“Humble Hospitality”
Luke 14:1 - 14
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, grace to you and peace from our triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
You’ll notice I included verse 2 through 6 of Chapter 14. I’m puzzled why the lectionary leaves these verses out, because I think they are important for two reasons.
First, they remind us and connect us to Jesus healing work last week in the synagogue when he cured the woman bent double on the Sabbath. And second because they show Jesus enacting grace by healing a man suffering from dropsy (elephantiasis, edema, swelling) in the midst of a dinner party – which is also taking place on a Sabbath day. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
If you think about it, what better place to heal someone than at an event that is an occasion for hospitality – Hospital-ity.
And this actual hospitable healing, this gracious act of Jesus, is followed immediately a parable of grace that is set at a wedding banquet. Jesus applies this parable to the lives of his listeners: “When you give a luncheon or a dinner . . .” and he goes on to teach about what hospitality must be if it is to be of the
Hospitality as Jesus practices it and as the Kingdom brings it is radically different from merely providing food, entertainment or shelter for a carefully selected guest list.
Jesus’ hospitality is enacted on the Sabbath, religious law or not. It makes room for the poor and for those in need of healing. And it warns away those who practice hospitality as something that is done in return for future consideration.
Here Jesus says and does hospitality that not only provides food and entertainment, but healing in the broadest sense of the word. Christian hospitality, as Jesus preaches and practices it, cuts across every human boundary: health, wealth, social class, status, power, religious practice – good and evil.
In short, the hospitality we hear about in this gospel is Good News, not just for the people on the A-list. It is for all of us at some point we all find ourselves on the wrong side of one or more of those boundaries. We are people in need of God’s grace. We are people who provide God’s grace to others in need. We are called to give and receive hospitality as Jesus shows us. When we do that it is always good news.
And it always brings conflict with the world and its ways. Real hospitality requires humility, humbleness heart – a dying to self. Humble hospitality means the last will be first and the first last. Hospitality demands that we look anew at who is invited, who is welcome at the banquet table. It requires us to change how we welcome. And to see that we are called to be hospitable at any time and anyplace.
If we inhale God’s grace, Jesus says, we are called to exhale humble hospitality. God’s grace, we hear today, calls everyone, feeds everyone, makes a place for everyone at the banquet table. Because the Host, is God himself.
So why do we struggle with hospitality? When is the last time you invited the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind to a dinner party at your house? When have we done it here at church? [The silence is deafening!]
I think we can get some insight on this if we put ourselves in the place of someone who was present at the dinner party in this gospel story. And who better, than the caterer. There had to be a caterer – it as big meal, lots of VIPs, Jesus. Imagine the conversation that went on between Sid, a leader of the Pharisees, and Phil Silverman, his caterer. It went something like this.
PS: Sid? Yeah, hi, it’s Phil Silverman, Phil’s catering. How’s my favorite Pharisee? Great! Great! Say, Sid, I gotta tell you, today’s event – yeah, thanks, yeah -- we really had to roll with the punches on this so there’s gonna be some extra charges.
What for? Well all the broken plates and cups for one thing. We set the table for a dinner, not a healing. What kind of doctor works on the dining room table for Pete’s sake?
Yeah, I know he cured him, but I lost four place settings in the process! And then, what was with the musical chairs? All of my boys’ work getting the right people in the right places. For nothin’!
Uh huh, sure, Yeah Kinda got outa hand! No kidding. Sid, we prepped 20 meals, but by the time the poor and the lame and the blind got fed, we did double that. You’re lucky nobody went hungry. In fact, I’m not sure how we fed all those people. I’m no miracle-worker, but this was darn close. I mean were you giving a dinner party or opening a clinic for the homeless?
What made you invite that Jesus character in the first place? You know his rep. Uh huh. Well, I’m thinking you must be some kind of glutton for punishment. Sid, baby, you know I value your business, but . . .
Wh- what’s that? You want to know if I’ll handle an upcoming dinner. It’ll be much smaller and quieter than this last one. How many? 13, upper room,
Sid, I love you like a brother, but this Jesus is a deal-breaker. No, really, I don’t want to be inhospitable, but after this last supper, this is one meal I gotta pass over.
Not a lot of hospitality in the catering business – at least not as Jesus proclaims it. It’s business like any other. But you can see that from Phil’s point-of-view, and frankly from ours, hospitality as Jesus proclaims it and enacts it doesn’t make a lot of sense. In fact, the very notion of grace-based hospitality: humility, compassion, justice, sacrifice and just blows right past Sid and Phil – and us. It is foreign to us.
I mean it truly comes from outside us, our experience and it is certainly out of our control. because it is of God and his Kingdom. We can only receive it as a gift and by faith – or in the language of hospitality, by invitation. This gospel today is filled with the translated word invite or invitation. The word is translated from also means call. In the New Testament it also is used as a technical term for the process of salvation. Hospitality, the kind of humble hospitality we about today, it the pivot point for our life today, and the promise of eternal life tomorrow.
God is looking for an RSVP to his invitation, an invitation we experience as grace. It is also a invitation that calls for a response, not only to come to the table, but to live out the same hospitality that called us to the party in the first place.
In the gospel today, we hear a foretaste of the great wedding banquet to come. You have been invited through that gospel word and, like Donavan, through your baptism. How are you responding? Will your life of humble hospitality shape Donavan’s, so that God’s grace splashes outward through time and space – like splashing waters of the font?
Amen.
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