Saturday after Pentecost: Don't miss the Banquet

Lessons: Psalm 20-21; Deuteronomy 1:1-8; 1 Timothy 6:6-21; Luke 14:12-24 

We all have things that trouble us.  Sometimes they are relatively minor.  Sometimes they are significant.  Perhaps because all bothers can end up emotional it behooves us to sort them early and address them in some patterned way.  Some of us make lists to be orderly as we shape our days and reactions. Some can keep the flow of care in their head and heart and be attentive.

Then there are the things that do not trouble us and perhaps should.  They are the concerns we overlook without much recognition.  For instance I have never given a banquet for the poor, the blind and the lame.  I have entertained often and with little regard to being invited somewhere in return.  But always it has been with folk I hope to enjoy.  This may be true for most of us.  No one at a dinner party has ever responded to me by saying,

"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." Luke 14:12-14 

For Jesus life was ever a teachable moment.  I suppose when you move through your days with the reign of God on your heart, you see the contrasts between life as it is and life as it may be, between God's generous gift of life and our response.  Part of Jesus' hope is that if we learn to mirror that generosity early in life we will grow more and more into it. Yet as we age we notice that the things we let slide out of our awareness, slide out of our actions. 

Part of the dilemma of modern life is that we live increasingly by isolated social/economic class.  Notice any urban area and one sees how true this is. When we no longer converse, touch lives that differ from our experience we loose perspective and real honest knowing.

Two things keep me more honest with myself and awareness.  They are both memory now.  One was living in an intentional religious community for a year in my twenties.  We practiced a rule of intentional hospitality in two ways.  We looked out for single people in London who appeared to be by themselves sometimes or often.  Then on Saturdays we planned a large luncheon and invited people to join us for Eucharist and lunch.  As much as we were scraping by economically, this simple shared meal enlarged our awareness.  It marked me when my year was over and I began to live on my own to remain aware of hospitality as an opening to God.

The second was that I twice served a parish in the inner city.  It attracted a broad range of economies.  While we were largely people of a middle economy, we had members who were poorer.  To us would come the really poor as well.  It was not uncommon for the homeless or mentally marginal to show up. My head and heart had to shift. There is a balance to be discovered and maintained as one creates a hospitable environment for this range of economy and personal strengths.  No one was denied the same communion, education opportunity and the same coffee hour, the same dignity.  Help needed was to be a direct and directed conversation that occurred but did not derail the purpose of our being together, to know and worship God.  We practiced a clarity that those conversations of need would be guided to the clergy and a few laity who were urban savvy. We grew clear as to what we could do and where we could refer and when we were limited.

The gift of these places in my life is that they keep me real.  They inform my view of church, nation and self.  The conversations challenge my simple notions of how one becomes poor or challenged, what it takes to rise from the place of too little to more.  I worry that we grow too isolated by economic class and too protected (and thus defended) from places of need.  I do not like the notion of the disserving poor as if there is some magic mark between disserving and not.    

Yet the truth is, being bothered by this does not help me.  What helps is finding ways to be generous and thus reflect a piece of God or the peace of God.  What helps is patterned and deliberate ways of sharing my middle wealth, my tithe paid, food in the food barrel, the poor seen and interacted with in dignity. It also helps to hear my negative inner conversations and question them.  Do I understand enough?  Am I missing some information? Does my inner tone seem overly harsh? Am I rejecting God's reign?  Do I remember that many have overlooked their invitation to God's wedding banquet because they were bothered by the wrong things? Am I?

It helps me to remember that childhood Bible School song:

I cannot come, I cannot come to the banquet,
don't trouble me now.
I have married a wife; I have bought me a cow.
I have fields and commitments that cost a pretty sum.
Pray, hold me excused, I cannot come.

(Verse 4)

Now God has written a lesson for the rest of the mankind;
If we're slow a responding, he may leave us behind.
He's preparing a banquet for that great and glorious day
when the Lord and Master calls us, be certain not to say:

I cannot come, I cannot come to the banquet,
don't trouble me now.
I have married a wife; I have bought me a cow.
I have fields and commitments that cost a pretty sum.
Pray, hold me excused, I cannot come.

We sing the song to prevent its outcome.  Who really wants to miss this banquet?