I want to start by thanking you Marcy for your profound communion story. In many ways your story captures the heart of our Scripture for this morning – with its themes of welcome and inclusion and joining together in God’s great banquet, joining at the table of our Lord. I wonder if I even need to preach a sermon, or simply let your story sit with us. Thank you!
This morning has already been such a rich morning with our Child Blessing time too. I was brought back to my early experiences of being a parent with young kids. With the Scripture today, I started thinking about meals and that question as a parent of whom do you eat meals with as a family, and with whom do your children eat and share meals. So much gets communicated subconsciously already to your children with what you do around meals and food. It was important to us as parents to have our suppers together as a family – to create a time when we all paused from our various activities and ate together. We knew intuitively that something important happens in a family when you actually eat together around the same table at the same time. We did have our feasts and celebrations and special dinners too, but mostly it was the subsistence of regular meals. Sometimes there were wonderful and profound conversations, but more often it was simply chaos with a certain degree of mess and unpredictability, or simply the everydayness of comments about school, homework, friends and so on. But we ate together and it bonded us as a family. Then we had meals with broader family and our good friends – often for special holidays and occasions – and these were so important in giving our children a broader sense of community and belonging and a world beyond our family. Meals with our church have also been so important. That expands the circle further and our children became a part of an intergenerational community with much more diversity of experience and range of ages. They would probably name potlucks as their favourite – that feast where everyone brings their best scattered around a table – a kind of equalization of status. Where we asked more questions about food and meals and get togethers was probably with their school friends. As parents, you have less control over who your kids hang out with and connect with. Who gets invited to their birthday parties and what about the birthday parties they get invited to where you are not as familiar with the families. We tended to lean towards openness and trust here – and so appreciated the broad and diverse range of kids our children connected with over the years. We are glad our neighbourhood school had such a broad range of economic status and cultural and ethnic makeup. There was something so good in those invitations, and what happened in that eating together.
But when I think about the parable about the Great Feast we heard in Luke, I think about … Halloween. In many ways, Halloween is that great equalizer of holidays. Children go up and down whatever streets they want, the highways and the byways, dressed in all sorts of costumes; and food, in that form of very healthy candy and chips and chocolate bars, J is shared with all, no matter what your background. I have to admit that I loved Halloween and walking around with other parents while our kids had so much fun. I was sad when they got too old, but I still enjoy seeing who all comes to our house. That still doesn’t quite get to the heart of our parable. But we happened to start a family tradition each Halloween of the first place we took our kids. We would start the evening at Cramer House. For many years, until it closed around 2019, Cramer House was the House of Friendship building located right besides the Men’s Hostel on Charles Street. Cramer House housed up to 10 men for longer stays – often years. These men often started off at the Hostel, but had various needs and disabilities and social concerns that qualified them for the supportive housing available next door at Cramer House. My wife Rachel worked there for a number of years, as did Daryl Roth. It was a place that created community for men so often existing on the edge of society. So when our kids were still very young, we decided that our first Halloween stop would be Cramer House. It became a favourite family tradition. Not only our kids, but these men got so excited for our visit. You see, no other kids showed up at the doors of Cramer House. Kids don’t typically trick or treat on a street like downtown Charles St, and even if they did, they would probably go out of their way to avoid a Cramer House. No one was coming from the highways and byways. The men loved seeing the costumes each year and our kid’s smiling faces. And boy did they have candy ready – enough for a whole neighbourhood of kids –a real feast. We would stay awhile and linger and chat. They would ask our kids questions, and we would hear all about their lives. This week I asked Nathan what he remembered about these Cramer House Halloween visits, for him starting when he was very very young. His response was ‘No way – I was just talking about this to my friend’ – and he ran upstairs. He brought down the latest House of Friendship magazine and there on the front page was James from Cramer House, a resident now at Eby Village, his story and photo featured in the magazine. All excited Nathan said he immediately recognized James from all those Halloweens and had to point this out to his House of Friendship colleagues. He has such good memories of those times and the sharing that happened. Hmmm… And now he works in the organization. Yes, something good and holy happened in that interchange, in that sharing of ‘food’; that ‘feast’, even if it was just candy. Each year we would capture just a little taste of that Great Feast of God’s abundance where all are welcome.
Chapter 14 in the Gospel of Luke is all about eating and feasting. The passage we just heard from verse 15 to 24 is one very familiar to me over the years, as I suspect it is for many of you. It was helped out by that Medical Mission sisters song that Daryl sang from in the Children’s story – ‘I cannot come to the banquet, don’t trouble me now.’ There is lots to digest within this particular parable and we will get to that. But what I realized this week for maybe the first time, was that this parable is just one part of a larger Biblical section and connected stream of storytelling. It is the 3rd and longest of 3 dinner eating parables by Jesus, and they are not told in isolation, but rather told in the middle of an actual real meal, a gathering of others who are listening to these very parables about meals and who are eating together. So there are real people listening to Jesus tell these 3 parables – and the parables are in many ways a commentary on these people and on the dinner party they are in the middle of. This changes how I hear the parables.
The setting from verse 1 is the home of a leader of the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders from his own tradition that Jesus is in constant dialogue with. It is a Sabbath, that holy day set aside by God. And this Pharisee has invited a group of people for supper, most likely a bunch of other Pharisees and maybe some of the prominent leaders of the community – it mentions that lawyers were there. Jesus has been invited too – whatever the motives might be – there was this intrigue about who Jesus was, but also this threat as he upturned so many of their significant traditions and values and challenged their claim to status. A man joined the occasion – a man with dropsy – which was a term like edema, used for a person with a build up of fluid where you become bloated with excess of water, and yet become extremely thirsty to drink water at the same time, the very water that can kill you. Luke, the physician, would well know about this medical condition. We can’t tell from the text whether this man was invited or not, but we presume in that cultural context, his disease put him on the edges of that society. Some scholars wonder if he was placed beside Jesus as a plant, someone from a lower status in the social hierarchy, simply to tempt him and see how Jesus responds. (https://theopolisinstitute.com/everybody-has-dropsy-luke-141-24/#:~:text=In%20Greek%2C%20the%20word%20translated,nothing%20more%20than%20more%20water.) The first thing Jesus does is ask the Pharisees whether it is lawful to cure people on the Sabbath or not. Before they can answer, he heals the man with dropsy and sends him on his way, asking them if they had a child or an ox who fell into a well, would you not immediately pull them out on a Sabbath day. Jesus has trapped them back into silence. Jesus is challenging their religious assumptions, and I wonder how welcome a guest he will become. This man healed of dropsy becomes a kind of metaphor for the parables to come. The seeking for a better place at the banquet table, for more and greater places of honour is like a disease. To quote ‘some are so filled with lust for honour that they force their way to the best places in the feast. This is a dropsy like affliction of not being satisfied with what one has but lusting always for more, in spite of the fact that the one afflicted is actually killing himself… But there is a cure. Let him seek the lowest place at the table from the beginning.’ (Ralph Smith, Ibid)
So, first scene, the man healed of dropsy on a Sabbath in the middle of this prestigious dinner party thrown by a Pharisee. It goes on. It says that when Jesus noticed how the guests at this party chose the place of honour, he tells them a parable. Remember, they are all watching and listening to Jesus as he tells it. ‘When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honour, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and then in disgrace you would start to take over the lowest place… Instead, go to the lowest place and you might be invited to move up… For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ We have heard Jesus have messages like this before, of the first becoming last, and the last first. I wonder what all these guests felt who had been clamouring themselves in front of Jesus to get the best spots. Second scene.
Then Jesus turns and addresses the Pharisee party host directly with a second parable, the one who had invited him to this prestigious Sabbath dinner. ‘When you give a dinner, do not invite your friends or relatives or rich neighbours, 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 – in other ways, those on the edges of society – and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’ Did the host’s face turn red when he compared his guest list to the one Jesus was calling for? Again it is about social status being upended. Third Scene.
Finally, it is one of the dinner guests who speaks up, perhaps trying to redeem and placate and calm down the whole awkward scene around Jesus and the rest of the party. He gives one of these Mother and Apple Pie statements – ‘Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God.’ This is true. Eating bread together is something of blessing. Even Jesus would agree. But it reminds me of claiming that ‘All lives matter’, which certainly is true, when in a discussion of racism and how to take seriously the systemic discrimination that birthed the phrase ‘Black lives matter.’ It is in response to this man that Jesus tells the third and longest parable – the Parable of the Great Banquet that we have heard today. In many ways it is an expansion of the 2nd parable and that list that Jesus says should be invited to a banquet. But it first runs thought his list of excuses of why people are not coming to the banquet – buying land, or oxen or getting married. It can be easy to find excuses once you have deemed that this banquet and this host are not prestigious enough, not up to the social standards of who you want to eat with or work your way up the status ladder. It is then that the host goes out to the highways and byways, the roads and the lanes to bring in those most on the outside of society, and bring them right into the centre. There will be the blessings of heaven when they eat bread together. It ends with the warning in the parable, but also warning to the very dinner party listening to Jesus speak, that the rest will not taste my dinner. The point of gathering to eat together is not to navigate and scheme one’s way to the top, like the metaphor of the disease of dropsy and always wanting more, but rather to come together in shared blessings where all are valued and all included. Fourth and final scene. It would have been fun to be a fly on the wall during this Pharisee Dinner Party and witness all the squirming.
These sets of parables ask us where we should be squirming. What stories would Jesus tell at our dinner tables? It is so easy to for us to retreat into our comfortable social circles – our friendships and relationships with those most like us. It is easy to have aspirations to grandeur, to moving up the social ladder and increasing our own status and prestige. Who do we long to be associated with? But these stories also remind us of the power of food and eating together, especially when we come together in diversity. In terms of our summer theme on the breadcrumbs, Jesus gives us a powerful example of what can happen when we eat together, disregarding status. Something happens that changes the nature of the relationships. The wider the circle of welcome, the broader the guest list, the more potential for transformation and change and for those blessings of the kingdom. A couple of times Rachel and I have stopped for supper at the Tiny House Take Out run by St Mary’s Catholic Church in downtown Kitchener, and now two satellite locations. I love what they say on their website: (https://tinyhometakeout.com/) ‘At St Mary’s church, we believe we are all part of one family and the same quality food that is available to the wealthy should be available to people who are struggling or unsheltered. Everyone deserves a great meal. Whether you are living on the street, squeezing your grocery budget to pay the fills, or living a middle-class life, Tiny Home Takeout is happy to feed you and your family… Everyone has the right to great food, cooked with care and served with dignity, regardless of economic standing. Grab a bite. Give if you can.’ A great banquet happening right in our community. Food can do that. We’ve witnessed that here too at SJMC, when we eat together, when we have a potluck, when we share a meal for the community, enjoy a community pancake supper, when we cook and eat a meal with Grace Lao, when we share meal making with the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Collective, when hotdogs show up at a Garage Sale or picnic at the Mill Race, when lemonade gets shared after a community ball hockey Thursday, when we sit down to a chaotic family meal around a shared table, when we expand the circle of who our children hang out with and what birthday parties they attend, when we risk how and with whom we celebrate Halloween and other holidays. Something happens when we allow our feasts, our food, our eating to be shared experiences where no guest is turned away. In the end, God is the host and we are all guests to God’s banquet, where all are invited and all belong. It is then that the saying becomes true –‘Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God.’ Thanks be to God. Amen.