Sermon, September 2, 2001
13 Pentecost – Proper 17, Year C
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas

Gospel – Luke 14:1,7-14 When you give a banquet, invite the poor...

It’s hard to interpret biblical texts. The words are from a different time, language and culture. It is particularly hard to find the right analogy to bring out the intensity of many passages, especially if you’ve hung around these stories for a while and they aren’t especially new to you any more.

One of rules of interpretation that you can probably trust, stresses that whenever our reading of a biblical passage makes us feel self-righteous, we can be pretty sure that we’ve misread it; and the concomitant rule is that whenever our reading of a biblical passage brings home to us the poignant judgment and salvation of God’s humility, we can be pretty confident we’ve read it correctly. The popular version of this rule of interpretation is that the scriptures usually "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."

Using those principles of interpretation, Professor James A. Saunders of the very fine School of Theology at Claremont College translates the offense of Jesus’ words in today’s gospel this way: Jesus is saying, "When you give a feast, invite the riffraff, the beggars, the ugly, those who do not pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, those who seemingly refuse to better themselves because they are lazy, trifling, and undeserving. ...We should fraternize with the very people who are a blight on our fine city, who live in and yes cause those slums which give our community such a bad name. You sell them a decent house and in two years it’ll be run down and cancerous to the neighborhood around it. And this Galilean wants us to socialize with them." (from Banquet of the Dispossessed, in God Has a Story Too) I don’t know about you, but that makes me uncomfortable. We’re having some friends over for dinner tonight, and none of them fits that description.

Jesus made people not just uncomfortable, but downright mad when he exposed the ugliness behind their proper social conventions. In his home town they tried to lynch him when he implied that God blessed foreigners who worshiped foreign gods even more than God had blessed them. Jesus made people mad when he empowered the riffraff and undeserving, honoring them with his blessing while speaking harshly toward the honorable and hard-working people. Consistently Jesus aimed his good news toward the lost, the lonely, the leprous, and the little, while just as consistently exposing the hypocrisy of those who thought of themselves as being on the right side of things. Jesus kicked the legs out from under all of the ladders of hierarchy.

That makes me uncomfortable, because when I am honest to Jesus, I can see ugliness behind my proper social conventions also. Not just the fact that I’ll be entertaining nice people who are like me at dinner tonight. But also all of the ladders of hierarchy I stand on while I pretend that they’re not there. You see, it feels comfortable to believe I am where I am, comfortable as I am, because I’ve earned it by my hard work and virtue. But the reality is, I’ve been the beneficiary of a very uneven field. Most of my good fortune is because of the unearned privilege I’ve enjoyed. How different might I be if I had been born in the slums of Mexico City? I’ll bet I wouldn’t be in this pulpit today. I’ll bet I wouldn’t be eating at this table today.

Instead, I might be one of those dispossessed riffraff who has no stake in a cruel society and is willing to do anything to get a few bucks. Or I might be one of those illegals who risks a dangerous journey with desperate men to get to a place like Northwest Arkansas where I can fake identification papers to get a job hanging chickens and pray I can keep it long enough to help my family survive.

But polite people like us don’t like to think about such things. They make us feel bad. Or when we do think about such things, we speak in the abstract about the immigration problem, or about how terribly our schools and health care systems are stressed by these unwanted people who covet the jobs no one else wants. Sometimes we feel threatened, because our lifestyle could be inconvenienced by these "others." After all, they aren’t Episcopalians, are they, and many of them have not even bothered to learn our language.

And Jesus looks at us down there from the other side of the table, where he’s eating enchiladas and dancing to the marimba band; he looks at us and shakes his head in disbelief at our meanness. If we are awake, our hearts are cut to the quick. We see ourselves exposed. We are the ones who need forgiving. We are the ones who need mercy. We are the unworthy, who are nevertheless invited to the great banquet feast as well.

Robert Coles was a Harvard graduate. He was in medical school at Harvard. He was going to be a psychiatrist. In this society, that’s a high status position. He knew that. He was really proud of that. He was also proud that as a person with all of these credentials, he was volunteering to help the poor at the Catholic Worker, the famous outreach ministry of Dorothy Day, the renowned activist.

As he arrived at the premises of the Catholic Worker, he asked to see Dorothy Day. He naturally went right to the top. The person said that she was in the kitchen. He went into the kitchen, saw her sitting at a table talking to someone. He had enough medical training to recognize that the man that she was talking to was addicted to some dangerous substance. He was disheveled. He was obviously a homeless street person. She was sitting at table with him, listening intently to what he had to say. She didn’t notice Coles had come into the room. He stood beside the door, waited for her to finish. When she finished the conversation she stood up. That’s when she noticed Coles. She looked at him and asked, "Do you want to speak to one of us?"

Coles had never seen anything like this before. Humility that can identify with another person so completely as to remove all distinctions between them. It cut through all the boundaries, all the categories that society sets up to separate us from one another. There were just two people, brother and sister, the sister concerned about the brother. He said he learned more in that one moment than he did in four years at Harvard.

Listen again to James Saunders. Until we, modern Pharisees, "cease to view the dispossessed as riffraff but rather as our brothers and sisters in the Kingdom of God, not until we know that we like them can make no claim on God, will we have experienced the judgment of the gospel which redeems and saves. Not until Jesus offends us by his rabble-rousing teaching ...can we be transformed, redeemed, and saved. When the dispossessed have ceased to be ‘they’ and ‘them’ and have become ‘we’ and ‘us,’ when we realize that we like them have no claim to make, no status to defend, no place of honor to boast, then shall we know the power of the good news that still there is room. When we have ceased to talk about how to ‘make them behave,’ and can start asking how we all should behave, and when we have fully realized that our Lord, and the God in him, was himself counted among the dispossessed, then perhaps we shall know the blessing of unrequited grace." ibid