The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost | August 31, 2025 | Luke 14:1, 7-14 | by The Rev. Dr. Ryan D. Mills |

¹ On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath, they were watching him closely.
⁷ When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. ⁸ “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, ⁹ and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. ¹⁰ But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. ¹¹ For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
¹² He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴ And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (NRSV).

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son +, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we hear from the book of Proverbs: “Do not put yourself forward in the King’s Presence, or stand in the place of the great, for it is better to be told, ‘come up here’ than to be put down lower in the presence of a noble.”

One summer while I was in Seminary I was living in Chicago, and a friend and I decided to go to Wrigley Field to see a Chicago Cubs baseball game. (Go Cubs Go!) We bought the cheapest possible tickets, which admitted us high into the outfield nosebleed seats, row ZZZ, with no shade from the hot August sun, and a historic metal beam right in front of our faces. And as the game started we looked down about 200 rows, where right behind home plate, with a perfect view, in the shade, among the rich and beautiful people were two open seats—going to waste. And in a moment of poor decision making we slowly walked from our seats in row ZZZ down towards home plate, feeling more important and more special with every step, and finally sat down, in row A, seats 1 and 2. What a feeling! For one brief shining moment we were on top of the world! But right then two guys wearing Rolexes and suits stood in the aisle, and just looked at us with their noses wrinkled up, like we smelled, which we probably did in the hot sun, and without saying a word they just held out their tickets that said, “A1 and A2” on them. “Oh” we said, feigning ignorance, “this isn’t section ZZZ?” And with the stadium security silently following us at our backs, and with red faces, we walked that humiliating stretch in reverse, back up to the cheap seats from whence we came.

Jesus today in his parable of the Great Banquet focuses on this kind of experience: our feeling rejected and shamed and being caught on the outside-looking-in, because he knows the hurt we experience, he knows that being denied a seat at the table is so painful to us. And of course it’s not at baseball games where we really feel it, but in our relationships, with our families, at our jobs, with our friends, at school, in our clubs, even and especially at church, there’s nothing worse than feeling excluded, nothing worse than the shame and humiliation of standing in the limelight that turned out to be reserved for someone else; nothing harder than discovering we don’t measure up or are not welcome; nothing worse than being judged as lacking or unworthy, and of being sent back to the cheap seats, to look on from afar.

And while we all feel this way when it’s done to us, we also perversely love to do it to others, don’t we?! Once we’re inside the party we want to control the guest list! It’s kind of like Yoggi Berra who once said, “I’d never join a club that would have me as a member!” We love looking at people and judging ‘in’ and ‘out’ and we get stuck in either feeling superior, or in feeling humiliated, and it’s all a form of self-obsession, of pretend control over our lives, it’s ultimately the old sinner, the old Adam and Eve in each of us, who wants to be Lord and judge of ourselves and others, and it’s so exhausting that not even getting into the grave can end it. “Which cemetery are they buried in, what section, and how nice is their headstone?”

And so it is that in the midst of our endless judging and vying with each other for the good seats in life, that we find Jesus, who is watching a banquet, watching you and me from the gospel lesson today.

And at first his advice seems pretty common sense, “If you’re invited to a wedding banquet, don’t sit at the head table, don’t sit right next to the bride and groom, don’t force the groomsmen to embarrass you and send you to sit in the back with the drunk uncles. Instead, start at the back, start low, start by sitting at the kids table and maybe you’ll be invited up higher! For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

We know this to be true in the Christian life, and we see it at Trinity: those who put themselves in the service of others, those who choose the humbler and littler path are the great saints of the Christian life. But those who want to be great, those who live to lord it over others, those who live for recognition or reward end up shriveling up and being sent down. So it’s those who are at home with the little ones, those who live to serve the nobodies, those who sit with the kids and the old people and the strangers on purpose, those who go out of their way to show welcome and love, those who do small things with great love–they are the saints of the church, they are the ones exalted among us and exalted in the life to come. The Book of Hebrews encourages us today to let this mutual love continue, and to not forget to show hospitality to strangers—hospitality, which in the Bible literally means the love of strangers, the love of anybody different, of anybody unimportant, anybody unknown–for by doing so, we’re told, some have entertained angels unaware. God is telling us when we welcome the unexpected, unimportant one, we might be welcoming God himself. So maybe there’s literally an angel or two here today, incognito, camouflaged among us, maybe one will flutter across your path this week, waiting for you to welcome them, God disguised as a stranger.

But after watching all this vying for the good seats at a banquet today, Jesus says, “When you throw a lunch or dinner, don’t invite your friends or brothers or rich neighbors, because they might pay you back, tit for tat, you’ll be repaid so you haven’t given anything. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed at the Resurrection, because they cannot repay you.”

We are throwing a banquet here this morning. Not just at Coffee Hour. But the banquet of Holy Communion, the wedding feast of the Lamb. There are no higher seats here, and no lower ones. But we are all equal, encircling around the same altar each one of us is seated at the same place of honor, and receives the same precious gifts. There is no judging of worthiness or unworthiness here, only those who know they are unworthy may come, only those who are washed from their sins by his baptismal waters are clean enough for this banquet. And this equal fellowship of the church is open to all people, to every person of every race and tribe and tongue under heaven, for it is only open only to sinners, like you and me, it’s only God who makes us worthy here and invites us to come and feast.

For really, deep down, the one who is poor and blind and lame, the one who cannot pay anything back to the host, is you, is me. And you are the one invited to come on down this morning, not in a humiliating walk of shame, but to walk up here with the royal dignity of a child of God, to feast on the body and the blood of him who gave a last supper for his disciples, for those who would betray and deny him, but that he still loved to the end. Here, kneeling down to receive him, we see that our ultimate standing in life, our ultimate worth does not depend on what we can gain for ourselves, does not depend on getting the best seats for ourselves, and that in fact it ultimately doesn’t matter what others think of us at all, but what God thinks, he who loved us so much to give us all he has, even his only-begotten Son. And as we follow him this week, we’ll discover again that the true way to glory is through putting ourselves lower in love to care for and serve others, especially those who can’t repay us and who don’t deserve it.

So–when you throw a banquet, invite such as these, and you will be blessed.

And the Peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Ryan Mills                                                        New Haven, Connecticut