets with Dr. Harrison and the Synod’s Council of Presidents. Who are the last two people you want to sit together at your party? You’re hoping Mr. sick and sinful keeps his head down and stays away from the main table and you’re watching Jesus because you’re sure He’ll take the head spot. (After all He’s been showing off like He’s God or something.)
Then it happens. Jesus starts chatting it up with the least of those at the party. Listening, caring, most likely touching. Jesus often healed with a touch – lepers, the blind, the deaf, the mute, even the dead. Just by touching Jesus would have made Himself unclean in the Pharisees’ eyes. And without even using hand sanitizer He went back to His food. Disgusting. And then somehow in someway, probably with a touch, Jesus took hold of Bruce and healed him. The puffiness left his face. His hands didn’t look like balloons anymore and when he got up he walked like a young man and left the house ready to break into a run.
“Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” Jesus had asked them. They didn’t answer a word. They had so twisted God’s Law that they had outlawed even good works on the Sabbath, works of mercy and kindness. They didn’t answer because they knew he was talking about Bruce and Bruce didn’t deserve healing. That was obvious just looking at him. Then He goes on, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” They all had bent the rule for their own – they’d help their son if he was hurt. One of them had even rescued a cat, but Bruce, not Bruce. Again they could not reply to these things (and didn’t really want to.)
So there’s the setting – a sick guy at the table with Jesus. The last guy they wanted there, the last guy Jesus should be talking to, the last guy that deserves help and Jesus took him and healed him and sent him away. Pardon the pun but that sets the table for Jesus’ parable.
When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.”
Saint Luke tells us that these words of Jesus are a parable. They are grounded in real earthly matters but reveal a hidden description of the kingdom of heaven. You may understand the meaning of Jesus’ Word, but the Pharisees did not. Your place in the Kingdom of God is not based upon you. That’s why Jesus in His parable says take the last seat because if you take a higher seat shame will be heaped upon you as your host says, “sorry that seat is for someone more important” and by then all that will left is a seat by the door.
Let’s revisit Pharisee Bruce for a moment. Bruce’s dropsy was evident to all who saw him. He walked with difficulty. He couldn’t eat very well because his hands were all swollen. And along with his dropsy everyone considered Bruce the lowest of the low – a sexually promiscuous pharisee, an adulterous pastor, a pedophile priest. It may or may not have been true, but that’s was the gossip. Now imagine the shame that Bruce took upon himself every time he went out. Sure he had been invited to the Pharisee’s dinner party’s but no one wanted him there. They would be relieved if he didn’t show up. No one talked to him, sat by him, or even made eye contact. But he went – humiliated and humbled, taking the last seat because he knew he didn’t deserve to be there, perhaps this time he only showed up because he heard Jesus was there.
That’s the Kingdom of heaven, that’s the Kingdom of Jesus. It begins in the humiliation not of presumed guilt, but of actual guilt. You’ve been invited and called by the Holy Spirit to faith, but you don’t deserve anything. This isn’t a place for you to be recognized in a seat of honor. This is the place where Jesus dwells in His seat of honor for you and your salvation, your lifting up by forgiveness and life.
At that dinner table in the Pharisee’s house Jesus shows us exactly how the Kingdom of God works. It works by Jesus taking the last and lowest place. He takes a seat next to the man no one wants to be near. At the cross He becomes dropsy Bruce and adulterous Arthur and whoever you are, whatever you’ve done or thought. The least, lowest, most shameful place you’ve ever been in your sin that’s where Jesus sits at the cross. What is the last place that anyone of us wants to go? The place of death and that is where Christ goes at the cross. He takes last place – the place of the sinner under God’s wrath. A few weeks the writer of Hebrews urged us to live “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.” (Hebrews 12:2–3, ESV)
Jesus willingly, gladly took the lowest seat and even now as He sits ascended in heaven at the highest seat – the right hand of God – He serves. He lowers Himself under the waters of baptism, under the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, under His Word spoken and preached to lift you up, to lift you out of sin and death, to take you from the last place to the highest honor – to be called a son of God, a child of your heavenly Father.
What does this mean for us? Jesus Himself tells us – “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,” (Luke 14:12–13, ESV)
You are in the Kingdom. Jesus feasts with you today and He has not looked upon you as you deserved (and by your own admission – you are sinful in thought, word, and dead). He has looked upon you with favor, taking you from the lowest place there is: sin and death to the highest place, seated with Him, a forgiven and living child of God. So when you regard your neighbor or your enemy or your child or your co-worker or your parents – regard them remembering that you were once last and now you have been made first. If they are among the last and least in the world forgive them, love them, show mercy and compassion to them and invite them over to your table that together you might rejoice in the feast that God serves in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Pr. Bruce Timm
31 August 2013 anno Domini