It's Dinner, Not a Marriage Proposal

Brad Sullivan

Proper 17, Year C

August 28, 2016

Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX

Luke 14:1, 7-14

It’s Dinner, Not a Marriage Proposal

At the very heart of the Gospel, we have God loving humans as his beloved children.  With all of the beauty and grace with which we were made, with our remarkable capacity for love and empathy, with our creativity and astonishing drive to invent, to imagine, to overcome obstacles, and with our courage to band together in the face of hardships, God loves us, and his love for us is at the very heart of the Gospel. 

God loves us for who we are, and with the list of human attributes I just gave, we can see why.  We are creative, loving, generous.  We band together to support each other.  We weep when others weep; we rejoice when others rejoice. 

We are also terribly flawed.  We can be mean spirited, cruel.  We commit horrible atrocities and acts of violence, hatred, degradation.  We fight, argue, see the worst in others, refuse to offer or receive forgiveness, and can be generally, rather grumpy.  We do all of these things and more, and still God loves us.  While the terrible things we do break God’s heart, and while there is judgment given by God for how we treat each other, God also understands that we only break each other out of our own brokenness.  God sees us as lost when we harm each other and believing Jesus’ words on the cross, God forgives us, for we do not know what we are doing.

God loves us not in spite of the bad things we do, but completely irrespective of the bad things we do, and God is constantly teaching us and showing us how not to do such harmful things to each other.  Knowing that if we were going to truly be able to love each other as God loves us, we would need to become God, and also knowing that just isn’t possible, God decided to flip that around and become human instead.  God joined himself to us so that we might be joined to him, and in that joining together of humanity with God, God has redeemed all of the harmful things we do so that in the resurrection, in the restoration of all creation, all of the harm we do will be seen forever as the good we always intended. 

God looks at us and sees the beauty.  He sees the bad too, but he has redeemed that.  God sees the beauty in us.  As holy and exalted as God is, God sees the beauty in us, lowly humans. 

I think that is why Jesus instructed the Pharisee, his dinner host, to invite the poor, lame, and blind to his feasts, rather than his friends and those who are well off.  Jesus said, “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."  There’s something more than a quid pro quo going on here.  I don’t believe Jesus is instructing people to invite poor and crippled people into their homes so that they’ll receive a nice fat celestial retirement fund in the sky after this life is over.   While Jesus definitely taught about reward and punishment for our actions, I don’t believe he was teaching those who were well off how to be even more well off in the next life.  “You that are ahead in this world, here’s how to become even more ahead later on.”  I don’t think that was his message.

His message was to get us to view each other as God views us.  Like the prosperity gospel of today, there were beliefs by some in Jesus’ day that those who were not well off, those whom tragedy had stuck, were afflicted because God was angry at them, didn’t like them, or they weren’t good enough people to have earned God’s favor.  Jesus was never much of a fan of the prosperity gospel or any such belief that we have to earn God’s favor or that the lowly are only lowly because God is angry with them.

Jesus hung out with everybody, the poor and the well off.  He said to his disciples “Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus said, “for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”  Blessed are you, he said.  He was speaking not about the poor, but to the poor.  Jesus declared blessed those whom many in society assumed were cursed.  Jesus declared as deeply flawed our systems of ascribing blessings and curses.  Jesus declared as deeply flawed our systems of ascribing righteousness and sinfulness.  Jesus sees our hearts and knows how much we want to be righteous, how much we want to be loved by others and loved by God, and Jesus sees how much we struggle for that.  Jesus even sees that we often end up putting others down in order to raise ourselves up. 

Jesus’ desire for us is to see ourselves and each other as he sees us.  Jesus’ instruction to the Pharisee to invite the poor, lame, and blind into his home is not an instruction to do more righteous, charitable deeds in order to earn a greater salvation.  Jesus instruction to the Pharisee to invite the poor, lame, and blind into his home is to let the Pharisee know that he doesn’t have to surround himself with supposedly righteous people in order to be righteous himself or in order to be seen as righteous by others. 

Accept that your righteousness comes from God’s love of you.  Then invite into your home those whom you assume are unrighteous, and learn to see them as God sees them, as his beloved children.  Such an invitation is not an act of charity.  Such an invitation is an act of accepting God’s acceptance, of seeing the beauty of people as God sees the beauty of people.  Such an invitation is an acceptance of the lowliness, the poverty, disability, and blindness within each of us, and learning to accept God’s love of us not only as we want to be, but also just as we are.

Jesus instruction to the Pharisee was all of this teaching, and it was also an actual instruction actually to invite the poor, lame, and blind into his home.  As James tells us, faith without works is dead.  A great idea springs up from a teaching of Jesus, but if there is no action to follow it up, the great idea dies on the vine. 

Invite the poor, the blind, and the lame into your home.  That’s a bit of a challenge, I would think.  What do we do, walk around outside for a time, find someone who we assume is homeless or living in poverty and say, “You’re poor, aren’t you?  I need to you to come to my home for dinner because Jesus told me to have dinner with a poor person.”  I don’t think that’s really going to work.  The challenge is to look beyond poverty or disability, to look beyond social status, to see beautiful human beings, and invite them to dinner.

Inviting total strangers into our homes for dinner still might be a bridge to far, and possibly weird, so invite folks here.  Invite folks to share the meal we share every Sunday.  Further, a lot of folks aren’t total strangers, they are folks we know from church or work, or other social circles.  Invite them to dinner.  Invite not only your good friends, but invite also those whom you don’t know as well.  Even that might seem a little scary.  What exactly are we committing to here?   Well, I remember some advice Dad gave me back when I was starting to date.  I was afraid to ask a girl out, partly afraid she’d say “no”, and partly afraid, just wondering what am I getting into, what am I doing?  Dad said, “Brad, you’re just asking her to go out with you for an evening, it’s not a marriage proposal.  Get to know her more; see if you like being around each other.” 

Get to know other people, Jesus was teaching.  Get to know different people.  That’s what we get to do at our Bible study in the parish hall on Friday mornings during breakfast.  All kinds of folks come to eat breakfast here on Friday.  Some are well off.  Some don’t have much.  Some are homeless.  Sharing breakfast together, we get to see the beauty of each other as God sees the beauty of us.  That’s life in God’s kingdom.  That’s life in the Jesus movement.  It’s not as though by inviting new and different people into our church and into our homes, people would become our projects.  The purpose is not to help or fix anybody, and it’s not a marriage proposal.  The purpose of the invitation is to learn to love people more fully, and in so doing, to be able to accept God’s love of us and of others more fully.  Following Jesus’ teaching, living out the Jesus movement, we find ourselves changed.  We find less fear, more love, greater connection.  Living out the Jesus movement, we find that humans are beautiful.  Flawed, sure, as well as beautiful and beloved.  Amen.