Who Is Missing?

Luke 14:1, 7-14
August 29, 2010 (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1.  Some of you know that I started teaching at Lewis & Clark Community College this past week—I’m teaching a few sections of World Religions and really enjoying myself.

Being back in the classroom has got me thinking about some of the academic theories and methods that I have studied over the years.  A lot of what I do as a scholar of religion is to document, evaluate, and think about people’s culture. 

The thing about culture is that it is often more easy to recognize someone else’s culture than your own.  Anthropologists, those scholars who spend most of their time studying culture, have noticed that it is all too easy to forget that you have your own assumptions and peculiar ways of doing things when you are examining someone else.  Or, as Jesus would perhaps say: it is easier to point out the dust in another person’s eye while ignoring the log in your own. 

2.  In a kind of humorous demonstration of this principal, an anthropologist named Horace Miner wrote a description of a foreign culture way back in 1956.  He said the name of this North American tribe was the “Nacirema.”  He said the people in this tribe all had little shrines in their dwelling places.  In these shrines, they had a charm-box full of magical packets that treat real or imagined maladies.  Underneath this charm box, the Nacirema always locate, “a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.[5] The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure…The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious [6] about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical [paste], and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.”

Of course, the surprise ending of this account of the strange Nacirema people is that Nacirema is just “American” spelled backwards, the shrine is the bathroom, the charm box is the medicine cabinet, below which is the sink where we wash our faces and brush our teeth.  Sometimes, our own cultural practices and daily habits and ways of interacting with the world are so close to us that we can’t even see them!

3.  This is precisely what’s happening in this morning’s gospel reading.  Jesus is at a dinner party at the home of a leader of the Pharisees.  He probably feels pretty comfortable.  Many scholars have argued recently that Jesus’ own interest in holiness and the law suggest that he himself, if not officially a Pharisee, was sympathetic with their basic program.  However, as the gospels abundantly show, Jesus was also quite critical of the Pharisees and their legalistic excesses.  The Pharisees and their gathered guests cannot see their own culture because it is too familiar.  They cannot see the way meals in their society were theaters of social class and importance.  They cannot see that a dinner party was an opportunity for the guests to cement their rank in the community based on where they sat.  And they cannot see that it was also an opportunity for the host to induce debt in his guests so that they would have to pay him back with invitations to lavish parties at their own homes. 

Jesus, with the acumen of a brilliant anthropologist, does see what’s happening at the dinner party.  Moreover, he tells the two-part parable about the imaginary wedding banquet where guests strive to sit in the low place so that they might be invited to the place of honor and where the host does not invite his muckety-muck friends but rather the poor, the halt, and the lame knowing full well that they cannot pay back his kindness.

4.  Food and eating are mentioned in the gospel of Luke more than in any other gospel.  And so when a banquet scene appears in Luke, we should perk up and pay attention—something important is about to happen!  Over and over, Luke and Jesus use the parable of the wedding banquet to point to the Realm of God. 

And in the Realm of God, we find that God’s culture, God’s social structure and intent for human relationships is radically different from the one that Jesus finds in the Pharisee’s home.

5.  But what about our culture, the rules and assumptions that surround us so tightly that we can barely recognize them?  Well, you don’t need me to tell you that—while our culture is not identical to that of ancient Palestine—we still have a culture that separates the powerful from the lowly, the strong from the weak, the rich from the poor, the white from the black. 

The great Reformed theologian of the 20^th century, Karl Barth, insists that the Christian community and our hospitality within this community may not under any circumstances make divisions based on:

• national, ethnic, or linguistic barriers in our world;
• racial differences;
• cultural differences;
• or class distinctions between rich and poor.

Barth also said that when preachers sit down to prepare their sermons, they should have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  So, let me share with you a cover story in the Post-Dispatch jus this last Tuesday.  The story pointed to the terrible fact that African American unemployment in the St. Louis area is much worse than for white residents.  The reporter writes, “An African-American living in the St. Louis region in 2009 was twice as likely to be unemployed as a white resident of the area.”  The jobless rate for black men in 2009 was 22.1%, compared with 10.5 % for the whole workforce. 

James Buford, president of the St. Louis Urban League for the past 25 years, blamed the discrepancy on several factors.  First, he mentioned the disintegration of the black nuclear family.  Then he points out that many black people do not finish high school (47% in 2008).  Finally, he pointed to black-on-black crime and high incarceration rates for contributing to unemployment.  While Buford refuses to blame racism for the unemployment, he is forced to agree with other observers that race is definitely part of the problem.  He and others insist that the answer to this problem lies in fixing a broken public education system, that is so frequently broken along lines of race and class.

6.  Let’s hold that thought for a minute and go back to Jesus.  Prof. David Lose argues that Jesus’ parable in this passage is precisely the kind of thing that gets Jesus killed.

Lose writes, “he dares not only to stand outside the social order of his day; he dares not only to call that social order – and all social orders – into question; but he also says these things are not of God. Jesus proclaims here and throughout the gospel that in the kingdom of God there are no pecking orders. None. Zero. Zilch.
And while that sounds at first blush like it ought to be good news, it throws us into radical dependence on God's grace and God's grace alone. We can't stand, that is, on our accomplishments, or our wealth, or positive attributes, or good looks, or strengths, or IQ, or our movement up or down the reigning pecking order. There is, suddenly, nothing we can do to establish ourselves before God and the world except rely upon God's desire to be in relationship with us and with all people. Which means that we have no claim on God; rather, we have been claimed by God and invited to love others as we've been loved.”

7.  So is there something we can say, for example, about public education in St. Louis that would so threaten the powers that be that we would be putting our life at risk?  Is there something we can do to so challenge our culture, the status quo, on questions of race, and sexuality, and class, and other wicked divisions that we sound like we are citizens of some odd country that does not share our culture?  Some odd country like, say, the Kingdom of God?

There’s a lot to say and a lot to do.  But let me give one humble place to start.  We must be radical and kingdom-based in our hospitality, in our welcome of people into this community of the church.  We must live and act as if everyone who is not here is someone whom we desperately need to have with us.  Who is missing?  Who do we need here that our culture is keeping out?  What social rules and assumptions are making it uncomfortable for people to be here with us, praising God?  If our congregation is to approach the openness of the heavenly banquet, then we must include all people here. 

I’d like to close this sermon with a wonderful story that UCC pastor Kate Huey tells, a story from her childhood: 

“When I was growing up in a family of eleven, meals were a big deal. My mother sat at one end of the table, and my father at the other. My four big brothers sat along one side of the table, and the five youngest, beginning with me, faced them on the other side. We always ate together, no matter how late my father had to work. Often, my parents would talk about the family business, but my father always asked each one of us “how our day went.” And occasionally, out of the blue, he would do a rather wonderful thing, as I look back on it now. Each of us could get lost in a sea of so many faces. But my dad would say, in a very serious tone, “How many people are happy we have John [or Libby, or Chuck, etc.], raise your hand.” And we would all raise our hands. (You made sure you always raised your hand, because you wanted everyone else to do the same when it was your turn – a great equalizer!) I can’t describe the effect it had on each of us to see ten hands go up in the air (some days people would put BOTH hands up – that was really something!)" Well, I think in that heavenly banquet in the eternal city, God will be like the dad in this story. God will say, “How many people are glad we have Jeff and Ruth and Betty June and Steve and Bob and Emily Dawn…raise your hand.” And we will. Amen