The Worst Seat in the House

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.”

My first Sunday in Georgia is one that I still vividly remember. It was mid-August, and I was moving here from Connecticut, traveling at a leisurely pace because I knew my furniture would also be traveling at a leisurely pace. Moving to a place where I knew no-one was – quite frankly – scary, but I knew that in the Episcopal Church, I would always find a welcome. I stopped in Athens on a Saturday, and the following morning I headed for church.

As I sat quietly in the pew, waiting for the service to start, an older woman appeared in the aisle beside me. She was on the arm of a young man, possibly a relative, or perhaps an usher. Despite the severe heat wave the country was experiencing, she was dressed as people used to dress for church: formally. She leaned toward me and, with an air of authority, said: “You’re sitting in my pew. Would you please move?”

My jaw dropped. I was at a loss for words. Part of me took umbrage. I bristled. We were in a large church, with lots of empty seats. Why did she need my seat? Who did she think she was?

The younger man whose arm she clung to avoided making eye contact. He studied the floor, and looked as though he wished he could sink right through it.

I quickly considered my options. I could either move – resentfully -- and fret for the next hour, or I could see the humor in the situation and move graciously. The expression on the young man’s face made my choice easy. It was really pretty funny, if I would get off my high horse. So I smiled, and scooted over a few feet. The lady took her seat, and the young man fled.

A moment or so later, she leaned toward me and whispered, “I know I shouldn’t have done that, but I always sit here.” “It’s all right,” I replied. And I meant it.

Sometimes where we sit matters, particularly if we have no choice about where we sit. And there can be issues of power: who is more important, who is less important. If we’re seated in a prominent place – the head table, for example – we may feel honored and respected. On the other hand, if we’re unfairly forced to take a seat we don’t want, or even worse, we’re asked to move so someone more important can take our seat, we may feel disempowered and disrespected – as though we have treated as less worthy.

A few days ago, we commemorated the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington, and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Difficult as it may be to imagine, in my memory there was a time when even in public places, some of our citizens had little choice about where they could sit. Bus stations in the South had separate waiting rooms for Blacks and Whites. And persons of color could be denied seating altogether at restaurants and lunch counters. Even in my home town in the less segregated Midwest, up until the time I was in high school, the lunch counter at the big department store was for Whites only. Many people accepted this as natural, a matter of common sense, and even as good. Of course, it’s easier to see these restrictions that way if you can sit wherever you like. Those whose choices are strictly limited are much more likely to understand that there is nothing very natural or good about discrimination.

Seating matters, particularly if where we sit tells everyone our position in society, what others think of us. Any bride can tell you that arranging the seating at a wedding can require the skill of a diplomat to avoid offending anyone. And in settings such as the military or English high society, there’s an established order – a written protocol – to determine who has precedence. Everyone is ranked in order of importance, and that order dictates where people are seated, and who goes first.

In the time of Jesus, seating order mattered, because honor and shame mattered in ways that we can’t imagine today, here in this country. Where a person was seated involved honor, and to lose honor was to lose everything. To be shamed was just about the worst thing that could happen to a person – or a family. People carefully guarded their own honor, and the honor of their family.

So when Jesus sees the esteemed guests at the dinner party jockeying for the best seat they can manage to claim –  and I imagine something like a game of musical chairs – he cuts through the social order game by completely rejecting the whole system of honor and shame, the continual ranking of who is more or less important.

Instead of sitting as close to the host as possible, Jesus suggests instead that guests should always take the least honorable seat – the seat that no-one wants, at the foot of the table. After all, he says, they might be lucky: the host may invite them to move further up the table. But if they start at the foot of the table, at least they won’t face the indignity of being asked to move, if someone of higher social standing arrives.

Take the worst seat? Risk dishonor, even shame? Here Jesus is being radically counter-cultural. In this society, humility is not considered a virtue – not even in theory. If anything, it’s regarded as a character flaw. Jesus is challenging everything the dinner guests value and compete for, how they make sense of the world. He’s turning the social order upside down. He’s inviting them to enter an Alice-in-Wonderland, Through-the-Looking-Glass world, in which everything is the exact opposite of what we expect.

In the Gospel of Luke, we repeatedly hear that in the Kingdom of God, everything we believe about the world will be reversed. The first will be last, the last will be first. God is filling the humble with good things and sending the rich away empty. In a world in which people jockey for status and position, in which everyone wants to be exalted, Jesus tells them to choose humility instead: 

"For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

And then – while everyone is still reeling at the thought of having to sit shamefully at the foot of the table -- Jesus brings the point home by telling them that when they entertain guests, they shouldn’t invite their relatives and friends, expecting to be invited back, or powerful people, hoping to gain some advantage. Instead, they should invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.

In the time of Jesus, the dinner guests he suggests – the poor, the lame, the blind, the crippled – would never have been invited to dinner. They wouldn’t even make the B list. Or the C or D lists, either. The lame, the blind, and the crippled are -- by religious law -- considered unclean: they cannot be priests. And the poor are – well, poor. None of these people would be suitable dinner guests. And these people can do nothing in return, which is precisely the point. To paraphrase John Kennedy, it’s not about what others can do for us: it’s about what we can do for others.

Some of you may remember a movie from many years ago: Places in the Heart. The story takes place in a rural Texas, during the Great Depression. At the beginning, a young Black man impulsively kills the sheriff, a man who leaves behind a wife and young children. Some White people respond by savagely lynching the killer. 

This vigilante violence is of no help to the sheriff’s widow, Edna, who is now destitute. She has no money, no job, and no husband. She has children to support and a mortgage she can’t pay. This is before Social Security, and this family’s future is very grim. Many of the respectable people of the town -- the bankers and merchants -- the ones in church every Sunday -- not only don’t help the young widow and her orphaned children, but they even try to take advantage of their helplessness and desperation.

Edna takes in two boarders: A blind man, who pays her for his room and board, and a homeless Black man, who out of desperation is willing to work for only room and board. All three – a widow, a blind man, and a homeless Black man –  are marginalized and disempowered, each for a different reason. But somehow, these three people – the least powerful, who individually are vulnerable -- band together. They miraculously harvest the first cotton crop of the year, winning a cash prize large enough for Edna to avoid financial disaster and keep her family together.

What most people remember about the movie, however, is the ending. Suddenly, we’re in an old-fashioned country church, with the choir singing “Blessed Assurance.” The minister reads the words of Paul: That without love, nothing else matters. It’s one of those churches where communion is served on trays with little glasses, which are passed around as people sit in their pews. One by one, as each person takes a glass, we recognize all the people in the movie: good or bad, dead or alive, respectable or not so respectable, Black or White, they’re all there. The sheriff sits next to the man who killed him. They are at peace, reconciled to God, and to each other.

This is what the Kingdom of God is like.

Jesus reminds us that every individual is precious to God: not only welcome at the table, but equally worthy of a good seat at the table. Our worth – anyone’s worth -- is based on being a beloved child of God, and not on how the world views us, or anything we accomplish, however worthwhile. Our worth is not even based on how we view ourselves. Rather, it is how God views us that matters. We receive our worth from God, as we each bear the image of God, and each person reflects the face of Christ.

The Kingdom of God will grow as each person embraces a topsy-turvy world, where we are most concerned about those who can’t seem to help us, where we treat the powerless with respect, where arrogance and pride are rejected, and where humility exalts those who choose to enter the Kingdom of God.