God's Extra Chairs--August 22, 2024

God's Extra Chairs--August 22, 2024

One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to him, "Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!" Then Jesus said to him, "Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, 'Come; for everything is ready now.' But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, 'I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my apologies.' Another said, 'I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my apologies.' Another said, 'I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.' So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, 'Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.' And the slave said, 'Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.' Then the master said to the slave, 'Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner'." [Luke 14:15-24]

It always seems to go this way: just when you think you're gonna score some easy points with Jesus (a slow pitch right over the plate), he turns out to hurl a wicked curve ball you weren't expecting, and your head is left spinning.  This is an important reminder: Jesus always reserves the right to up-end our expectations, especially when we want to put ourselves in charge of limiting the guest list at God's table.

Here's a case in point.  Jesus is already sitting at someone's dinner party, continuing on from the passage we looked at yesterday about inviting the "nobodies" and the "anybodies" to our tables rather than the Big Deals and the So-and-Sos.  That probably had broken the rules of etiquette, since Jesus (a guest) basically shamed his host and all the other Respectable People seated at the party.  So some well-intentioned guest seated around the table decides to offer a change of subject, something easy for everyone to nod their heads in agreement to, and something that sounds vaguely pious without a hint of controversy.  "Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!" this guest blurts out, and you can picture him nervously raising his glass, looking around the table to see if his proposed toast has smoothed things over with any egos Jesus has bruised.  The gist of his sentiment is something like, "Boy, won't the people who get to dine in God's great banquet be lucky!  Who wouldn't want to be them?  Must be a pretty exclusive group of the holy, the refined, and the well-respected, you know?"  Who can imagine anybody disagreeing with that notion, right?

Well, Jesus is always something of an outlier.  And so instead of just vacuously nodding along at this guest's suggestion of God holding an exclusive dinner party for the well-heeled and well-connected (which all the other guests at the table with Jesus would like to picture themselves as being!), Jesus throws a spiritual hand grenade into the conversation.  He responds with an upside-down sort of a story (aren't they all, when it's Jesus who's telling them?) about a banquet whose original guests decide not to bother coming, and whose host decides still to carry on with the festivities anyway.  Even though the excuses from the first guests range from pathetic to awful (test-driving new oxen?  Come on!), the party is unpoopable, and the host determines to welcome in all the people the first guest list would have deemed unacceptable and unworthy.  "Go and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame," the host tells his wait-staff.  In other words, these are the ones who can't possibly repay the host with a party of their own, and cannot ever return the favor. These are the ones who don't have status, don't have wealth, don't have name-recognition, and don't have prestige--and yet, there is a place set for them all, and welcome extended far and wide.  In fact, when it turns out that all of the folks from the margins of society have already been welcomed in, the host now gets his caterers to grab people off the street and lead them into his party: "Compel the people to come in!"  The party will go on, and the house will be full, no matter what!

Jesus, of course, is not giving a lesson in party planning, but describing the economy of God.  When we start picturing God's big party as an exclusive soiree for "our kind of people" [nudge nudge, you know, OUR kind of people...], Jesus says that God insists on welcoming all the ones we have deemed unworthy and unimportant to the party.  To the guest beside Jesus at the party who blurts out with self-congratulation in his voice, "Blessed is the one who eats in the kingdom of God!" Jesus offers a different sort of picture--not a gathering of the Respectable and the Religious, but of the ones disregarded and disinherited by everybody else.

That had to have been something of a wake-up call for everybody seated at the fancy dinner with Jesus.  They all saw themselves, comfortably, as the ones who had earned  a right to be seated beside the respected rabbi from Nazareth.  They saw themselves as worthy of being there, and they didn't like the idea that other people might be welcomed to the table beside them, much less the ones without status, significance, or sophistication. It was an outrage to suggest that they might have to make room for people who hadn't "earned" their spots, or <gasp!> to hear Jesus suggest that maybe none of them, even the Respectable Religious people and the Big Deals, had "earned" their places at all, but were all welcomed to the table by grace.

It's funny how often we act like this, we humans.  We like to imagine that we personally deserve OUR place at the table because of our own innate excellence or status markers, but the moment someone suggests that other people (different from us, or without our credentials) also can have a seat there, we start complaining about how "entitled" THEY are, or how "unfair" it is to let more people have access to the things that were first given to us by grace, apart from our achieving them. Yet Jesus says God is the One adding extra chairs.

I know how easy it is to focus only on Me-and-My-Group getting the good things in life.  I know it's tempting to say, "I have to look out for the interests of MY children, MY stock portfolio, MY industry, or MY collection of like-minded folks," and then to use that to justify all sorts of selfish choices.  But Jesus reminds us that my children's well-being is caught up with the well-being of my neighbor's children--and that's not just the people literally next door to me, but the folks who have been pushed off to the margins and on the streets that I didn't want to recognize were there.  To hear Jesus tell it, that's just where God finds more guests for the party, anyway--the roads and the streets and margins.  They are welcomed by the host, too, and they are not turned away. Jesus tells me that I can't live my life under the illusion that I "deserve" my place at his table while I scoff and sneer when other people are gathered to the feast, because we are all invited only by the grace of the Host, not our earning a spot there.  If I care about me-and-my-group being able to eat at God's banquet, then I need to allow God to bring other people to the table, too, because it is God's table and God's prerogative to invite whomever God chooses to set a place for there.

I'll bet the folks who heard Jesus first tell this story were more than a little scandalized when he was finished.  And I bet they were more than a little humbled.  If you and I aren't at least a little bit uncomfortable after listening to this story, I doubt we've been paying attention.  But there is the possibility, once we've heard it, that we can be led out of bitterness and resentment to joy and gratitude for the way Jesus expands the table.  When we realize that we don't have an exclusive claim to a place at God's banquet, but that we've been invited by grace, then we can rejoice that God cares about other people, too, and that God will include the people we've overlooked.  And maybe we'll move beyond our narrow and short-sighted concern only for "Me-and-My-Group-First" to see that our well-being is inseparable from the well-being of ALL of our neighbors... across the street, across the country, and across the world.  

That will make for a mighty full banquet hall, I know.  But don't worry--God's got extra chairs.

Lord God, help us to see our place as recipients of your grace, so that we can welcome others to whom you extend your invitation, too.