August 31, 2025
Pentecost 12/Proper 17, Year C
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church
Essex, CT
Jeremiah 2:4-13; Psalm 81, 10-16; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14
A few weeks ago, a stranger showed up at my former parish in Charlottesville, Virginia. This was not unusual. St. Paul’s Memorial Church is located across the street from the University of Virginia and occupies an area known as The Corner where students congregate and the city’s unhoused population often spends time panhandling or sitting in the sun on benches. On this day, the guest was welcomed into the parish hall to help himself to coffee and something to eat, but he became agitated when he asked for soup and was told there wasn’t any. Suddenly, he assaulted the rector, my friend, and a couple of others before being subdued until authorities arrived.
We all know the horrific story of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where, back in 2015, a young man was welcomed to bible study at this historic Black congregation and ended up slaughtering ten people including the pastor.
This past Wednesday, someone armed with multiple guns fired into a chapel service at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, a place where children were learning about welcome and getting along with each other as a new school year began. The families of two of those children are planning their funerals today, and many others are hoping for full recoveries for their own kids, although healing from the trauma will be quite another thing.
Apparently, hospitality can be a dangerous thing.
Maybe this kind of violence is an outlier, but hospitality does involve vulnerability. People show up carrying all kinds of wounds and baggage that may be invisible to an outsider. Sometimes, people show up because they want to be insiders, long to be included, to have a place at the table in the room where it happens.
You have probably noticed that Jesus spends a lot of time sharing a meal with folks, whether it’s 5,000 people on a hillside or the Twelve on the night before his arrest, or with a Pharisee, as we just heard. This is not the only time Jesus dines at the house of a Pharisee, and if you recall what I said last week about how religious leaders debated texts and interpretations all the time, they could still sit down together to share a meal. Imagine that.
What happens at these meals is often a teaching opportunity for Jesus. Luke, the author of this gospel, was an educated Greek-speaker, and he undoubtedly was familiar with the philosophical tradition of teaching around a table groaning with food, as with Plato who frequently taught in this way. So did Plutarch, a philosopher more contemporaneous with the writing down of the gospels. Even Martin Luther was widely known for his Table Talk. Come to think of it, how many of you have had a brown-bag working lunch to learn something related to your job or volunteer work?
And so it is with Jesus.
In this instance, Jesus is in the home of a very important person. He was not that VIP, mind you. The Pharisee was, and the other very important people who had been invited were jostling for a position near the head of the table. They may have been curiosity seekers because in a significant few sentences left out of our reading today, this Jesus has healed on the sabbath again, even though our text clearly says they – the Pharisees – were watching him closely (14:1), and I imagine there were onlookers wondering just what kind of debate was going to happen over supper.
Now, I don’t believe that Jesus really cares about seating arrangements at dinner. He is not trying to establish a Reign of Appropriate Banquet Etiquette. He is continuing the theme found throughout Luke’s gospel of upending the expected way that things are. Casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly (Luke 1:52) is the lens through which this should be read. Jesus’s attention to those being crushed by the weight of hunger and exclusion is how he moves them to the honored place at the table. Inviting them to dine rather than those who can issue a reciprocal invitation is the model for the Reign of God he brings.
But these are not the people here at the table of the Pharisee. Jesus knows good and well that everyone in this setting is privileged, and for one of them to be sent to the foot of the table would be the ultimate in shame. He knows how this system works, but I’m not sure they realize that he’s not talking about them. They’re so vain, they probably think this parable is about them, or something like that.
No, this is the in crowd already, and Jesus is admonishing them that their seats are not secure. Their position is endangered by what Jesus says and does, and they do not like it one little bit.
The first part of this parable Jesus tells the Pharisee and his guests is about humility. He has no time for false humility. He has no time for the humble brag. He’s telling them about a humility that not only doesn’t worry about how humble one is but is about not thinking about oneself much at all. This is the embodiment of the self-emptying life Jesus came to show us.
Interestingly, this is also the kind of humility and hospitality that I have experienced among those who have the least. The families in Palestine or in Appalachia or along the US-Mexico border. Most of us have too much to protect – our social standing, our privilege, our reputation. What Jesus is telling those dinner party guests and their host is to let it go. Open the doors. Take the worst seat in the house. Take a risk. Let yourself be transformed. Let yourself experience the reign of God.
In a couple of weeks, Hoboken, New Jersey, will hold the 20th Annual Spaghetti Dinner along Sinatra Drive on the Hudson River waterfront. It’s both a nod to the Italian heritage of the city and a way of showing what a longer table can look like with its red and white checked tablecloths and heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs. Neighbors and civic leaders spread out along these tables that span a couple of city blocks, and I tell you it looks (and smells) like the heavenly banquet.
Here at St. John’s, we fling our doors wide every Tuesday as our soup kitchen volunteers cook and serve a fabulous meal. Everyone is welcome whether you are poor or not. If you are hungry, we will feed you. It looks to me like maybe we have heard, and understood, the assignment. If all we do at St. John’s is to demonstrate such hospitality and welcome, I’d say we are doing our part to make real the reign of God right here.
Show hospitality to strangers as it says in Hebrews. You might just be entertaining angels.
But as we know, not all guests are angelic, because when we open our doors and tables to those who come to us for food or help or welcome, not only will they not be able to repay us, they may cause us harm. Even so, I don’t think the rector of my former church or Pastor Clementa Pinckney of Mother Emanuel would have done anything differently. I imagine the children and educators inside the chapel at Annunciation Catholic School would have welcomed the person who lurked outside on Wednesday morning, a place she reportedly once attended school and a church where her mother had worked until a few years ago.
Hospitality and welcome are demanded of us. It may be uncomfortable, it may be dangerous, it may be risky, but it is how we take part in making real God’s reign right here. For most of us, the worst we will experience is probably discomfort or feeling a bit unsettled. I hope we can all sit with that, because it is the only way the divisions between people will end.
Author and public theologian Brian McLaren wrote a book reflecting on building relationships with his Muslim neighbors following the September 11 attacks. In part, this is what he said:
Imagine what might happen around the world if more and more Christians rediscover that central to Christian life and mission is what we could call subversive or transgressive friendship – friendship that crosses boundaries of otherness and dares to offer and receive hospitality…Imagine the good that could happen – and the evil that could be prevented from happening – if more Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, and others (to which I would add Democrats and Republicans, gay and straight, immigrant and native born, boomer and GenZ – if more of us) cross the roads and other barriers that have separated us and discover one another as friends.
Notes:
https://www.charlottesville.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=2254
Brian D. McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (Jericho Books, 2012), 228.