Thanksgiving W/ Jesus

This is a sermon. I rarely write them out in manuscript form, and even when I do, I usually don’t post them… Because mostly, they are not prose, they are meant to be spoken. It loses something in print.  I preach in a lot of incomplete sentences. If you’re like me, it flows just fine when you’re hearing it, but can be maddening to read. Also, I make up words. So anyway… at your own risk, and all that. This was the last in a November series called “Daily Bread.” Since it was the day of our Thanksgiving potluck, it may be a little on the short side. Because, after all, there was pie waiting…

Luke 14:7-24 (The Message Translation)

^7-9 He went on to tell a story to the guests around the table. Noticing how each had tried to elbow into the place of honor, he said, “When someone invites you to dinner, don’t take the place of honor. Somebody more important than you might have been invited by the host. Then he’ll come and call out in front of everybody, ‘You’re in the wrong place. The place of honor belongs to this man.’ Red-faced, you’ll have to make your way to the very last table, the only place left.

^10-11 “When you’re invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place. Then when the host comes he may very well say, ‘Friend, come up to the front.’ That will give the dinner guests something to talk about! What I’m saying is, If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face. But if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.”

^12-14 Then he turned to the host. “The next time you put on a dinner, don’t just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors, the kind of people who will return the favor. Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You’ll be—and experience—a blessing. They won’t be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returned—oh, how it will be returned!—at the resurrection of God’s people.”

¹⁵ That triggered a response from one of the guests: “How fortunate the one who gets to eat dinner in God’s kingdom!”

^16-17 Jesus followed up. “Yes. For there was once a man who threw a great dinner party and invited many. When it was time for dinner, he sent out his servant to the invited guests, saying, ‘Come on in; the food’s on the table.’

¹⁸ “Then they all began to beg off, one after another making excuses. The first said, ‘I bought a piece of property and need to look it over. Send my regrets.’

¹⁹ “Another said, ‘I just bought five teams of oxen, and I really need to check them out. Send my regrets.’

²⁰ “And yet another said, ‘I just got married and need to get home to my wife.’

²¹ “The servant went back and told the master what had happened. He was outraged and told the servant, ‘Quickly, get out into the city streets and alleys. Collect all who look like they need a square meal, all the misfits and homeless and wretched you can lay your hands on, and bring them here.’

²² “The servant reported back, ‘Master, I did what you commanded—and there’s still room.’

^23-24 “The master said, ‘Then go to the country roads. Whoever you find, drag them in. I want my house full! Let me tell you, not one of those originally invited is going to get so much as a bite at my dinner party.’”

…

You’re ready.

You’ve meticulously planned your menu. For weeks. Got your shopping done early so you wouldn’t have to fight the Wednesday-after-work, grabbing the last turkey in a-blind-panic crowd. You’ve hauled the good china out of the hutch. The house is clean. Ish. You’re ready to rise at dawn, put on your Chiefs hoodie and smoke the perfect bird in the back yard. You’ve poured over the ESPN line -up… ALL the ESPN’s—so you know exactly what to have on at each precise moment, and exactly when to serve each course so that nobody passes out before the game, but so that the pie will last until at least half time. It’s a delicate dance.

And the place cards… Oh the place cards. You’ve finally figured it out!  You’ve got grandma, the perfect buffer, seated between your two sisters who are still fighting about… whatever that thing was last year. You’ve got the other end arranged so that your aunt, who is chair of her local Tea Party chapter, will not be seated next to your best friend from Portland. And you won’t have to worry about your uncle Steve—who makes a move on EVERYBody—sitting next to your newly-widowed neighbor. No, that would be a brand of awkward that you’d never see on a Pillsbury canned biscuit commercial.

BUT—it’s ok, because you’ve got PLACE CARDS. You hand wrote them yourself in caligraphy, but that labor of love is nothing—NOTHING—next to the time and energy you put into creating the perfect holiday seating chart. Free of social landmines, familial meltdown territory, and political hostilities that would leave your turkey smoldering in ashes on the floor.

It is finished. You are ready, and it is going to be PERFECT.

But there’s a guest you didn’t count on. You didn’t EXACTLY invite him, but you kind of casually said, “oh if you’re not busy, stop by!” and well, here he is. You bring him in, you take his cloak, you offer him a drink. He says water is fine, “I can work WONDERS with water…’ Whatever that means. And here’s what he does.

While you’re getting his drink, and JUST SECONDS before everyone else comes into the dining room—he goes in there and messes with the place cards. Every last one of them. And the next thing you know, all the wrong people are sitting next to each other—and your perfectly smooth, easy, tension free, zero confrontation zone is totally wrecked.

Welcome to Thanksgiving with Jesus. Pass the yams, y’all.

Unlike his cousin John (who was known to subsist on bugs and branches), Jesus loves food. Think about it–he talks about it all the time. Sermons, parables, and even post-humous encounters–he can work food into any conversation. Even performed his first miracle at a FEAST, to make sure there was enough wine…to complement the food, presumably.

But even so… when your’e with Jesus, what’s ON the table is not nearly as important as who’s AT the table.

In that time and place, the culture of shame was the law of the land. We may think that shame is a big part of OUR culture…but back then, to lose your social status was as good as to die. So we have to keep that in mind any time Jesus walks into a room and starts playing Holy Spirit Shuffle with the place cards.. Which he does, honestly, A LOT. In many of his encounters with people on the road, he invites them to a meal, or invites himself over to THEIR PLACE for a meal… And it is always these people who nobody else would have eaten with. Like women of questionable repute—or tax collectors. He frequently talks about eating with the poor. And in more than one parable, he takes the carefully laid social stratification—which was not really something the host put together , so much as it was the cultural system—and he throws them all up in the air like confetti.

Like this parable. …as with so many gospel meals, it finds all the wrong people sitting next to all the wrong people. And as always seems to happen…all the wrong people, next to all the wrong people, is somehow exactly right.

The meal table is the great equalizer of human experience. Food is central to life:  life of the body, community life, and life in the Spirit. No wonder Jesus so often used the table, as his pulpit.

Preaching from the table—especially a table with a radically re-ordered seating chart—Jesus challenges the notion that some people are more ok than others; that the worth of one outweighs the value of another; or that the place of honor has something to do with money, power, or privilege. Jesus isn’t just redefining etiquette, when he tells the masters of the house to scoot on over and make a little room for the kitchen workers and the farm hands. He is challenging the known world…

But as always, a parable has more than one meaning. This grouping is especially interesting because it directly addresses two different audiences. It provides, on the one end, a lesson in being a gracious host; and on the other, instruction on how to be a good guest. Just what we need for today–holiday etiquette! Jesus is even better than Martha Stewart…

For one audience—presumably those in privilege–this is a powerful reminder that it isn’t enough to serve the poor—to donate to the food bank, or go serve at the shelter—although those are important ministries of compassion…But those who have power are called to live alongside those who do not. To know their struggles and their joys, and to be in the kind of relationship with them that leads to sitting down at a dinner table. And not just figuratively.

Then, as now, that is a daunting prospect. Because so many areas of our life—down to where and how we procure our food—are designed to separate people into endless demographics…age, race, income and on and on it goes. How can we possibly hope to overcome these social (and literal) boundaries, and be in real kingdom kinds of connections?

This is why Jesus preaches from the table. He teaches the way of broken bread.

It is the way of restorative relationship with those who may not quite fit the seating chart… We are called to recognize all the ways that we are privileged, and all the ways our privilege can harm others.

But, while we are re-thinking that table placement from the perspective of one with great hosting abilities– we might also need to rethink how we approach as invited guests.

Within this parable is an assurance that we, too, are worthy to take a seat in places where we long ago decided we were unwanted or forgotten. Where our own culture of shame has done its work on us—where our own feelings of scarcity and inadequacy, our own burdens of brokenness and imperfection have outweighed our sense of full personhood—the good news of God’s welcoming mercy gathers us back in. We are called back to the fullness of life at the table.

This parable is Jesus’ Thanksgiving sermon. It is a call to give and receive grace. Maybe it was intended for two different audiences, as these stories often were. But  maybe more than that, it acknowledges that we are both host and guest, at different times in our life, and in different expressions of human connection.

At times we are called to the work of laying the feast, inviting the ‘other,’ and serving those who will never be able to offer us a gift in return.

But at other times… we need only come in and sit down, and rest in the grace of God’s blessing. Such grace can never be earned, but is ours just the same.

We don’t even have to bring a pie.

Valley Springs Manor was a residential home for the elderly. Last fall, it abruptly closed. Some of the residents moved to other facilities, and others went to be with family. But many were left behind. In an empty building, unable to care for themselves, or even get the basic things they needed to survive. The staff stopped being paid, and they all left.

Except… for two.

Maurice Rowland, and Miguell Algaraz.

They were not nurses or social workers. They weren’t trained caregivers at all. Nor were they managers or the CEO’s, who somehow felt responsible for the souls left behind.

They were the cook. And the janitor.

One of the men, Miguel, said that he’d been abandoned by his parents as a child. That he knew what it felt like to have nobody, and that he couldn’t live with walking away from these people in need.

So the men stayed. For weeks barely sleeping, barely going home for a shower, they fed and bathed and cared for the 16 elderly residents, until local social services found other placement for them…

This was not a publicity stunt…they weren’t doing it for a promotion—to get themselves some bonus pay for a run on the talk show circuit. They were newly unemployed, and should have probably been out looking for new jobs. But…They Stayed behind and served the least ones.. those who will never be able to serve them in return. Those who are no longer deemed important or worthy of notice by the culture at large.

I think of the master of the feast, and the workers that he sent for — the ones he called out from the kitchens and the stables and the broom closets—to be placed at the head of the table. I’d say the kingdom of God works a lot like that. A lot like this.

W/ Jesus, what’s on the table, is not as important as who’s AT the table. And it’s not REALLY a party til everybody’s home.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving. Give thanks for the abundance of your own table, the joy of your own family–even if it comes with some tense, awkward humanness. Let the fullness of that life call you to be more generous, more welcoming, and more willing to receive the mercy offered from others.

Don’t sweat the menu. But also… don’t get too attached to your seating chart.