Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Photo by Considerate Agency on Unsplash

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Have you ever gone to a “first-come-first-served” event of any kind? Those events where people start to line up for hours before the doors open so they can rush in and grab the best seat in the house?

Something similar is taking place in our Gospel text this morning. Jesus gets an invite to an important dinner. When the doors open, Jesus notices that people are rushing in and claiming the best seats – the ones next to the host - for themselves. The guests want the prestige of the best seat at the dining table.

It’s our human instinct to try to get the best position. I fall into this trap. It must be in my lizard brain, the one that helps me with basic survival. I often crave that place of honor, or at least, I want to be associated somehow with an honored person. In other words, that attraction to fame that exists in most people, is in me too. I think it’s a survival instinct, if we are the honored person then we will be protected.

In our modern self-conscious humanity, this instinct make us put faith into a meritocratic system. Like the one Jesus encounters today around a society dining table. We place a burden on ourselves to look, act, or be a certain kind of way that matches a value judgement we want to have of ourselves.

This puts pressure onto ourselves to be something we may not be in order to become something we think is more important or better.

Now, Jesus interrupts this rush to get the best seat at the table with one of the same Proverbs we read today: “do not place yourself in the honored seat, for it is better to be told to come up there.” Jesus interrupts the meritocratic culture, the striving for worth, the need to become something by saying that one should in fact sit at the lowest place in the hierarchy and be content with that position and hosts should in fact only serve those who cannot repay.

This is the “moral” of the story. It’s a good one. It reminds us that life isn’t only about striving and positioning so that we can be in the best seat in the house. The moral of this story can help us to relieve pressure which we’ve put on ourselves to become something we’re not and to be who we are.

In other words, it reminds us to remain humble and to find contentment in humbleness for there is also honor.

I also think this passage is about something more than just a story with a moral – however good that moral may be. Luke is writing this passage as a theological illustration – as a way to show us who God is.

The Gospel of Luke and the letter to the Philippians from Paul were written within the same 30 year window. Similar theological ideas were being developed by these early Christians and became a part of our scripture. Luke is developing a the theological idea of Christ the Servant in this passage. To illustrate this let me read a little from Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

…have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant… Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name… (Philippians 2:6-7, 9-10).

This is a beautiful theological statement about who God is through the person of Jesus Christ. A servant. Someone who reaches out to us in loving kindness, care and compassion.

We know Jesus to be God in the flesh, and yet Jesus doesn’t use that to his own advantage. Rather, Jesus serves. God serves. And therefore becomes exalted above everything else, because it is just SO DARN WONDERFUL that God is a servant to the very creation God created!

Luke is giving us this theological idea in the form of a little story about Jesus attending a dinner party. Isn’t that wonderful!?

I think this is what makes the Gospels, and all the literature of the Bible, so beautiful and why it’s been passed down as the Word of God for generations and generations. Because at the same time as we get some hints on how it’s best to live our lives, we also find out who God is in these words – in these little memorable stories – and that’s what’s key, what’s critical and what turns us to worship God each week.

This promise, that Jesus is a servant, showing us that God loves and serves creation means that God has got us.

And once again, this takes the pressure off of our shoulders. With Christ the Servant, there is no more need for striving to become something we are not. In this case, there is no striving to “get God” to forgive us. In the theological idea of Christ the Servant and in our humble position, we are set free from this striving to become something that we perceive God wants or needs us to become. Because we are already all that God needs us to be.

God created us for God’s own good pleasure so God redeems us and gives us life for God’s own good please. Saving us through grace, by faith so that we don’t need to strive, we just humbly come to God, giving God all the thanks and praise for who we already are: Children of God, marked by the Cross of Christ.

This morning’s story about a dinner party has given us two related meanings in one story. One story showing us what it looks like to live humbly as God’s named and claimed children in service to the neighbor and in our humble position. And the same story giving us a theological image of Christ the Servant that delivers a promise of freedom from striving to become so that we can merely be.

Praise be to God! Amen.