C Proper 17 22 Ord BFC 2019
Luke 14:1, 7-14
September 1, 2019
Maybe your grade school playground had a bully like mine did. Maybe it wasn't even a bully so much as a few eighth-graders who enjoyed their physical superiority by interrupting any form of play or fun that up and coming fourth-graders could muster. Even to this day, I remember the rage I felt because the football or kickball or basketball we had checked out from the gym had been taken by an eighth-grader for the upteenth time. What right, I remember thinking, did those eighth-graders have to do this? What right to take away what was checked out by a fourth-grader?
It was the time to turn the tables.
It was the day I erupted. We had been the victims for far too long. I had had enough. Injustice had persisted for far too long on the Metamora Community Consolidated Grade School playground. It was time for fourth-grader wrath. Steve Scrhamm, tall and lanky eighth-grader that he was, had taken our football again. He stood there, smug, tossing the football from hand to hand, smiling at the lot of us. In a full display of “can't take it any more” stupidity, I decided to act. With no teacher or administrator to be found to correct these injustices, it was time for the masses to rise. “Sic semper tyrannis est.” Crying and screaming all at the same time, I launched myself at Steve Schramm's left leg and pulled and tugged and beat as hard as I could.
I must have bewildered him so completely, or my attack was the equivalent of a single gnat on the leg of a huge beast, such that Steve stood there and took the punishment from my tiny, little fists—whapping and whapping against his left leg. That is, until I bit him, and he promptly kicked me to the side. But I remember what I was thinking as I whapped and hung on for dear life. I remember thinking over and over again, “Wait till I'm in eighth-grade. Wait till I'm in eighth-grade, and then we'll see who runs the playground and how it is run.”
These were not the early signs of ordained Christian ministry in the cards. Au contraire! I even hate to complete the thought of “Wait till I'm in eighth-grade.” For what I was thinking, was not some benevolent change in the system and structure in the playground. I was looking forward to my turn, when I was at the head of the table. “Wait till I'm in eighth-grade, I'm the king of the hill, I get to be the big cheese, I get to snatch any basketball or kickball or football I want. I'll be in power, and I'll get to interrupt play time, tease and make fun, and steal all those footballs from fourth-graders.”
Now that may not be the most Christian sentiment, but I do believe it is a very human one that survives with us long into adulthood. When we are on the outside looking in, part of the crowd that is not in power, instead of imagining a day when we will create a different kind of playground, it seems to be human nature for us to dream of the day when we will get to do exactly what has been done to us. And we have been fed a line, that we are the victims, the dispossessed.
It is almost like a revenge fantasy, where we have the expectations that those dispossessed will rise up and do to others what has been done to them. This is a violent game we play day after day, deciding who is victim so that we might justify our violence to gain our rightful place at the table.
The author of Luke has the habit of grouping healings with teaching. The sickness or the condition coming before Jesus embodies the presenting problem in the wider world. In the ancient world, the physical condition of “dropsy,” a swelling of the soft tissue due to excess water, represented the spiritual problem of avarice or greed. It was said that the person suffering from “dropsy” had a need to drink more and more water without ever being sated. Dropsy was like a greedy person could never accumulate enough wealth or possessions. The Roman philosopher Cicero said: “Diogenes used to liken greedy men to those suffering from dropsy.”
The healing of the spiritual condition, a form of affluenza, is then what Jesus addresses in his teaching. Eating together is an intimate and communal act. In the ancient world, eating defined social position and status. Dining at the home of a Pharisee on the Sabbath, the social stakes are heightened as all eyes are on Jesus to see what he brings to the table. Jesus heals the physical condition for the man with dropsy. He then instructs how the spiritual, societal question shall be healed. As we hear his teaching, we should remember that Jesus’s contemporary listeners are not the usual poor and dispossessed. He is speaking to those people who have climbed the ladder of the Jewish religious aristocracy.
Jesus does not counsel that social status should be wholly abandoned. Instead, he advises that for healing, one should consciously and deliberately live beneath presumed social status, to not thirst after social status or higher honor. To displace oneself to a lower seat is a way of bringing back social health and well-being. When Jesus tells the host who he should invite to a dinner party, he tells him: “Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” For readers of the gospel of Luke, these groups should be a memory cue. They are a reminder of Jesus’s original mission statement when he first begins his public ministry, standing in the synagogue and reflecting on the scroll of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Living God is upon me. For God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the Year of God’s Amnesty.” This is a cue that Jesus is speaking into being, enacting a different way of life, a life that has the ability to end the violence of affluenza, that will bring about a spiritual health.
And the reason Jesus gives for this way of life? Is that the Divine Host . . . this is the way God acts in the world. And so as we act in this way, we come into the home and being and practice of God. It is God’s good wish, God’s deep desire, that our chasing after status and affluence, on the playground or at the dinner table, in the board room or among the nations, the violence and sickness of affluenza, come to an end.
Today we shared in the holiest of meals, a practice that remembers the many meals Jesus shared on this good earth in a way that was counter to the sickness and death found in the wider world. We ate this meal to steel our courage, enliven our hope, and say that we would once again recognize that as God asks us to take a seat at the front of the table, we are willing to live in some discomfort, and we waive our hand to say, “No, no, I am afraid you don’t understand. I am confident in the good gifts you intend for me, Gracious One. I defer. Rather, this person who is poor or beaten down by the world should sit next to you. It is only right and well.”
And in that moment, when we enact the mission statement of Jesus, God smiles, smiles broadly, and says, “In my house, this place, you shall always have a home.” And in that moment, we share in God’s joy. Amen.
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