Luke 7:36—8:3
July 7, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard a NPR interview about a new documentary film, A Place at the Table. Living in a country of expanding waistlines and increasing obesity, many of us don’t think that the U.S. as a land of the underfed. According to the US Department of Agriculture, 50 million Americans fall into the category of “food insecure” meaning that they don’t always have the resources to buy the food they need. This includes 17 million children lacking the necessary food nutrients during the years when their brains need the best food to develop.
The government provides farm subsidies to grow wheat and corn that end up producing mostly processed food dense in calories but poor in nutrients. When food arrives for the poor, it’s filled with empty calories contributing to the expanding waistlines in America. For us living in the Bay Area where there’s a higher interest in fresh and healthier food, we don’t always see such realities. But let me tell you that when you go to Kansas City, it’s hard to find a Fresh Choice or a Red Tomato!
Dinner Parties
In today’s lesson, Jesus is the guest of a Pharisee named Peter. Jesus took his place at the table and it seems like Jesus goes from one dinner party to the next where some of his most significant sayings occur at the dinner table.
At the Pharisee’s home, a penitent woman in the city barges in, makes a great fuss over Jesus, seeks his forgiveness, and is forgiven. In the process the tables are turned on the host. The Pharisee thinks that he is a righteous person without the need of much forgiveness; but the woman knows she is a sinner in great need of forgiveness.
The Pharisee considers Jesus’ actions toward the woman to be most un-messiah like. He sneers, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.” After all, who is a prophet but someone who can see and name real sin and call it for what it truly is—an offense against God.
Jesus responds by making a comparison between the behavior of the woman and the behavior of the Pharisee, which must have been a stinging rebuke to the Pharisee. By telling the parable of two debtors whose unequal debts were cancelled, Jesus is suggesting that both Peter the Pharisee and the woman are sinners.
Jesus has come to forgive sins, the sins of the penitent sinners and the sins of the self-righteous saints who presume to be without sin. Jesus is good news to the hungry, the hungry who know emptiness and reach out for grace, the hungry who are not able to admit to their hunger and act as if they are filled. By the time Jesus finished with them, everyone at the table is revealed to have various kinds of needs.
One of the most famous meals in Luke is the grand party that was thrown to welcome home a wayward and sinful son in Luke 15. A great shift in the story of the prodigal son comes when he turns his steps back toward home. He makes that move from life out in the far country in horrible hunger and poverty back toward home and into his father’s embrace.
How and why did he make that turn back toward the father? He made it out of hunger. He appears to have had no particular religious motivation, no sort of insightful thought processes. He was hungry. There was a famine. He had run through all of his money. He was reduced to living off the slop that the pigs fed on. And in great hunger, he “came to himself.” He realized that there was food, and it was at home. His hunger propelled him back toward the father.
With so many people who are food insecure in America and not receiving the necessary nutrients to grow up with healthy lives, I wonder how we can advocate for the hungry by causing a great shift in government and the way we put good food on our dining room tables.
Empty Life
Today Jesus’ good news is good news for the hungry. But when Jesus speaks of “hunger,” he often speaks metaphorically, as if “hunger” meant more than simply an empty stomach, as if “hungry” is a good simile for an empty life.
Sometimes hunger reminds us of what really matters. There was a man who was so wrapped up in his work that he traveled far from home most of the week, always on the road working and making money. Then his little daughter was struck down by a terrible illness. For one dark night she hovered between life and death as he frantically drove home in fear that she wouldn’t make it through the morning. By the time he got to the hospital, her fever had broken and she was on the way to recovery. There, at the hospital, weak and worry, overwhelmed with gratitude, he promised God that he would find another line of work. His great sense of need got him back in touch with what was really important in life.
Rather than hungering for more money, this father is now hungry to be with his daughter.
To be honest, some of the worst things we do we do out of hunger. Hunger is such a powerful motivation that we act crazy when we are very hungry. When the Hebrew children were freed from slavery in Egypt and out on their own in the wilderness, they ran out of food. They became hungry. They dared to question why God would bring them out of slavery and into a freedom that was demanding of their faithfulness and trust in God. “Maybe we had it better in slavery,” they brashly said to God who had delivered them from servitude. “At least when we were slaves, we had three square meals a day,” they said. It was a crazy thing to say, but sometimes we are crazy when we are hungry.
And some of the best things we do, we do out of hunger. Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the hungry.” So why are we blessed when we are hungry. When we are hungry, things come into better perspective. Our life focuses. All the things that we thought we needed, we no longer need. What we need is food. Nourishment. Our very lives are at stake and we are willing to risk and do anything for food.
In the play, Les Miserables, Jean Valjean breaks a shop window and steals a loaf of bread in order to feed his family. He is not a criminal by nature, but his family is hungry. He will risk anything for them. He spent the rest of his life paying for that criminal act, but he never felt sorry that he had done it or apologized for his crime, because it was a crime committed in hunger and done for the hungry.
What Are You Hungry for?
What are you hungry for? While there is so much talk in the Bible about food, banquets, parties, bread, famine, and deprivation and the reality that we live in a country where we have never experienced or even observed such famine, we may never have felt hunger. We may still be nutrient poor with all the high calorie processed food that we have, but we rarely if ever have experienced real physical hunger.
We think of God as some being who makes us a little less miserable, who helps make our lives a little better, whom we thank before we eat our meals but today we are reading about the testimony of people for whom God was their last hope, the only thing between them and death, the only thing between them and the horror of spiritual starvation.
So maybe this is the reason why you are here today. We live in a country of such abundance of food but deep down you know you are not filled, not fulfilled, not really that happy. You are looking for something that satisfies, something beyond the fleeting sustenance that the world provides.
Well, I believe you have come to the right place. After my message, I will give the invitation for you to come to the Lord’s Table and to participate in Holy Communion. I don’t expect a stampede and we would be genuinely upset if there were one. I expect us to sit quietly in our pews as we have always done. And as the Deacons pass the bread and the trays of cups to you that you would orderly receive the elements and wait until I ask you to eat and drink.
But how I wish there was a stampede to this table! Maybe we are missing something because we are not really, deeply hungry. In the tradition of some churches, the people would fast from Saturday night supper until they had the Lord’s Supper in their church on Sunday morning. They found it spiritually helpful to approach the table with at least a hint of hunger. But maybe we enjoy Joe’s Kitchen breakfasts so much that we are so filled up with waffles and tater tots that we are not hungry enough for the Lord’s Table.
Jesus, the Beggar
According to Luke’s Gospel, Jesus seems to be at a progressive dinner all the time. He was going from one dinner party to another. We wonder what Jesus did for a living—he was like a celebrity guest at people’s dinner parties.
But another picture of Jesus at these parties is that he was more of a beggar than a celebrity dinner guest. Jesus begged for sustenance. He was totally dependent upon the hospitality of others. Here is a savior who is also a beggar. The consumption of food is a sign of Jesus’ dependency upon the kindness of others as well as his vulnerability as truly the Son of God who became fully like us modeling a new way of living in this world for us.
We hunger for bread, but we also hunger for love, for community. The word, “companion” means simply “one with whom we break bread.” Jesus is our companion who broke bread with us because we truly hunger for love and companionship with God.
Do you have hunger for Jesus? My prayer for you is that something in this service might reach you in your need, might minister to your deepest longings, might satisfy your greatest hunger.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is the guest of a man who is a very righteous, very religious person. A controversy breaks out at the table when a woman who is a notorious “sinner” appears and lets down her hair, washing Jesus’ feet. The host is aghast. Is this any way to act at the table, after the blessing, with this sinner defiling Jesus in this way?
Jesus commends the woman’s grateful, penitent posture, criticizing the aloof self-righteousness of the Pharisee. Both the righteous-sounding Pharisee and the penitent woman are sinners. They are both empty, but in different ways. Both need God who loves and forgives sinners. The woman who knows she needs a forgiving God, and the Pharisee who in his presumed righteousness doesn’t know he needs a forgiving God, but both need Jesus to satisfy their different hungers.
And the good news for us today is that Jesus does. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
So I invite you now to come to the Lord’s Table, in your known and unknown, acknowledged and unacknowledged hunger, come.
Let us pray.
God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food. Let us praise God for satisfying our hungers, for filling our needs, for coming to us in our emptiness and providing for us.
Let us thank God for loving us even when we cannot admit to our deep hunger, even when we presume that we are without need, even when we act as if we were self-sufficient and okay as we are.
God of the hungry and of the fulfilled, God of the sinner and the saint, God of the pompous righteous and of the penitent sinner, thank you for loving us as we are and giving us what we need even when we know not our real need. Amen.