Jesus at Salon

Text:  Luke 14:1, 7-14

Theme:  "Jesus at Salon"

15th Sunday after Pentecost

September 1, 2013

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Denton, Texas

Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

 

+In the Name of Jesus+

 

One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched.

⁷ When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: ⁸ “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. ⁹ If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. ¹⁰ But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. ¹¹ For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

¹² Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, ¹⁴ and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

You can tell a lot about a person based on who they hang around with.  Who sits at the same table for coffee at Jupiter House at 9 o'clock AM on any given weekday?  Who are the ones who show up at the city council or school board meetings?  Who are those that occupy the barstools at Sweetwater or the padded chairs at Alcoholics Anonymous? Who attends a "Cowboy Church"?  In other words, we make discernments -- or snap judgments on people, if you will -- based on the company they keep.  The same goes for the places where they keep such company.

Five years ago, in June of 2008, Tim Russert died suddenly.  Russert, you may recall, was the host of NBC's "Meet the Press".  Russert was very much respected and even loved by anyone of stature in Washington, D.C. As Mark Leibovich has pointed out in his book This Town, everybody who was anybody showed up at the memorial service.

"Tim Russert is dead," wrote Leibovich.  "But the room was alive."

You can't work it too hard at a memorial service, obviously.  It's the kind of thing people notice.  But the big-ticket Washington departure rite can be such a great networking opportunity.  You can almost feel the ardor behind the solemn faces:  lucky stampedes of power mourners, about two thousand of them, wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center.

They were all there:  Democrats, Republicans, liberals,conservatives, members of congress, government officials, TV news "personalities",  journalists and reporters of a certain pedigree.  But they weren't there just to mourn.  It was like a salon with a memorial service thrown in.  And in using the word "salon", I don't mean a place where you get your fingernails, toenails, and hair done.  "Salon" is also defined "an assembly of guests in a room consisting of leaders in society."

I can only wish that someone like Leibovich could have been on-hand to report the goings-on at the banquet  hosted by the prominent Pharisee in today's text. It was like a salon.  The big shocker, apparently, is that Rabbi Jesus was on the guest list of all these high-brass people.  We are told that it was on the Sabbath day.  As Leibovich watched the high profile mourners at the Russert services, we are told by Luke that Jesus, too, was being carefully watched at this banquet where all the uppity-ups were gathered.

Jesus, with all eyes upon Him, sort of turns into a Leibovich and does some watching himself.  The guests were angling for position.  As Jesus sees this, He says:  "When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor (in other words, don't angle for position), for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited.  If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this person your seat.'  Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place.  But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.'  Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests.  For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

At first glance, it seems Jesus is teaching a lesson on etiquette and courtesy and the importance of being polite and using good manners. Now, I'd be the first to say that such lessons in simple human decency are in short supply.  But Jesus, as is His way, always draws us deeper.  An old friend of mine always used to say:  "It's nice to be nice."  But there's more here than just niceness.

This is a lesson about what you do with who you are.  Jesus singles out two things for special attention:  you can either exalt yourself or you can humble yourself.  You can push and shove and kick and claw and stampede your way through life.  You can "look out for number one," as the saying goes, and then justify that by saying that "no one else looks out for me; it's everyone for themselves."  This is the way of tireless self-promotion and self-exaltation-- which, in our day, is fueled and exposed so much by social media.  This is what nowadays is called "self-branding." You need to get your brand noticed!  Your star needs to be on the rise.

Contrast this with another kind of individual.  This is sort who knows that he/she isn't as great as he/she thinks he/she is in his/her best moments.  And neither does he/she think he/she is so horribly awful in their worst moments.  They have a balanced view of themselves -- which is part of the essence of genuine humility and genuine humanity!  They're connected to God and to their neighbor, but they don't use those connections to get ahead.   They don't "network", if you will, with God and their neighbor in order to exalt themselves, to get linked in to the uppity-ups,  or increase their personal brand recognition! 

Ironically, the route to the ultimate exaltation, the only uplift that, in the end, counts for something, is through humility.  Listen again to those incredible words from St. Paul to the Philippians:  "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:  Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death -- even death on a cross.  Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place."

Jesus, in today's Gospel, is inviting us -- both in our church and in our lives -- to host a salon.  But this salon shall be different than some gathering at the red-carpeted Kennedy Center.  The honored guests for this salon shall be the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  These are the ones who get stepped on while everyone else in this self-absorbed society is marching to their own drummer.  These are the people so easy to overlook, that no one wants to bother with. "Do you have a heart for them?" Jesus seems to be asking.  And what do they all have in common?  They can't repay you.

Here's the clincher:  we can't repay either.  We can't repay God -- for the fact that we're alive; that there is divine grace and forgiveness in our lives; that our lives are here today, and that our ears are about to hear those words of invitation from the host of this salon, this banquet, this wedding feast set before us this morning, who says:  "Take and eat; this is my body.  Take and drink; this is my blood of the new covenant given and shed for the forgiveness of your sins."

"How," asks the psalmist, "can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?" The short answer, of course, is that you can't.  But the psalmist wasn't quite finished yet.  That psalmist went on to say:  "I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord." 

Amen.