Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
This sermon was first given at St Michael's Church, Middleton, and then at All Saints, Rhodes, where I was invited to preach to both congregations on Sunday 28th August. The parish has been following a theme of Community Living, as taught by St Benedict in a recent sermon series.
The Gospel that morning was Luke 14:1,7-14. I hope you enjoy reading it!
I’d like to start this morning by offering my thanks for inviting me to preach to you all today. Jenni tells me that you’re nearing the end of a series of sermons drawing upon the teachings of St Benedict on community living, in preparation for your away-day in just a few weeks’ time, and then following that, that you have a meeting on 22nd September to discuss the idea of being a ‘mission community’.
I hope my sermon this morning plays its part amongst the rest of the preparation you’ve been doing to generate some thoughts and ideas as together you plan this next exciting stage that God has in store for you all. I also hope to not repeat too much from previous sermons on this theme you’ve heard over the past few weeks! If you do find I’m being repetitive, then please accept my apologies in advance! If worse comes to it, and we get to such a point in my preaching that you’ve heard it all before, then I hope you’ll be kind enough to let me use the excuse that that must mean that God must really want you to hear it again! That’s what I’ll be telling myself, anyway…
This morning’s Gospel seems particularly apt for your community-focussed theme. If you wanted to know what Jesus’ idea of community was, you really could do so much worse than throw a dinner party. Or go to one. Honestly, when you sit down and read the Gospels, Jesus spends so much of his time at the dining table that you’d be forgiven for starting to wonder if he were actually a chair… And then, when he’s not eating food or attending a party, Jesus is talking about them. You can see why his detractors called him a “glutton and a drunkard”. Today’s Gospel is a case in point – not only is Jesus at a dinner party, but he spends his time at this dinner party telling stories about not just one, but two other dinner parties. The man was obsessed!
I think I’d have loved to have witnessed a conversation between Christ and St Benedict about dinner parties. I think Benedict was probably obsessed too – in his book of rules, he devoted four whole chapters to mealtimes – his prescriptions included keeping to only two meals a day, with only two cooked courses at each and ensuring monks kept to certain amounts of and types of food per day. Rules also dictated what times those meals could be eaten, and what you were allowed to do during the meal – and that was listen to someone else read aloud. You had to have signs with you for anything you might require so as not to interrupt the reading. You know the sort of thing: “Can you pass the ketchup please?”, “I don’t like boiled potatoes!”, “Daddy, my brother’s kicking me!”… maybe I’m projecting? Thinking about it though, I might take Benedict up on this no-talking-and-use-a-sign idea; I’ll discuss with my wife later when I get home…
Jesus’ ‘rules’ for mealtimes were simpler. We heard about them in today’s Gospel. There are only two – one for the guests and one for the host.
We English are often criticised by other nationalities as being obsessed with class, but, honestly if you think we’re bad, you should have been around in Jesus’ day. To the Romans, class was crucial. Rome was built on everyone knowing their place in the social order, and dinner-parties helped to cement it.
If you go to a dinner-party today (and should you be lucky enough to receive an invite to one, remember to ask yourself – What Would Jesus Do?!), you’ll probably find that everyone there at the party moves in the same sort of circles, and that there is no meaning as to where you sit when you eat – other than to enable free-flowing conversation. Not so in Jesus’ day; the host would invite his friends, his patron and also those who depended on him for patronage. A dinner party was not just a meal; it was a transaction. Some guests were there in order that the host might impress them, and gain favour from such an impression, and some were there in order that they might themselves impress the host and offer their service in recompense for their gracious invite. I say ‘gracious’ – these parties were more favour than grace. And the more in-favour with the host that you were, the closer to him you got to sit.
And so, with the background of this very prescribed social structure, built on status and reciprocity, Jesus gives two new rules for how he wants community to function.
His first rule is to the guests – “sit at the back”. Sit with the lowest. And there’s some rationale in our reading as to why Jesus says this; because if you sit at the front and your host moves you further down, you’ll look foolish, but if your host calls you forward closer to him, well, then you’ll look pretty good. And the rationale is right – this is the way to avoid an extremely embarrassing situation; sit with the lowest and you can only look good. But I have to ask – since when has Jesus cared about what looks good? He cares about what is good. And what is good in the community of Jesus is turning the dinner tables of social convention. Here, at the back of the room, away from the pomp and the Important People™ is where God can be found.
And then Jesus gives his next instruction; to the dinner party host: forget the favour; extend the grace. Invite those people who can’t respond in turn. Invite the marginalised, invite the poor, invite the disabled, invite the outcasts. And we’re suddenly reminded of another of Jesus’ stories[1], where the king throws a wedding feast, and invites all his important subjects, only for them to reply with excuses as to why they cannot come. In response, the king throws open his doors to anyone and everyone who is available; the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame, and anyone else who can fill up the house… and we start to cotton on as to why Jesus is so keen on dinner parties.
A dinner party isn’t just a party. Not for Jesus; it’s a parable in itself. A meal with others is a representation of the kingdom of God. And in God’s kingdom, there is no favour; there is only grace. Who is invited? Well – everyone is invited, but often only the outcasts turn up. And who does God sit with when eating with those who accept his invitation? God sits with those outcasts.
St Benedict sat with them too – in his rule, he describes a ladder consisting of steps to Godliness. One of those rungs to become more like Christ is an instruction to consider yourself as “inferior to all”. Sit with the least, says St Benedict. It’s where you belong.
It's where God belongs too.
Sitting at the back has connotations nowadays with rebellion; it’s where the naughty kids sit; at the back of the bus, and the back of the class – the back of the church too, maybe?
But you know what? That’s good. I like that, because our social order needs some rebellion. It needs God and the outcasts to sit at the back and plan a holy revolution – eating together can lead to rowdiness and dangerous ideas – that’s why Benedict prescribed his silence and his signs – but those dangerous ideas can be of equality and of bringing forth the kingdom of God; especially if you’re already sitting with God, at the back, with the outcasts.
The kingdom of God is not an old boys’ club, or an in-crowd. It’s an open-invite dinner party. It’s a communal meal – a communion – where revolution is planned and the dinner table is overturned, breaking the bread and spilling the wine. We’ll partake in our own representation of that holy kingdom meal in a few minutes; a revolutionary meal of bread and wine that speaks of an equal community of outcasts who all consider themselves as inferior to everyone else at the table, because they see Christ in everyone else at the table.
I hope that’s the kind of community you want to be in? I want that too – but only if I get to sit at the back.
Amen
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