Göttinger Predigten
Göttinger Predigten im Internet hg. von U. Nembach
12th Sunday after Pentecost, 09/01/2019
Sermon on Luke 14:1, 7-14, by David H. Brooks
When [Jesus] noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable…
If you have middle-to-high-school-aged children, or if you were ever a middle-to-high-school-aged child, you probably recognize the dinner party Luke describes. There is little that is more painful for adults than watching as kids learn the rules of adulthood. Actually, that’s not quite right, for there is only one rule—know who gets to sit where. Everything that is the social dimension of middle and high school is about learning, navigating, subverting and suffering from that one rule.
When you are invited to a dinner party, sit at a low place, rather than at the place of honor…When you throw a party, invite those who have nothing you want.
Easy to say, Jesus, but hard to do. Even adults, like the ones at that party, understand that invitations are supposed to go to those who whom they are obliged or to those whom they want to obligate. Married couples know this as a usual conversation—we need to invite the Ciphers, they invited us to their lake house last summer and we’ve not had them over yet. The gurus and experts who teach about sales, networking, job hunting or any other aspect of business will tell you over and over—never eat lunch alone! Don’t waste that opportunity to influence, make a contact or position yourself. The style pages of metropolitan magazines and newspapers are really a chronicle of who’s at the top, who’s moving up, who’s sliding, and who’s at the bottom. Sure, the clothes and locale might be more impressive, the food and drink more expensive, but it’s still that eighth-grade skating party where you desperately tried to get in with the cool kids while that annoying little pest from third period English class wouldn’t leave you alone. We who have finished the move to adulthood have simply become more sophisticated and subtle as we size one another up in our competing for a good seat. In the end, all we have done is taught cynicism, where every relationship, every offer, every invitation is simply a means to an end.
So you might imagine Jesus both sympathetic and yet laughing up his sleeve as observes those who are observing him; he sees a whole bunch of painfully self-conscious people, jockeying for position around the table, angling for the benefits that result from inviting the leader of the community or some business type, and he says you don’t need to do that. Over the course of his ministry, Jesus reveals that the values and priorities of the Kingdom of God are very different from our values, and to be a
part of God’s Kingdom means that it’s no longer necessary to engage in dinner party jockeying, or any kind of jockeying any more. Jesus means to move host and guest from the situation where every act of hospitality is calculated and meant to accomplish some increase for ourselves, to where we can truly enjoy the act of living in community with other people because they are worthwhile in and of themselves.
And Jesus, by his death and resurrection, has accomplished this great reversal of the invitation. The Christian life is one where we no longer see others as means to an end—the end being that we improve our standing with God—but that they are worthy of our love and care simply because they are our neighbors, a worthy end in and of themselves. This is why Jesus directs his listeners to take the lowest seat, to invite those who have nothing you need and simply take delight in them, to simply be interested who is sitting before or around you. As an old story tells of two famous Englishmen, people would say “to dine with the one is to realize ‘how fortunate I am to be with the most interesting person in England’; to dine with the other is to realize ‘how fortunate he is to be with the most interesting person in England.’” I don’t think you need any help in determining who hosted the better parties.