August 31, 2025 Sermon
Sermon Title: “Dinner Seating Suggestions”
Scripture: Luke 14:1, and 7-14
(Other lectionary suggestions include Jeremiah 2:4-13, Psalm 81:1, and 10-16, and Hebrews 13:1-8 and 15-16.
Luke 14:1 and 7-14
Jesus Heals the Man with Dropsy
1On 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.
Humility and Hospitality
7When 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; 9and 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. 10But 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. 11For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” 12He 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 or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. 13But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
The sermon title is of course a facetious one. Jesus is not an ancient Emily Post, telling us which fork we should use first! However, it is almost funny that we are told, “they were watching him closely.” Haven’t you ever heard that axiom that you should simply watch the others at the table to see what THEY do? They WERE watching him closely!
I remember the first time I was served an artichoke. I didn’t know how to eat it, and I even read some story in which a young woman berates her parents for not teaching her how! (If you don’t know how, we’ll have an artichoke-eating lesson right after service!) Also, at the private school where I taught, we were sometimes served lamb. I asked my Mom one time why we never ate lamb. She said, “Because it’s expensive. Would you rather eat lamb than steak?” I said no. Besides, my Dad really liked steak, and we had that often on Friday nights.
So, what was going on here? Did that Pharisee invite Jesus more than once for dinner? My guess is NO! One evening of uncomfortableness was enough!
Says British scholar N. T. Wright, “Jesus didn’t come to offer good advice; and often his own conduct seems calculated to cause embarrassment.” I have mentioned before that Jesus really didn’t like the legalism of his day, and what seemed to irritate him most was how some people “were jostling for position in the eyes of God.” As far as Jesus was concerned, people were “eager to push themselves forward, to show how well they were keeping the law, to maintain their own purity.”
Says the Rev. William H. Willimon, “Jesus tells a little story at the dinner table. Get it? Israel believed that when the Messiah came, the Messiah would invite all to a great banquet of the Lord. These table time episodes are hints that Jesus’ presence at the table foreshadows the coming great table of the Lord. After telling the story, Jesus makes explicit what may be implicit in the story. ‘All who lift themselves up will be brought low. and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.’” This is a decidedly uncommon, unconventional way of thinking about things. Those who exalt themselves will be lowered, and those who lower themselves will be exalted. What kind of logic is this? God’s logic, that’s what. Jesus’s logic, that’s what. Can you and I bear this? Willimon says, “I hope the congregation is open to a bit of challenge, judgment, and transformation this Sunday. We’ve invited Jesus to dinner (or he has invited us!), and those who dare to allow Jesus to speak to them about their table manners had best be prepared for change!”
As we know, Jesus often used concepts such as “the last shall be first and the first last.” Also, it has been pointed out that he talks a lot about banquets, perhaps looking toward the time that ALL will be seated at his and God’s table in the Heavenly Kingdom. But there is also this – Luke’s Gospel was written sometime after 65 or 70 AD, and that means that Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians sat together at table, and such a concept was a hard one for some of the Jewish followers of Jesus to accept. Quoting N. T. Wright, the British scholar, “Within Luke’s lifetime thousands of non-Jews had become Christians, had entered, that is, into the dinner party prepared by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Many Jewish Christians, as we know from Acts, had found this difficult, if not impossible, to understand or approve. They were so eager to maintain their own places at the top table that they could not grasp God’s great design to stand the world on its head. Pride, notoriously, is the great cloud which blots out the SUN of God’s generosity; if I reckon that I deserve to be favored by God, not only do I declare that I don’t need his grace, mercy, and love, but I imply that those who don’t deserve it shouldn’t have it.”
Wright goes on to say that Jesus spent his life trying to break through that cloud, that cloud of pride. Jesus wanted to bring the fresh, healing sunshine of God’s love to those who were in its shadow. The Pharisees could watch him all they wanted, as we were told in the first verse of today’s Scripture reading, “but the power both of his healings and of his explanations was too strong for them (the Pharisees).” Says Wright, “The small-mindedness which pushes itself forward and leaves others behind is confronted with the large-hearted love of God. All Christians are called to the same healthy dependence on God’s love and the same generosity in sharing it with those in need.” That’s a hard one. Do we accept it? Don’t we feel that that there are SOME folks, both in this church and elsewhere, who DON’T DESERVE God’s Love and forgiveness? Boy, I hope not, but it is hard, isn’t it, to get the log out of our eye first before we try to get the speck out of somebody else’s eye? How wonderfully insightful was Jesus for coming up with THAT one!
I’ll close with an article I saw in the Christian Century. It’s by Brandon Ambrosino, and it’s called “Confession: I don’t want Trump to go to Heaven.”:
I recently found myself agreeing with President Trump.
“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he told the hosts of Fox and Friends, while discussing his motivations for trying to broker an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.”
A reporter at the New York Times called the moment “soul-searchingly self-deprecating,” acknowledging that Trump’s public reckoning with his own mortality is quite rare.
Hearing Trump admit that he might not be first in line at the pearly gates was surreal. This is a man who carries himself as if he were the Messiah, as if he’s God’s emissary sent to save the world. Everything he does, by his own description, is the biggest, the best, the most beautiful. He doesn’t usually acknowledge changing course—what some people call “lying.” He’s fickle and temperamental and seems to rule by capricious whim. He makes people’s lives harder. He says things that are cruel and callous. And at the end of the day, he gives himself a giant thumbs up. (You’ve seen the pictures.)
And yet his candid admission of “not doing well” in terms of getting into heaven was, I’m sorry to say, humanizing.
For him, anyway. For me, it was the opposite. No, I thought, you’re not doing well at all. You’re not getting in. No questions.
But then, as so often happens whenever I’m being too sure of myself, I got the feeling that I was being laughed at by the only person who gets to decide Trump’s eternal fate. And wouldn’t you know it, that person is a master storyteller.
As I gloried in the anticipation of Trump’s eternal demise, I realized that I sounded like a character from one of Jesus’ parables. “Thank you, God, that I’m unlike that corrupt narcissist!” I proudly prayed, echoing the Pharisee who congratulates himself in Luke 18 for not being like a tax collector.
As soon as I made that connection, the parable got to work on me. And it didn’t feel very good.
That’s the point of the parables: to shock us, to wake us up, to force us to question our own moral superiority.
The obnoxious thing about Jesus’ topsy-turvy imagination is that it’s actually the tax collector—at least the one who owns up to his lack of goodness, to the fact that he is, to borrow Trump’s language, at the bottom of the totem pole—who will enter the Kingdom of God ahead of me. I love these sentiments a lot more when they don’t challenge my personal opinions. It’s lovely to think that the poor and the disenfranchised and the disabled will be the first to enter God’s eternity. It’s frustrating to think that modern-day tax collectors—real estate moguls, say, or billionaires—might beat me to heaven. It’s infuriating to think they might get there at all.
Of course, when they get there, they might not be “them.” When I first started questioning my assumptions about hell, I did what many people do when they’re trying to end a discussion: I went straight to Hitler. “If there is no hell,” I asked one of my theology teachers, “then doesn’t that mean Hitler is in heaven?”
“If Hitler is in heaven,” she answered, “then he isn’t Hitler.”
Who knows what any of us will become when the exacting love of God burns away every last shred of hatred that polluted our earthly being?
But I don’t want Hitler there. And I don’t want the other guy there either. Surely, God would agree.
If there’s anything I know about God, it is that God is love, that the very essence of God’s being consists in pouring out love on all of us, lovable and unlovable alike. I don’t like talking about hell, and I don’t think God does either. In fact, I think God, like Pope Francis, hopes hell is empty. God is as crazy about Trump as he is about you or me. God loves Trump the way that God loves any other annoying kid—we can’t understand why, but their parents insist on keeping them.
The part of me that doesn’t want Trump in heaven is the part of me that I need to work on. I need to repent of hoping that God hates the people I want him to hate.
To be fair, there’s probably a long list of people that Trump doesn’t want in heaven with him. That list likely includes any politician he’s ever christened with a nickname, immigrants, all Democrats, the “woke,” trans people, and people who believe slavery was bad. Trump seems to love walls, boundaries, and dividing people from others. I’m guessing if he had his way, heaven would look a lot like his America: an exclusive club for winners. But God is not a god of walls, and he’s certainly not the god of winners. In fact, in the loser Jesus’ dying flesh, God “has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” between various groups of people (Ephesians 2:14).
Maybe the question isn’t whether God wants Trump to go to heaven (God does) or whether I want him to; it is whether Trump himself really wants to go there. The same parables that teach me that God loves the people I hate would, if Trump listened to them, teach him that God is crazy about the people Trump hates. There’s just no way around it. The kingdom of God will be filled with people we are surprised to see. For me, that means folks like Trump; for Trump, that means folks like Biden.
The question each of us needs to ask about our eternal destiny is not whether we are okay sharing eternity with God, but whether we are okay sharing God’s eternity with the people God chooses, without consulting us, to lavish love upon. If we aren’t prepared to spend eternity with our enemies, then maybe we, like Trump, are in danger of not making it there.
If, on the other hand, we are prepared to spend eternity without walls, then we ought to anticipate our own hoped-for future by living in a way that reflects that vision of heaven here and now.
Yes, President Trump, I’m speaking to you.
So, what do YOU think? Observations?
Pastor Skip
