C Proper 17 22 Ord Paul 2025
Luke 14:1, 7-14
August 31, 2025
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.
Usually this
Scripture appears on the first Sunday of September, a Sunday when most
congregations like ours share 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 est 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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