Luke 14:1,7-14
August 29, 2010
It’s a dinner party. People are arriving, they are probably greeting each other with small talk, and some have started to make their way over to the table to sit down. As they do, they look for the seat that best matches their position or status within the family of faith that has gathered. When Jewish people of antiquity came together for meals, the closer you were to the head of the table – to the host – the more important you were within that social system. I suspect sometimes it was absolutely clear where a person was to sit, but probably other times they were sort of guessing. I’ve experienced enough social awkwardness in my lifetime that I can imagine the anxiety some people must have felt as they turned all the intricacies and nuances of the unwritten rules over and over in their heads to make sure they chose neither too low nor to high of a position.
Of course all of this was automatic for them. Anxiety-provoking as it may have been, it was their culture. They didn’t question whether or not they should engage in the seating ritual. Culture is the beliefs and values we share which make up the bases of society. We don’t think about it, even when it causes us stress or hurt. It just is what it is, and it usually takes a jolt to get us to examine these things we take completely for granted.
I think this passage is about Jesus giving folks a little jolt. He’s is watching this whole dinner party scene unfold. When we first read this passage, it might seem like the parable Jesus tells us is a bunch of strategic advice for playing the seating game better - as if he’s saying to each person who walks in, “Now listen, I’ve been watching this all and I think I’ve got it figured out. Don’t choose too highly…being demoted is worse than sitting too far from the host. Plus, if you are promoted, that looks really good, so choose as low as you can possibly stomach.”
It seems like he accepts the system and its rules, he’s just teaching people to be better at it. But that’s not how parables worked for Jesus. We know Jesus was the quintessential critic of his culture. He often stood on the outside and told parables that challenged the status quo. I don’t think when you read this as a parable he was offering advice – I think he was being funny; satirical to be more precise.
Now, I need to be honest: I admit, here and now, that I like John Stewart; I like the Daily Show because I like satire. Satire exposes the folly and absurdity of things. But the best part about satire, when done well, is it’s funny. It allows us the chance to laugh at ourselves, and I think laughing at ourselves is one of the best ways to loosen us up from the grip of culture.. Stewart plays clips – largely from the news – that show us ourselves. And when we see them we laugh because we see how foolish our beliefs can be, how crazy our systems can operate. He reveals how silly we often look in our serious attempts to maintain our culture, our beliefs and our assumptions.
Jesus, the John Stewart of antiquity, is holding up a mirror for folks. In the parable, he is verbalizing the anxious conversations people are having in their heads. He’s showing them what it looks like when you play the game out loud. Because once these beliefs, behaviors and assumptions are out there – explicit – they can’t help but stand in comparison with what the people say they believe; and the contradiction is obvious. These are Jewish people who profess the Torah as their guide. But, culture had taken over, set in so much, that they couldn’t even see the conflict between their actions and the scriptures they genuinely thought they were following, until Jesus laid it all out there. And I like to think that pointing out how silly the two things look next to each other may have given a chance for them to laugh at themselves.
When I was in Jr. High, the girls had this “thing” called “Big Sis/Little Sis”. Now for those of you who are familiar with the wonderful Big Brother, Big Sister program, let me assure you, this was not that. Big Sis/Little Sis was an informal social system – and it had its own culture. The way it worked was girls in the older grades would ask the younger girls to be their “little sis”. Once the relationship was established it pretty much consisted of passing notes to each other. And if I remember correctly, the notes were mostly about boys and how sweet the other person was.
“Dear Carrie, I’m so glad you are my little sis; you’re so sweet. And you should totally go for Chad. I think he likes you and you guys would be so cute together…and he’s so sweet.”
As you can imagine, there were many, many unwritten rules that maintained this not-so-sweet social network. First and foremost, you only asked someone to be your little sis if they were of the same popularity level in their grade as you in yours. Obviously, there were no official designations of these levels, but you kind of knew who fit where. There was a chance of an older girl of a higher popularity level might ask you to be her little sis, and you would gloriously move up the ladder a rung or two, but this was fairly rare.
There was no keeper of this game – no official enforcer of the unwritten rules. But everyone knew them, and everyone followed them, and I can tell you that in general it was really stressful trying to make sure you were judging the popularity level of yourself and others correctly. Of course, this whole popularity culture was silly; it was also, and anyone who ever went to Jr. High knows, enormously hurtful.
But the fact is these girls were nice for the most part. They enjoyed having their little or big sis, they really liked making their sis feel good about herself. The folly that lay behind it went unnoticed, unexamined for the most part, so they didn’t really see it. They weren’t, most of the time, malicious. It usually took someone getting hurt or seeing someone in pain because they were left out to give the system a little “jolt”. Then there was a chance to see what their cultural assumptions were doing to other people. Unfortunately, this jolt contained no humor whatsoever and things usually resumed as before.
And, of course, it’s not just Jr. High. Think about the culture of lawn keeping in this country. We’ve adopted a whole world of unwritten rules and standards about what lawns should look like, and then we stress out about keeping our lawns up to those standards. We have created our own aesthetic, and now that aesthetic is so deeply ingrained, we don’t examine what costs there might be when we furiously try to live up to that fabricated aesthetic. We mow, we spray, we displace natural plants and grasses, even though none of that is great for the environment.
And, our adherence to lawn culture sets up class differences we are largely unaware of. Cultural norms – when they are the dominant ones – are often inherently exclusionary. They assume people have a certain amount of resources. Lawns that look bad can make us see the people inside the houses as bad – as not keeping up the neighborhood, not caring about their house, etc., even though they may not have the time or money to keep a lawn up to these completely random standards.
I can just see Jesus coming and standing on my porch while I mow and making suggestions for how I can make my lawn look better, giving more and more suggestions down to tending each blade of grass separately, until I have my John Stewart moment. I realize how silly it all is.
Of course, not everyone likes satire, especially when it is at their expense, and especially if it makes them feel at all exposed, humiliated or vulnerable. Satire also implies a need for change. If something is silly, the implication is things need to change. And change is hard. Changing culturally embedded things is really hard. Fact is, I’m still going to mow my lawn . No one at the time thought the culture at dinner gatherings was odd, and in fact they took very seriously. When people ate in the wrong place, there was no telling what might happen (think lunch counters and the civil rights movement). Most of them probably didn’t take the satire well. In fact, in general we know the Pharisees responded to Jesus’ parables antagonistically – whether they were funny or not.
But, can we take a joke? Can we can choose differently from the Pharisees; to laugh at ourselves, and then turn that laughing into wisdom and courage to change things that seriously need to be changed. It’s certainly hard. These things are ingrained, and upsetting them will upset many. And of course it’s harder to take a joke when you are really serious about something. And, as we see at the end of the parable, Jesus holds up the mirror to show them their foolishness in order to make a very serious point. The laughter is just a way-station meant to loosen us up so we can make the serious changes we need to make.
Maybe a current issue closer than the lawns to the table manners of Jesus’ day is the incessant debate over where things can and can’t be located relative to ground zero. The issue seems to be laying down rules for who gets to be closest to this very important site and who is relegated to the absolute lowest end of the table. The thinking around the Islamic Center is folly:
Christians can be close, Jews maybe a few blocks away, movie theaters seem fine anywhere, but Muslims should know their place at the table. It’s crazy.
How did this become an “us” against “them”? Who got to decide who are the “americans” – the “us” – and who are the outsiders threatening Americans – the “them”, when we’re all, by the way, Americans. We quibble over whether it’s called a mosque or Islamic center, as if one would be worse than the other. It’s all folly at its height. We should step back, laugh at ourselves – at how much we look like the people Jesus was poking fun at – and try again. And when we do, the message is clear – the ones we thought belonged in the Netherreaches should be invited to have the highest place of honor.
In the end, Jesus turns these Jewish people back to their own roots – their own scriptures. He reminds them of the centrality of hospitality in their sacred texts – especially hospitality to the “other” and the “least”. He reminds them that eating together – at God’s banquet – should always be an act of reconciliation and invitation…never an occasion to make divisions or to exclude.
So I want to turn to a Muslim man that beautifully points us back to our scriptures. In commenting on the Christian scriptures from a Muslim point of view, Rashied Omar argues that the biblical teachings of hospitality – which are in the Koran, Hebrew bible, and New Testament – are a great place to start in healing our world. Omar, like Jesus, used the meal…the table…to turn people from hurtful cultural norms to the world of God’s banquet table. He writes:
“the sharing of meals, which is at the heart of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, is seen as the way in which God speaks to people through and beyond any barriers that they set up. Can we Jews, Christians, and Muslims work together,” he asks, “to recover this aspect of our traditions for the feeding and healing of the world?”
I think we can. Let’s step back, laugh at our folly, and then reach out to invite those we have been excluding for a long time. Amen.
