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SUMMARY:Weaving the Textures of Welcome
DESCRIPTION:Let’s turn our imaginations toward this fascinating passage from the Gospel of Luke.  What a textile this Gospel is\, shot through with references to the Spirit\, but containing a surprising mixture of fibers. Our story this morning has dark tones of confrontation but also light threads of comedy.  There are moments here where Jesus tugs so hard on the strands of what seems normal that normalcy itself starts to unravel.  But that unraveling produces new cloth. \nThe specific fiber of this Gospel story is the social experience of meals.  Jesus has been invited to a Sabbath meal by a ruler of the Pharisees. Jesus dines with Pharisees several times in Luke\, and the meals remind us that Pharisees in this Gospel are not simple bad guys.  Maybe this religious leader is offering Sabbath hospitality to a respected traveling teacher or maybe he’s hostile.  We can’t tell.  He doesn’t speak in the story.  What we know is that he’s a dinner party host.  Let’s humanize him a little -- give him a name -- he can be Jacob the Pharisee for the next few minutes -- and with some disciplined historical imagination\, let’s enter his dining room.\nAs a well-off member of ancient society who could afford a well-appointed home\, I’m confident Jacob took great care with his dining room.  He decorated the walls with colorful frescoes\, selected dining couches\, and had them arranged on three sides of the room.  His servants or slaves draped the couches with pillows and textiles\, and arranged small tables in front.  It’s the way things were done. His dinner guests reclined at an angle on the couches\, leaning on their left arms\, using their right hands to eat and drink.\nSo who does Jacob the Pharisee invite to this dining room for special meals?  Perhaps the invitation to Jesus was spontaneous.  But usually\, Jacob\, like other elite men of his time\, takes great care with dinner invitations.  He honors and thanks his benefactors and patrons with invitations. He also rewards his own loyal clients.  When he needs to make progress in business\, or negotiate good marriages for his children\, or gain some political influence\, he invites the people who could be helpful.  And\, like others of his time and ours\, he puzzles over what combination of guests will make for great after-dinner conversation -- who would be best at witty repartee?  Who can you trust in a political debate? Who among his friends\, family\, and colleagues is really capable of good theological discussion?\nLike most wealthy men of the ancient world\, Jacob probably believed that the ideal for his dinner parties was that\, as guests share food\, everyone at the meal is equal.  Meals were sometimes spoken of idealistically as democratizing\, equalizing\, friend-making social interactions.  But here’s the trick.  Jacob also knows that in his rigidly layered social world\, with all its hierarchies\, to create the impression of equality at a dinner party\, he has to be careful to recognize his guests’ status\, and show meticulous respect for those of higher rank.  So Jacob would have to decide\: do I serve better food to higher status guests\, or the same food to everyone\, but still serve the higher rank guests first?  Do I let people choose their own seats (generally not the done thing\, but apparently he tried it when Jesus came to dinner)\, or take care to determine the seating of guests according to status?  Jacob likely believed what most men of his rank in the ancient world believed\:  discriminating\, selecting\, excluding and ranking -- those are the keys to harmony at table.\nBut then he invited Jesus -- to take bread on the Sabbath -- a day of rest\, but more than that\, according to Isaiah\, a day of delight\, a holy day\, a day not to pursue one’s own interests (Is 58\:13-14).  Suddenly\, before the meal\, a man appears who has dropsy -- a swelling caused by excess fluid\, we would say an edema.  We can’t tell precisely where this encounter and healing take place.  Are they in the road outside Jacob the Pharisee’s house?  On the threshold?  In the atrium?  Even in the dining room?  What we can tell is that before the meal has begun\, an ill and disfigured person is present\, is healed on the Sabbath\, and is sent away.\nOnce  in the dining room Jesus observes the guests all choosing the most prestigious seat -- couch number one.  What did their efforts look like\, I wonder -- a jostling rush?  A casual tossing of the cloak to save the place?  Jesus responds with comic strategizing -- hey guys\, when you go to a wedding banquet -- an even bigger meal\, with an even wider cross-section of society -- rush the lowest seat.   Then the host will lead you up to the highest one.  Couch number one will be yours if you pretend you don’t want it. As straight social advice\, this is hypocrisy -- pretend to be humble so your host will give you the status you crave.  But with Jesus\, the apparent hypocrisy functions as irony and parable as he echoes the promise that pervades the Gospel \: that God is a God who lifts up the lowly.  \nRank in seating is the first meal protocol to fall\; now guest lists and the expectation of reciprocity take a hit.  When you give a lunch or dinner\, Jesus says to our friend the Pharisee\, don’t invite your friends\, your family\, your extended family\, or your rich neighbors.  Now “rich” is almost never a neutral word in the Gospel of Luke\, but generally\, Jesus is prohibiting invitations that are thoroughly normal -- normal in ancient times\, normal in ours.  With whom did you share Easter dinner?  Friends or family\, perhaps?  Most of our social relations are built around mutuality. We\, like the Pharisee\, are left uncomfortable with Jesus’ alternate guest list -- “invite the poor\, the crippled\, the lame\, and the blind.”  Partly\, the language of that list might make us cringe.  In this year of our Lord 2009\, we would prefer Jesus to say\, “persons who are economically on the margins” and “persons with disabilities.”  Yet there is insight here\, too\, in placing categories of physical disability alongside each other and alongside the poor.  As Nancy Eiesland perceptively showed us\, with all their differences\, “persons with disabilities have experienced a common set of stigmatizing values and arrangements that have worked to make them an identifiable minority group\, shaped by exclusion.“ \nIf he could follow Jesus’ guidance\, what would change in Jacob the Pharisee’s dining room?  The intimacy of bodies would be experienced as difference. The dining couches\, with their lovely fabrics and pillows\, would now welcome frail and impaired bodies\, probably dirty ones\, too.  Food and drink might be spilled a bit by guests for whom physical control is a struggle.  And surely the table talk would be radically different -- not accounts of benefits sought\, favors returned.  There might well be lots of witty exchanges\, but also “difficult truth-telling”  about how discriminating\, selecting\, and ranking have been experienced by those excluded.\nWould Jacob the Pharisee have heard any overlap or intersection in Jesus’ two lists?  What I mean is\, if Jacob the Pharisee’s mother had lost her eyesight late in life\, as my mom has\, how would he hear\, “do not invite your relatives…invite the blind”?  If Jacob had a child or sibling or friend with disability or struggling with poverty\, as many\, most\, perhaps all of us do\, what insights or complications would Jesus’ challenge arouse?\nBut Jacob doesn’t speak. Only one brave dinner guest does\:  “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” Who could disagree with that?  But the exclamation strikes me as a little odd.  Faced with a sharp challenge to social practice\, the guest proposes we all sing a rousing chorus of “When we all get to heaven…”\nJesus’ response is the parable of the great dinner\, shaped around two kinds of double invitations. Well in advance\, the parable host sent invitations for this dinner on a certain date\, then on the day itself\, he sends a slave at the appointed time to gather the guests\, perhaps providing transportation for them.  At this very late hour\, the slave receives  these excuses -- two about business\, one about family.  Press on the first two and they sound pretty flimsy.  Who buys a piece of land without seeing it first?  Who buys five yoke of oxen without test-driving them?  The third excuse\, “I have just been married” might sound more plausible  -- something like\, “my wife won’t let me…”  But the dinner invitation is not a surprise\, nor would the marriage have been.  The host is being snubbed.  But the invited guests\, it turns out\, are replaceable.\nFor there’s a second double invitation.  Using language we’ve already heard\, the host demands\, 'Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor\, the crippled\, the blind\, and the lame.'  When the slave reports that there are still places left\, the master’s welcome becomes more sweeping\, indiscriminate -- don’t just go within the city\, keep going\; don’t just fill the dining room\,  make it necessary for them to come in so  “my house may be filled.”   \nThis parable host didn’t at first do what Jesus just urged Jacob the Pharisee\, but the experience of social shame forces him into the radical position Jesus has advocated.  His dining room overflows\, his house is full.  It’s not just that his ideas about status have changed.  His own status is now different -- he’s the host of that place where those people hang out. \nMy family recently helped host a truly great dinner in our church youth building\, an end-of-season celebration for our county’s Special Olympics teams.  I loved watching my son with his fellow athletes\, and amidst the laughter and free-wheeling table talk\, reflecting on the many ways they help me regularly recalibrate my values.  I remembered watching the one young woman on my son’s 3-on-3 basketball team during the state championships\, fiercely defending her opponent.  Her opponent glanced down and became upset because her shoe was untied\, and it appeared she wasn’t sure how to tie it.  Without hesitation\, my son’s teammate dropped to the floor\, tied her opponent’s shoelace\, stood up\, patted her on the shoulder\, went back into her tough defense\, and stole the ball on the inbound pass. I’ve watched these athletes cheer wildly for athletically gifted teammates -- people who run like they were born to run --  but just as wildly for a teammate whose long jump distance doubled in a season -- from his initial six inches\, to a final twelve.  In my professional life in a university\, intellectual work\, strength\, and eloquence are highly valued\; the times I spend with the Special Olympics athletes return me to wellsprings of trust\, appreciation\, patience and honoring of all.\nPart of the power of Jesus’ meal teaching here is in what it adds to the Gospels.  The Gospels are replete with healing stories\, but in Jesus’ dinner directions and his parabolic meal\, no one must be cured or fixed or remedied to be welcomed.  The man with dropsy is healed and goes away\, but these folks fill the house as they are.  The Gospels also certainly call us to charitable actions\, to support of our food banks and homeless shelters and services for persons in need\, but this story images something different. This host does not take the meal and hand it out in the streets -- this is no image of individualistic charity\, but a reweaving of the social fabric. \nLuke’s story reads mission as welcome and solidarity\,  as the Alliance of Baptists has done -- you have understood mission as welcome and solidarity and reshaping the center of conversation.  Where now do you stretch or extend that understanding?  Where do we all?  Luke’s Jesus calls us to open our fellowships even more to difference\, and to be changed by it.  Jean Vanier\, the founder of the L’Arche network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities\, once remarked\, “I’m not suggesting for a moment that each one of us must welcome into our homes all those who are marginalized.  I am suggesting that if [we]\, with our gifts and weaknesses\, our capacities and our needs\, open our heart to a few people who are different and become their friend\, receive life from them\, our societies would change.”\nWhat will you do with this weaving of Luke’s Jesus\, with this story and its varied textures of welcome?  Let me urge you to rub your hands over it\, wrap it round you\, stand back\, look close\, sew it into the garment you wear closest to your skin\, drape it over your dining couch\, or wrap it around a stranger. This weaving of Jesus -- full of uneasiness\, but also of embrace\, unravels our normal status seeking\, and calls us instead to a welcome so extreme that we are changed as God’s house is filled with those different from ourselves.\n
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DTSTART;TZID=US-Central:20090510T190100
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