Enlarging the Guest List

Luke 14:1, 7-14
August 28, 2022
William G. Carter

On 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.

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “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; and 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. But 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. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” He 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. 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.”

A good friend was invited to offer the opening prayer at a banquet. It wasn’t a wedding banquet, but rather the annual chamber of commerce celebration in his city. Two of his friends heard he was going and said, “Why don’t you and your wife sit with us?” Sounded like a good way to spend the evening, so Rob said, “We’d love to sit with you.”

As the event drew near, it occurred to him that he’d better check and see what the seating arrangements were going to be. He preferred to sit with his friends, out in the crowd, but maybe there were other plans that he didn’t know. The safe thing to do was to check with the organizers who were, after all the hosts. 

Not wanting to be presumptuous, he asked his secretary to call the chamber office. She said, rather sweetly, “Dr. Elder wants to know if you plan to seat him at the head table of the banquet.” What followed was a real monkey chase. The planner at the chamber hemmed and hawed, and said, “We will call back and let you know.” The secretary said they sounded as if they were embarrassed, so Rob said, “Just call them back and say, ‘Actually we’d like to sit with our friends; we were only going to sit at the head table if that was the plan.”

Too late, as he found out. The leaders of the chamber of commerce, not wanting to offend him, moved heaven and earth to get him a better seat. They didn’t want to him to “sit too low,” by the standards of Jesus’ parable and the inscrutable standards of chamber of commerce protocol. He didn’t know what they did, whether they added a couple of seats at the end or moved one of the other dignitaries closer to the kitchen.

All he knew is that somebody assumed the Rev. Dr. Pompous and his wife had to sit up front. And sitting at the head table is never what it’s cracked up to be. You’re up there on display, in a straight line at a one-sided table. Spotlights in your eyes as you squint into the dark. You can’t talk to anybody, except for the spouse you talk to every day. You can’t yawn or slouch in your seat if everybody’s watching. And in Rob’s case, the friends he wanted to sit with were clear across the room, all because somebody didn’t want to insult him by seating him “too low.” As he summed it up, “Importance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Now, I don’t know if you’ve had an experience like this one. But some of you have told me about the icy stare you’ve received if you dared to sit in a church pew that someone thought belonged to them, not you. And I’m sure that happened in some other church, not this one. We are open minded and completely hospitable, right? Yet we can surmise that seating arrangements suggest something about prestige, prominence, and celebrity.

No doubt, that’s just the sort of thing Jesus is noticing, too.

He’s at the house of wealthy Pharisee. How do we know he’s wealthy? Because the host is a Pharisee, a well-educated religious leader. And he’s a leader of the Pharisees, so he has some community clout. And he’s in a house big enough to seat a lot of guests – which distinguishes him from most of the kinds of people who lived in most of the towns where Jesus lived and worked.

Notice, of course, that Jesus is eating with him. Jesus loved the poor – but he also loved the rich. He did not distinguish. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus eats with everybody. In the next chapter, chapter 15, that’s exactly how and why they will criticize him – he eats with everybody. It’s OK if he eats with them – the well-educated, the affluent, the cream of the crop - but only if he eats exclusively with them. That seems to be the assumption

But he sees something else going on. A striving for the good seats. A choosing of the seats of honor. Let me ask you – where would those seats be in this room?

Look around the room. Would the best seats be in the back row, so you could watch everybody else? Over by the aisles, so you want to make a quick getaway? Up in the choir loft, so you can get out of here without someone passing you an offering plate? Down front, where you can deeply focus on the wisdom pouring from the pulpit? (Hmm, I always wondered why nobody sits up here.)

One day, I was exploring a closet in my first church and discovered they had kept a chart. That’s right – a seating church. Once upon a time, instead of passing the offering plates, the Session collected pew rents. You had to rent a pew. I guess this is how some people got the notion that a pew was theirs – they rented it! I’m not making this up.

I suppose you believe all the pews cost the same. Oh no! There were inexpensive pews, medium-priced pews, high priced pews, and yes, two expensive pews. The cheap seats were off to the sides with an obstructed view (hard to sell, so they were discounted). Medium price was in the middle somewhere. The back two rows of the sanctuary was expensive, the price driven by supply and demand. A couple of prominent pews a respectable distance from the front also had a hefty price tag; the long-term elders sat up there where they could be noticed.

Do you want to guess where the most expensive pew rent was? Third row over here, immediately behind the row reserved (and discounted) for the minister’s wife and children. They put them up front where they could be watched – and commented upon, over Sunday dinner. And the row right behind them was the primary observation perch.

What are we saying when we assign seats, especially if we assign them with a certain value? We are saying some people are more important than others. Or that they think they are. And that’s the lesson in a nutshell.

At a dinner party at a Pharisee’s house, Jesus sees some of them jostling for the best seats. And he says something ridiculous, “When you get invited to a wedding banquet, don’t sit in the places of honor.” No kidding! You leave the places of honor for the people getting married, and then the tables for their families, and then the honored seats for the bridesmaids and ushers.

Sometimes it’s awkward if the bride has two fathers, or if the prodigal daughter surprises everyone by showing up. The fact is – can I just say this? – it’s always awkward; it often is for me. (Where do we put the minister? Let’s put him next to Screwy Uncle Louie. He recently found the Lord, so I’m sure they will have something to talk about. And the minister says, “Oy vey!”)

Where it gets really awkward is when Jesus speaks up and calls out the whole thing as a bad exercise in sorting human beings who are essentially equal in the sight of God. There’s that little parlor game of returning invitations to those who invited us first. You know it, they know it: they invited us to dinner, now we must invite them for dinner. He took me golfing, so I must take him to the club for a lunch that costs just about what my greens fees cost him. And so on and so forth.

“If that’s the pitiful sum of your participation in the human race,” says Jesus, “then you are missing a real blessing.”

Oh, I remember my college classmate Sherry. She got her masters in social work and took a job with an agency in Philadelphia. When she found out that I was studying to be a minister, she found my address and wrote me a letter, “I hope it’s going well for you and will pray for you.”

I wrote back and said, “What are you doing with yourself?” She wrote back, “I’m having the time of my life. Yesterday I took two homeless men to lunch. We sat in the diner and talked all afternoon. They have had such interesting lives!” I looked up from that letter, curious, startled. I never saw any homeless folks in that high-priced town where I studied in New Jersey. Maybe I was missing out on something. Yes, I was.

Where do you sit? Who sits at your table? Such simple questions, and they reveal so much. I would encourage you to look around, see who’s here, and ask who’s not here.

And if I really wanted to mess with you, I’d invite you downstairs for the church picnic, and ask, “Are you merely sitting with the people you know?” Or are you willing to step out of your comfort zone and welcome somebody new?  I know, I know; now I’m meddling. It’s only fair – Jesus meddled with us first, and he never promised to stop.  

For he is the One who says, “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.” Oh, listen to that. “They cannot repay you,” or to translate in a way we all can hear, “they are in your debt.”

“Invites the ones who cannot repay you.” Show them grace regardless of their circumstances. Pass them the same potatoes that you are going to eat. Include them at the abundant table that you first received as a gift. Lift them up, don’t hand them down. Always sit beside them, not ahead of them.

For this is the essence of grace. You can tell it is grace, because the one thing we know about grace is that it always removes disgrace.

And to get in a proper frame of mind and spirit, I remember the wisdom of my friend Rob: “Importance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.