Where do you think you fit in the cosmos? It’s said that President Teddy Roosevelt liked to take his important guests outside in the evening. He would point to the huge Andromeda Galaxy and remind his guests that it contained a hundred billion suns, many larger than our own sun. After a little silence he would then say, “Now I think we’re small enough. Let’s go in.”1 Roosevelt knew that people could work together effectively only when they understood their relative importance in the grand scheme of things.
A humor web site offers us a slightly different take. The folks who run humor@emmitsburg.net suggest that we can gain a healthy – and perhaps humble – perspective on ourselves by looking in the mirror. At age 3, the site says, a girl looks in the mirror and sees a queen. At 8, she sees Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. At 15, she sees a chubby, ugly, pimply teen who just can’t go to school looking like this. At 20, she’s too tall, too short, too thin, or too fat, but she goes to class or work anyway. At 30, she’s still too tall, too short, too thin, or too fat, but she’s too busy to do anything about it and goes out anyway. At 40, she’s still the same, but she says, “At least I’m clean and healthy,” and off she goes. At 50, she looks at herself, says “Well, that’s me,” and goes wherever she wants. At 60, she looks at herself, gives thanks that she can still see herself, and goes out and enjoys life. At 70, she sees wisdom, skills, and laughter and goes out with a grateful heart. At 80, she doesn’t bother to look; she just puts on a purple hat and goes out to enjoy life with her friends and family. Perhaps, say the folks on the site, we should just grab that purple hat a little earlier in life!
If Jesus were teaching today, he might suggest that both comparing ourselves to the stars and looking away from the mirror sooner would help us to have a clearer sense of who we are before God. What a strange dinner guest Jesus was in the part of Luke’s story that we hear today! We are still on the road to Jerusalem, with Jesus going from town to town and accepting invitations to teach and dine along the way. Here he has been invited by a leading Pharisee to dine on the Sabbath. You know, the Pharisees tend to get a bad rap in the Gospels. They were a sect that began in the diaspora, the colonies of Jews living outside Israel. These Jews were anxious to maintain the integrity and visible distinctiveness of their community in largely Gentile areas. So they very carefully observed all the rules and regulations in Scripture concerning dietary laws and Sabbath keeping. In inviting this relatively unknown travelling rabbi to dine, perhaps this leader of the Pharisees and his fellow rabbis were curious as to what Jesus would do and how he would interpret the rules and regulations. Perhaps they wanted to hear what new teaching he would give them.
Jesus must surely have disappointed them! He behaved in three ways definitely outside the norm for dinner guests in his day, or maybe in any day. In the first part of the story, which we don’t hear, he healed a man who had swelling in his joints. Remember that it was the Sabbath, and he wasn’t supposed to heal on the Sabbath. Healing is work, as we were reminded in last week’s Gospel reading, and one doesn’t work on the Sabbath. Jesus challenged his hearers here in the same way that he had in his healing of the bent-over woman, namely by reminding them that they would rescue a child or animal on the Sabbath, so it ought to be OK to heal.
Now everyone was surely on edge. So the second thing that Jesus did was to give his fellow diners a lesson in the proper etiquette for taking one’s seat. He told them that it’s smarter to take the lowest place around the table than the highest place. Of course, this was not news. Any Pharisee who read the Scriptures – and surely these Pharisees would have known their Scriptures backwards and forwards – recognized Jesus’ quotation of Proverbs 25.
If instructing his fellow diners weren’t bad enough, the third and oddest thing that Jesus did was to instruct his host as to whom to invite to dinner: not his family, his friends, and those able to reciprocate his hospitality, but rather the “poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” The Pharisees must surely have shuddered when they heard Jesus say that. Most people believed that the “poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” were that way because God despised them. Therefore a Pharisee would be ritually defiled by getting too close to them. Yet what does Jesus suggest? That one would be blessed by inviting such people, at least in the resurrection of the righteous.
Are we too at that dinner party with Jesus? Are we too observing him closely? What do we hear him telling us? I hear him telling us two things. I hear him telling us that we must let go of pride, self-preoccupation, and the desire for human accolades. That doesn’t mean being a doormat, but it does mean having a realistic sense of who we are. When we do have a realistic sense of who we are before God, when we put that purple hat on a little sooner in life, when we understand that all of us are created in God’s image and loved by God, then we will be truly blessed. Ultimately, God will enable us to become more than we are this minute. God will continue to help us to grow fully into the person God created us to be. As The Message Bible puts it, “If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’ll end up flat on your face. But if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.”
I also hear Jesus reminding us that if we are created in God’s image, then God will also enable us to get beyond ourselves, to go beyond focusing on our own needs and the needs of our own immediate circle. God will enable us to share our life with people who look, talk, act, and maybe even smell different from us. God will help us to reach out to those whom we don’t normally see, know, or care about. The people with whom God is inviting and enabling us to share our love and wealth are all around us: single moms, homeless men, disabled children, gay folks, migrant workers, people who can’t make ends meet even though they’re gainfully employed, immigrants trying to adapt to our community. Jesus calls us to see them as equally beloved of God as we are. Jesus calls us to step out of our comfortable middle-class existence and invite them into our lives. Jesus promises us that when we do, we will be blessed. Hear The Message again: “Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You’ll be – and experience – a blessing.”
Daniel Clendinen tells the wonderful story of the wedding of his friend’s daughter, Lisa.2 The young couple couldn’t afford to invite the whole church. So they had the main street in downtown Waco, Texas blocked off. Guests danced in the street, enjoyed ice cream from Baskin Robbins, and shared wedding cake in a park gazebo. The groom, a pastor, had befriended a homeless man who lived under a bridge. Sure enough, “Coyote” came to the wedding dressed as usual: in jeans with holes in the knees, scruffy beard, and unwashed hair. He brought several of his homeless friends too, who then cleaned up afterwards. The bride’s neighbor, a small girl, came with her mother and grandfather. Soon all the younger folks were vying for the chance to dance with the 70-year old man. People strolling by were invited to join the festivities. There were smartly dressed guests alongside guests who had probably never been to a formal affair. However they were dressed, for this moment at least, “every person felt welcomed as an honored guest.” Every person was welcomed as God welcomes us and invites us to welcome each other. Every person was blessed by the others there. Every person was a blessing to the others there.
My friends, here’s the good news. When we know who we are, when we know that we are beloved children of God, when we feel free to be who we truly are, when we feel free to be the people that God created us to be, and then when we reach out to others, all others, in true welcome, we will be a blessing, and we will surely be blessed. And not only at the resurrection of the righteous. Right here and now, in our lives in this place, today. Do we feel free to step out of our comfort zone and embrace those who cannot repay us? Are we ready to stretch out our hands in welcome to all?
1. Thanks to Patricia Sanchez for this and the following story in Celebration Preaching Resources.
2. In this week’s Journey with Jesus, http://www.journeywithjesus.net
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