Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, RCL
September 1, 2019
North Fork Ministries
Gospel:
Luke 14:1, 7-14
On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.
When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, `Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."
He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Judging from the propensity for church goers on Sunday mornings to leave the pews up front empty and gather on the back rows, it appears that the parable we just heard about the seating arrangement at the wedding banquet is one of the few passages of scripture that Christians seem to truly take to heart. Apparently most of you have chosen to humble yourselves, and by taking a seat toward the rear, you are saying to those less exalted, “Friend, move up higher.”
I don’t attend a lot banquets with assigned seating - those with place cards designating who is to be seated next to whom. That practice seems increasingly to belong to another era, or perhaps I just don’t run in those circles. I have, however, over the course of my lifetime, traveled a bit. And it is, in the world of travel, that I have experienced the more formal assignment of seats – with the choice seats being given, if not to the more distinguished or honored guests, then certainly to the to the people with the most coin in their pockets.
Years ago, as a young man fresh out of college, with few responsibilities, no debt (unlike today’s young graduates), and a taste for adventure, I strapped on a backpack, put out my thumb and hitchhiked my way south from Austin, to San Antonio and then southwest to the Mexican border town of Ojinaga. My plan was to ride the Chihuahua al Pacifico railway, known as the “railway in the sky” - an engineering marvel with tracks laid across high desert, up mountainsides and across steep gorges into the heart of Mexico’s Copper Canyons. Living frugally, I had managed to save a good portion of my carpenter’s wage for about six months, but I intended for my savings to last a good while, so I ate a lot of beans and tortillas, and at the ticket counter in Ojinaga, I selected the lowest price seat among the four available seating options.
I shared the magnificent vista for part of the journey with a seatmate holding her young baby in her arms and with her feet resting on a handmade wire cage containing the two elderly chickens she intended to stew for supper that evening.
The twists and sharp turns required for the train to navigate the mountainous terrain meant that occasionally, seated in a railway car toward the rear of the train, my fellow passengers and I would meet the gleaming stainless steel engine leading the train as it emerged from a tunnel ahead and run, for awhile, almost parallel to our shabby fourth class railway car.
We traveled through coastal shrub, fertile valleys, pine forests, high desert, towering canyon walls, sheer drop-offs, flowing waterfalls, and over bridges and through countless tunnels. With no club car available for fourth class, we were eager to purchase tamales and tacos from the serape-clad ladies who emerged from the forest whenever the train came to a halt. At one such stop, deep in the mountains, a village had formed alongside the tracks, where a string of abandoned boxcars had been repurposed as housing and stores and artisan workshops.
Three young men emerged from one of the boxcars, bid farewell to a tearful family, and climbed aboard the train. One of the young men asked permission to sit beside me on the crowded railway car and then he stowed a suitcase, held together with binders twine, in the compartment above us and took his seat. With wide-eyed anticipation he told me of his plans to take the train from the mountain home he had never before left, to the port city of Topolobampo, where he would take the ferry across the Gulf of California to La Paz. He would then take a bus up the Baja Peninsula and, God willing, cross the border to the great state of California and find a good job in the fields and groves of the promised land. I couldn’t bear to tell him of the hard, lonely and desperate days that likely awaited him, so instead I praised the beauty of his mountain home and shared with him the joy of adventure and the promise of a bright future in America.
Approaching the city of Chihuahua, I marveled at the endless collection of crumbling cinder block huts, side by side with dwellings built of whatever material could be collected from garbage dumps and building sites. People did the best with what they had, but it was clear that most had very little.
Sitting in a park in the center of the city, I struck up a conversation with a couple of students who were as eager to practice their English, as I was my Spanish. Before long I received an invitation to join them for lunch at their home. One of students left to alert her mother of my coming and we walked the few blocks from the square to a neighborhood, a little nicer than the others, dotted with an occasional residence, palatial in contrast to nearby slums, and mostly concealed by high adobe walls topped with shards of broken glass, signaling intruders of the danger of trespassing. My new friend’s house boasted a fountain in the courtyard, gleaming tile floors, and hand carved furnishings - all evidence of wealth unimaginable to the average Mexican.
I had known poverty in Texas and I had some acquaintance with wealth. However, I also knew a world with a large middle class, filled with people like my Dad, who with a blue-collar job could still afford decent housing and health care and to send his kids to college. I discovered that south of the U. S. border, one was either very rich or very poor.
Jesus said, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors… But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed….”
In the forty years that have elapsed since that youthful journey to Mexico it seems that fewer and fewer people in the United States have been invited to a place at the table. Not since the “gilded age”, the days of the robber barons a century ago, has wealth been so unevenly distributed among the people. The banquet has been held increasingly for the rich, while the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, aren’t even receiving an invitation.
This past week we celebrated the 56th anniversary of the March on Washington. The power and thrilling nature of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, makes it easy to forget that a major focus of the march and the subject of the ten speeches that proceeded the one that day were concerned, not just with racial justice, but with economic justice as well. It was a celebration of the action of brave people 50 years ago who “didn’t know their place.” It was a call to action for people who refused any longer to sit at the back of the bus and accept only what fell from America’s banquet table.
The urgings of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Hebrews that we heard this morning, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have”, are words not meant solely for individuals, but for a nation that has moved away from its commitment to equal opportunity. St. Paul, and all the Old Testament prophets, tell us to not neglect to show hospitality to strangers. Paul reminds us that the strangers gathered at our Mexican border may be angels, without our knowing it. Everyone, despite the happenstance of birthplace, deserves a decent job, a living wage, a sound roof over their head, and good heath care. Everyone deserves a seat at the table.
“Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”