Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

20:44 You really give us such a gift every week. Before we turn to the word this morning, won't you pray with me? Good and gracious creator, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable, perhaps even pleasing, in your sight. great God our rock and our redeemer amen this morning we are continuing our summer sermon series at Christ's table and in this series we as a congregation are exploring the lessons that Jesus taught through the meals he shared in the gospel witness Jesus used meals as an opportunity to break down boundaries, to shake people out of their routines, and to bring people together. In that spirit, when we celebrate the sacrament of communion together during this series, we're going to change up how we distribute the elements. Now, I know Presbyterians don't like change. So I am giving you this warning well in advance. There is no need to panic. Reverend Werner is going to give you very specific instructions on where to be when later in the service. Our text today is a meal within a meal. In the 14th chapter of Luke's gospel, we find Jesus dining with Pharisees and lawyers. During the meal, one of Jesus's dining companions makes a seemingly innocuous comment, which prompts Jesus to tell a story about another dinner party.

22:38 Let's listen together for what the Spirit might have to say to us this morning.

24:24 Thanks be to God. One of the dinner guests says to Jesus, blessed is anyone who will dine in the kingdom of God. This seems obvious, right? Blessed, Greek makarios, that's the same word that we find in the Beatitudes. It can also be translated as happy or fulfilled because of God's favor. and then the kingdom of God. It's one of those phrases that feels weighty and biblical. The kingdom of God was shorthand that Jesus and others in the first century used to talk about another world. Not a world ruled by worldly leaders and worldly concerns, not the world of the empire, but the world of God. When we talk about the the kingdom of God, we are talking about a world where the waves of clashing crises that plague our city, our nation, and our world are no more.

25:34 It's an almost mystical somewhere or something where the ills of our society, poverty, racism, climate catastrophe, and conflict are no more. So this man makes an obvious point. Those who eat bread in the kingdom of God must be blessed. Those who dine in a world without all of the problems around us must be happy. And Jesus responds by telling a story about a great dinner party, a great banquet. And because Jesus tells this story immediately after the man's comment about being happy in the kingdom of God, it would make sense that Jesus is using this story to expand on that, to talk about how happy and blessed the folks are who dine in the kingdom.

26:40 There's just one problem. Nobody at this dinner party seems at all happy. Let's take a closer look. A man invites many people to a dinner party, and when the time for the dinner party comes, he sends his servant out to tell everyone that things are ready. Now, this is common in the ancient world. This is how invitations would have worked. For example, if Reverend Jonah is planning a dinner party for days or weeks from now, you would know that information, and you would just sort of be sitting around waiting for someone to tell you that it was time to go. Once the table is set, the food is cooking, the bar is ready, the appetizers are plated, you send for the guests. and given the scale of the great banquet that we're talking about here it's safe to assume that the host is trying to impress the community he wants this party to go well unfortunately for our host when the second invitation comes out nobody wants to come to the party everyone has an excuse oh I'll go check on my land oh I suddenly have to tend to my ox and I've just been married. Sorry, I'm busy. I can't come. Please accept my regrets.

28:10 Maybe it's just me, but these excuses seem just a little bit made up. At the very least, these are things that you could have known about or mentioned before the day of the party, almost as if it's when the first invite came, everybody got together and said, oh man, I really do not want to go to this party, and then came up with an excuse to get out of it. Oh gosh, I'd really like to, but you know, oxen, oxen, I have to go check on those. This party is not off to an auspicious start. So the servant comes back to the house and tells the host the bad news. Nobody's coming. Perhaps the host is already standing there with a tray of wine, and so it is understandable in light of the preparation that has gone into this and the timing of these no's, the anxiety that the host must be feeling if the party does not go well, that the only emotion attributed to the host in our text this morning is anger. The host is angry as a result of these rejected invitations, and in an effort to save the party, sends the servant out into the streets to grab people, even the poor and the crippled and the lame, compel them to come.

29:36 So the second round of invitees shows up to the party, and the servant looks around and says to the host, you know, there's still room. It looks a little empty in here. And the host, still angry, perhaps growing increasingly embarrassed about how things are going up to this point, hours or perhaps even days after this party was supposed to start, says to the poor servant, go out even further. Go get even more people until the house is filled. I'll show those people that I originally invited, none of them are going to taste the dinner. And that's where the parable ends. In our minds, I think we sometimes rewrite this parable a little bit to make it sound like something out of a children's book. We add something to the effect of, and when the host looked around at his full house and all the wonderful people that he hadn't thought to invite in the first place, he was happy and everyone had a great time.

30:43 And those that didn't accept the invite really missed out. But that's just not there. The parable doesn't give us that satisfaction. Where our text ends is with three people sitting in their houses with the shades closed, hoping that the host doesn't see them, a bunch of people awkwardly sitting around a table after an unexpected invitation, and a host seething in the corner muttering about how nobody who got the original invite will ever eat his dinner, and a poor servant exhausted from running back and forth to keep grabbing people in off the streets. If that's what the kingdom of God is like, I'm not sure I mind if my invitation gets lost in the mail. And maybe that's partially the point. Maybe Jesus wants us to notice how this dinner party has gone awry. But before we decide what this dinner party means, perhaps we need to ask a simpler question. Where did things go wrong? Of course there's the issue of the excuses, the invited guests who when the time came to go to the party said, no thank you, there's some land over there that I have to check on. Maybe the excuses are believable, maybe they're not, maybe they're symbolic, but whether they're good excuses or bad excuses, the result is the same. The banquet hall sits empty. If nobody comes, the banquet doesn't work.

32:19 So the host then invites the the poor and the blind and the lame to dinner. That's that's a good thing. Reverend Natalie is actually going to preach in a few weeks about the portion of Luke 14 where Jesus commands us to do just that. so I'm not going to dwell on it today. But I do think the host sometimes gets off easy in this parable. And if our goal is to understand why this unhappy dinner never really becomes the party that was planned, we have to look carefully at our host. Luke tells us that the host is filled with anger when the servant comes back and tells him that none of the originally invited guests are coming. And everything the host does afterward, even when he gets it right, and when he even when he invites the poor and the crippled and the lame, when he's sitting at the end saying that the originally invited guests will never eat his dinner, everything he does is motivated by his anger. Anger and perhaps pettiness, spite, holding a grudge. And as a result of the anger, he seems to forget to enjoy the party that he has planned, the glorious feast that he has spent days preparing. He misses the beautiful diversity of people around him. In his anger, he has managed to fill the house, but there's room at the table and something still feels empty. And when the servant keeps telling him that there's still room, the only thing that the host can fixate on is that there is no room for those who had been originally invited. The host doesn't wonder whether those who first said no might change their minds when they catch the sound of music drifting out of the windows and smell the goat that's been cooking.

34:17 he's too busy making sure that they're kept out. Too busy winning. Too busy making sure they get what they deserve. That there's still room. That people might enjoy the feast. That someone could change their mind. That the party could grow. All of that gets lost. Because the host is fixated on cutting folks who have wronged him out. And that, that the host is being governed, being motivated by this grudge, by this anger, is precisely why I have trouble believing that Jesus is talking directly about the kingdom of God in this passage. To paraphrase the late François Beauvan, historian, Bible scholar, and professor at Harvard Divinity School, this parable is not a preview of something to come, but a tool that Jesus is using to incite us to transform our present reality.

35:28 A word spoken in order to elicit a response from us. this is july 4th weekend yesterday our country celebrated its 250th anniversary and i don't have to tell you nor do i have the time that there is a lot going on in our world our world does not look like the peaceful kingdom of god where everyone is happily eating bread I was texting with a former co-worker the other day. It was that very 21st century relationship where our offices used to be next to each other and we spoke all the time, but now our entire correspondence consists of exchanging memes and articles and reactions. And I found myself scrolling up in the chat and realized that it had been years since we had said anything to each other that wasn't a back and forth of shared outrage, shared anger, shared disbelief about what's going on in the world. When I look around, I see a lot of anger, a lot of pettiness, a lot of resentment, a lot of it justified. There is a lot that is wrong and that is to be angry about, but some of it just seems to be kind of in the air, how we're operating these days. And perhaps this morning that is why Jesus tells this parable, not because the kingdom of God looks like this dinner party, but because our world so often looks like this dinner party.

37:25 Jesus tells this parable in order to hold a mirror up to us and to point out the ways in which we let our anger, we with our anger and our resentment need to win and have the capacity to really mess up even the most perfectly planned dinner. And Jesus wants us to do something different. We already said that the kingdom of God was a shorthand in Jesus' day, shorthand for a world unlike the one that we are living in, not meant to evoke heaven with harps and halos and clouds, but a world ruled by and operating under the priorities of a loving, forgiving God who delights in creation. And what's revelatory about Jesus's ministry is not his use of that term, kingdom of God.

38:24 It's the idea that you, all of us, have a role in bringing about that kingdom. You have a role to play in the work. and of course I want to be careful here about conflating our calling as Christians as followers of Jesus Christ in bringing about the kingdom with our participation in human political and social systems and structures I do think those are different things but in our reformed tradition especially our faith asks us to consider how our existence and our actions contribute to the bringing about of the kingdom. If the goal is for everyone to be happily eating at a great dinner party, the great banquet, and we play some role in making that happen, we can't always be looking up. We have to look out and in. And perhaps this parable is pointing out how our own anger, resentments and grudges impact the world that we walk around in.

39:36 Even when the host gets some things right, operating from the place of anger does not result in the dinner party that he had hoped. There's another reason that I think this parable is trying to point us to another way of being point us away from resentment, anger, and holding grudges. There's a temptation to read this parable as an eschatological allegory, that is the story which through symbolism tells us about salvation and the end. There are many different ways of doing this for people of all theological persuasions, And in many of these readings, the dinner party is the kingdom of God, God is the host, and the guest originally invited or otherwise are all of us.

40:33 There are more conservative or fundamentalist ways of doing this, where the parable gets read as a clear statement by Jesus that those who reject the invitation to the great banquet are being rejected. One chance to come, better be ready, and if you don't say yes, than off to the bad place with you. There are more progressive Christian readings of this parable that read it as a parable about privilege in our world. An A-team gets the invitation to the party and they lose out and so the meek and the lowly inherit the invitations. And I have to confess there's a part of me that finds these interpretations a little bit attractive. I'm an Enneagram 1, type A, oldest child who practiced law for a while and really likes rules. That person, that side of me, that flawed, perhaps a little petty person who wants things to be done right, that person likes a parable where the dinner guests who refuse the invitation and made excuses get what they deserve.

41:39 You lost your chance. You were invited. You made excuses. Tough cookies. You lose. but God doesn't operate out of pettiness or resentment, and God doesn't hold grudges. Luke makes that very clear in the next chapter, Luke 15. Whether or not you know it, you know Luke 15. Luke 15 starts with the parable of the lost sheep. There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance. Next is the parable of the lost coin. There is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner who repents. And to round things out, we have the parable of the prodigal and his brother, the ultimate redemption story. No matter how badly we mess up, God is waiting there to throw us a banquet when we come home safe and sound. All three parables point to the same place. God is faithful to us, seeks after us, loves us despite our mistakes, and rejoices when we come home.

42:53 God's grace allows us to make mistakes and gives us a landing pad when we realize it. That's good news. A God who hosts a dinner party, sends one invitation, gets mad when you don't show up and then angrily stews the rest of the night, God doesn't work that way. And I don't think we should either. happy are those who will eat bread in the kingdom of God. I really do like the image of the kingdom of God as a dinner party, music and laughter, everyone you like, and even the people you really can't stand sitting together around a table, passing food, setting down their differences for just a moment.

43:53 I wish our world could be a little bit more like that. And I do believe that every day God is trying to draw us to that table. There's still room at that table. Room for all of us. Room for the poor and the blind and the crippled and the lame. Room for all the folks who ghosted and rejected the invitations to change their minds. Room for the servant and the host to sit down together and appreciate what a great job they did with the party. There's room at that table.

44:37 But that table asks something of us. It asks us to show up, to make room, and to keep expanding the table, not out of obligation or spite, but because every person belongs there simply by being. And it asks us to choose grace over our anger and resentment for ourselves and for the sake of the great dinner party. The invitation is open. The question remains whether we'll pull up a chair and sit down together. Amen. having heard the word read and proclaimed i now invite you to rise in body or in spirit as you are able and join me in saying what we believe using the words from a brief statement of faith printed in your bulletin or on your screen we trust in god whom jesus called abba father in sovereign love god created the world good and makes everyone equally in god's image male and female of every race and people, to live as one community.

45:57 Loving us still, God makes us heirs with Christ of the covenant, like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child, like a father who runs to welcome the prodigal home.