Luke 14:1, 7-14
August 29, 2010
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco’s Annual Church Picnic
Every time we pray, we ask Jesus to be present. When we have the Lord’s Supper, we pray that Jesus be present in the bread and the cup. In Sunnyvale, in this gazebo, we pray that Jesus is present. But do we really want Jesus to come to our church picnic?
I ask this because of today’s gospel. Let’s face it—Jesus was not always the most pleasant dinner guest. Here Jesus has been invited to the “house of a Pharisee.” That’s a rather gracious thing to do, considering that the Pharisees have attacked Jesus consistently. Maybe this Pharisee has invited Jesus to his house hoping for some reconciliation.
“If I can just get Jesus to sit down at the dinner table, in the warmth of my house, maybe we can work things out.”
Forget this. No sooner is Jesus at the Pharisee’s table than he starts an argument. The first thing that Jesus does is to insult his fellow guests at the table. He sees that they are all jockeying for the best places at the table.
It’s like when we attend a wedding and arrive at the assigned table area. We give our name and we are told that we are sitting at table 50! We say to ourselves, “Wow! That’s so far back! I thought I knew the couple better than this!”
Today we have Evite. No longer do we need to be discreet about attending an event anymore because we can see all the names of who’s been invited. And sometimes, (not me!), we like to see who’s have said “Yes” to the event before we might say, “yes” too. We like to jockey our attendance to come only if our friends are coming.
Jesus mocks the fellow guests at the table by saying, “those who build themselves up will be pushed down and those who are pushed down will be pulled up.”
Exalting and Humbling
In our world, we expect that everyone is self-sufficient. Frank Sinatra said that when he is down and the world is challenging, he still “did it my way.” Or when we play video games and we think that we are invincible or some superhero who has no need for anyone else. We like to think that we are self-sufficient.
In our world when someone rises up, we say that they have “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.” This means someone with ambition and drive has pushed themselves up from a low place to a high place by their own effort. It’s like being assigned to table 50 and you take a seat at table 2.
On the other hand when someone descends, falls from a high perch to a low one, we sometimes say, “well he has no one to blame but himself for this situation he has put himself in.” We blame those who are in low places for their lack of ambition and credit those on high places with a lot of ambition.
But Jesus is telling us that the “humbling and the exalting” will be done by God. It is God who lifts up the lowly and who pushes down the high and mighty. In other words, Jesus is not telling people how they should behave when they come to a wedding or a party but rather he is telling them about how God behaves. There is something about God that exalts the lowly and humbles the mighty.
If Jesus were to come to our church picnic, how might we behave? What might be our table manners? When God wants to exalt the lowly and humble the mighty, I will let all of you go to the food line before me. Pastors need some humbling too. We’ll make sure that the children and the seniors get their food first. We would want to make sure we don’t run over and push over those who are more vulnerable than us like our children and seniors. We don’t want to take more food than we can eat to ensure that others will have enough too.
Being Hosts
When my mother was deciding on the guests to our wedding banquet some 38 years ago, she pulled out this little notebook that she had. In this notebook, she listed all of the wedding banquets that she was invited to and attended. She then proceeded to invite everyone on her list to our wedding banquet. There were many people whom Joy and I didn’t know. When I complained, she said, “Inasmuch as I have attended my friends wedding banquets, I need to invite them to yours.” At that point, we knew that this banquet was not as much celebrating our marriage as it is my mother’s need to reciprocate or to pay back her friends!
The second point about this lesson is that when we are serving as hosts, we shouldn’t invite people to eat with their ability to return the favor or pay us back at a later date. Jesus is saying that when we make up our guest lists filled with our friends or brothers and sisters or relatives or rich neighbors whom you are pretty confident that they will have the means to reciprocate your hospitality, you are not acting as good hosts.
Jesus tells us to break away from this reciprocity cycle. Jesus proposes inviting the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, that is people who can never repay your invitation.
All of us paid either $5 or $3 or if we are young enough, it’s free to eat today. For the most part, we can afford to eat our barbecue lunch today. But Jesus tells us that we can be hosts to people who may not have the money to buy a lunch ticket or have the means to pay us back by hosting us at a later date. If Jesus were here at our picnic, he would ask us to do this.
When we return to San Francisco, we know of people like “Bobby” who comes and sits in the back of the sanctuary to catch a nap and to feel safe from the world. He comes to take a sponge bath in our restroom. He comes for a hot breakfast. Bobby probably will not be able to reciprocate our hospitality, but this is what Jesus is asking us to do.
Great Picnic
Our picnic is one of the few times in the year that we are all together. I have said this before that when we are together, we are a better church—we resemble a closer reflection of the Body of Christ. In God’s great banquet that we read following our passage today, the Kingdom of God is that those who have nothing will be given everything and those who were on the outside because of their earthly conditions are now inside at God’s great banquet.
No one here today, even me know everyone’s names. When Jesus comes to our church picnic, he wants us to get to know other people. Jesus wants us to remove the label of who’s inside and who’s outside. While it’s natural for us to spread down our picnic blanket in our familiar spots with our family and friends, how about making a point to get up and meet people who you haven’t met before? Since we are all “outside” today, we are all together to become a better church.
In Hebrews 13:1-2, we read, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
One of the practices that we do when we visit people in their homes is to bring a bag of oranges. I always bring 8 for good luck. My mother taught me to do this. And it’s a wonderful practice we do at our church.
What I like about our Chinese tradition of always bringing something is that we reverse the roles of host and guest. While we are guests in someone’s home, the host would slice up the oranges that we brought for us to all eat. By bringing oranges, we become as much the host as the guest. We are both host and guest.
As Christians, we’re always strangers and sojourners in a foreign land. We don’t follow what this world likes to teach us like success is solely the responsibility of self-sufficiency. We don’t invite only those who would have the ability to reciprocate back to us. In Christ, we are called to offer hospitality to all who are in need and from the world’s perspective; we remain strangers and sojourners until the great picnic of the kingdom of God comes.
We like to think that we are hosts but in God’s kingdom, we are guests to his grace and mercy. When we come to God with offerings like bringing oranges, God invites us to also become hosts to all those who are in need—the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the world. God is making us guests in his kingdom so that we may be good hosts for the world. Let’s have Jesus come to our picnic today.
Let us pray.