Shouldn't he have known something like this would happen?  Did he go home and say to Mrs. Pharisee, Uh, honey, guess who’s coming to dinner?  Maybe it was the wife who just had to have Jesus come.  Who knows?  Either way Jesus ends up sticking out like Sidney Poitier at an all-white blue-blood soiree, sure to draw whispers.  Part of that may be because Jesus was from a hick town in the Galilee called Nazareth, where the Jerusalem Judean upper crust weren’t sure whether they even used utensils, let alone knew which was the salad fork and which the soup spoon. 

Maybe we should be more generous than that, though.  Maybe when Jesus later on says we should be inviting to our little dinner parties those who cannot pay us back, maybe he is actually congratulating his host on inviting him.  Who knows?  Either way, Luke says when Jesus showed up, they watched him closely.  I bet.

They weren’t the only ones watching closely.  Right between the appetizer and the salad, Jesus sees a man with dropsy at table with him.  Dropsy is a condition of retaining too much water and getting all bloated.  Jesus interrupts the polite table conversation about the behavior problems of the apartment kids in the public schools and brings up the religious riddle of whether this man could lawfully be healed on the sabbath.  They all take a deep breath and hold it.  Mrs. Smith-Downing clutches her brooch.  The social columnist licks her pencil.  No one speaks.  Jesus goes ahead and heals the man.  And while he’s at it, he launches into a little parable that no one thinks is hypothetical.

Now here’s a warning, if you ever invite Jesus to dinner and he starts in on one of his little parables, forget about enjoying dessert.  He talks about a wedding banquet where the guests are all jockeying for the best seats, putting themselves forward as if to show they are somebodies.  Jesus has been watching closely all night and has seen the same thing happening at this sabbath meal.  People taking places of honor as if life is a competition that if you win may get you as far with God as with man.  Jesus turns the tables, tells us that if we really want to be strategic diners we ought to reverse our social arrangements and get ahead by getting behind.  We move on up with God by moving on down the ladder of humility.  All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

The desire to be first and best and honored: where does that come from? We all want to be noticed.  Don’t believe me?  Have kids?  Watch me, Mommy, watch me, watch.  It’s God-given, this desire, I think.  It’s not the sin nature in us so much as the image of God in us.  God also wants to be first and best and honored.  But God doesn’t run up to the head table and fluff up his ascot to be noticed.  God lingers far back in the line, taking a low profile and hoping we will recognize him for who he is and call him up to sit on the throne of our hearts.  Jesus didn’t come as a socialite with public clout, either; he came as a socially marginal person claiming authority you had to strain to admit.  He humbled himself even to death on a cross, Paul says (Phil.2:7-9), and therefore God highly exalted him, giving him the name that is above every name.

It’s like the first day of school when the bus driver decided to teach the kids a lesson.  They all were ready to get home after the bell had rung.  The most aggressive kids were working their way to the front of the line, emulating their parents, don’t you know?!, practicing to be grownups, pushing weaker and smaller kids out of the way.  The driver opened the door and told them to form a straight line.  Then he got off the bus and told them to follow him in that line.  He walked down the sidewalk just far enough to leave the kids at the end of the line right at the front door to the bus.  Okay, now board the bus, he said.  And after that day, they never pushed and shoved in line again.  The last shall be first.

But we don’t learn easily, do we?  Or maybe when we get to be adults, we forget.  Like Danny Almonte’s father.  Follow this story?  Just plain sick.  The kid pitched a perfect game in the Little League World Series.  He was awesome.  He was also 14 years old, in a league where the cut-off age is 12.  Before he left the Dominican Republic for the Bronx a year ago, his father obtained a new birth certificate, falsifying his age and instructing the boy to lie about it.  Not only that, but all this time he has been in the States the father has not enrolled him in school.  So what is that kid learning about life?  Want to get ahead?  Push and shove yourself to the head table any way you can get there.

Let’s not be so hard on them and easy on ourselves.  Do you realize that white-collar crime in this country is far more damaging to you and me than street crime?  Do you realize that for all our outrage at burglars and drug dealers and welfare cheats, our insurance premiums probably escalate more because of the white-collar crime of mostly white people that seldom gets convictions and usually gets settled out of court than all the home burglaries put together?  The richer and more prestigious you are in this country, the more you can get away with as you walk all over people for your own benefit.  Let’s be honest.  The judicial system works best for those with money—no matter how they got it.  No matter how well- intentioned the judges, no matter how fair-minded the court, the tendency most often is for those with the best and most expensive counsel to benefit the most and be punished the least.

Where will justice be served?  Jesus says it will be served in heaven, where God is the final judge and not influenced by these kinds of things.  God knows human hearts, and God’s standards will turn the tables on us.  When it comes to final judgment and eternal destiny, Jesus says those last in line will move on up, and those who have pushed themselves forward will be right at the front of the wrong line for the elevator going down! 

Now that’s a bit sobering, don’t you think?  What if people started taking all this seriously?  What if people at the top of the heap started acting like they were just regular folk and those at the bottom started believing they were valued highly in God’s eyes?

Walter Hovell was a deacon in our church in Mobile.  He was an able and humble man both.  When people asked him what he did, he always said he worked for the gas company.  Which he did.  But you couldn’t tell by the way he carried himself whether he was a meter reader or a corporate officer.  He was president of the public utility.  You’d never know.  And why do we need to know?  Does being president put him ahead in the line for heaven of the meter readers?  He didn’t think so.

But the thing about Jesus’ parables is that they don’t just knock down; they pick up.  They cut two ways, like a double-edged sword.  If you’re all high and mighty and suffer the sin of pride, they puncture your bloated opinion of yourself.  But if you are one of the poor, crippled, lame, or blind that never get invited to anybody’s dinner party, they lift you up and put you at the table.

Jillian is reading the same novel her sister and brother read before her— Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene.  It’s set in a small Arkansas town during the Second World War.  They have a German prisoner-of-war camp there.  One of the characters is Ruth, a black woman who serves as cook and nanny to the family of the young Jewish heroine, Patty.  Arkansas society had hardly been reconstructed after Reconstruction, social roles still ordered strictly.  They called Ruth an uppity colored woman because she wouldn’t look down at her shoes when white people were around.  The reason is pride, she says.  Even though she has very little, she puts on Sunday dresses just to go to the store.  When Patty asks her why, she says, It’s the pride.  It’s me shouting out to the world that one of God’s creatures is walking on by.  You think God would like it if we went and used the Good Book for a doorstop?  [Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1973: 11.]

The thing about the Good Book is that it gets its way with us over time.  You come to church and hear preaching and Sunday school teaching about passages like this one, and pretty soon you can’t stay the same.  You end up having to share a meal at the Lord’s Table with all kinds of people you wouldn’t have invited to your own table, and before you know it you start feeling guilty about not inviting them to your own.  Feeling guilty about stuff like that isn’t all bad, if it motivates you to do something about it.  Church folk had a hard time reading Bible stories like these and then going out to segregated lunch counters and water fountains.

Sometimes I get discouraged when I read a passage like this one, thinking we are still so far from what Jesus wants for us.  We still jockey for position, even in the church.  Jesus tells us to rearrange our social calendars to prepare ourselves spiritually for judgment.  He tells us to dine with people who can’t pay us back, to become friends with people who can’t advance our social standing.  And yet if you look at the lunchroom of any public school, it’s pretty obvious that integration hasn’t stopped the segregation.  If you look at our neighborhoods, there isn’t much mixing.  If you look at our churches, … oh, please don’t do that!

I don’t know the answers anymore to getting churches integrated.  We can’t even seem to cross class lines, let alone racial and ethnic lines.  All I know is that when I imagine the marriage feast of the Lamb in heaven, I don’t think we’ll be at separate tables.  I think we’ll be more like that painting in the James Gallery by Jim Colley—the one with people of every race and age and gender crowding round the Lord’s Table.  Just because we don’t look like that yet when we gather at the Lord’s Table doesn’t mean we’re going to continue this same way in heaven.  It means we have to start changing our eating habits here and now to get ready for there and then.  We have to think from the end back to now and be strategic about it.

We need to hang out more often with people who don’t look like us.  Maybe more projects and partnerships and community missions work with others across ethnic and class lines.  I served in the two-year-old department this morning in Sunday school.  (Have I told you we need workers in the preschool?)  Among the little ones there were twin boys with cerebral palsy.  They were easy to love, even if they aren’t easy to handle.  But I thought, You know, this is it; this is where they are welcome.  This is what Jesus was talking about.  We also need to go out of our way to be in relationship with people richer and poorer than we, just the way Jesus was.  We could start by becoming better acquainted.  It could lead to inviting them to church and sharing the Lord’s Table together.  It could lead to them inviting us to church and sharing the Lord’s Table together.

Who knows what might happen then?  Maybe another healing?  Maybe we’ll be the ones healed this time?