PROPER 17, YEAR C, 9/2/07

In the last few days colleges and universities have been welcoming the class of 2011. They are bright, in most cases well prepared, and they are so very young. As I stood there watching them complete a psychological profile, I recalled my own first days as a freshman. It was during that first week that I met a man who would deeply affect my life. George was the resident medieval historian at Emory, reputed to be one of the two or three best medievalists in the world. He was an anglophile having been a Rhodes Scholar and received his doctorate at Oxford and having been honored by the Queen of England for not only his academic achievements, but for his contributions as an intelligence officer during WWII.

George was eccentric, iconoclastic, biased, and opinionated, but above all, a great scholar and teacher. He would become my major professor, faculty advisor, fraternity advisor, friend and the man who saved my academic career, a story best left untold.

George would invite three or four students to his house for drinks and dinner. (Invite is far too mild; summoned is a better description.) He would call up and say, “Be at my house for dinner at 5 p.m.” There was no refusing. We would sit in his den for cocktails, learning to drink in a responsible manner and eat hors‘d oeuvres properly. A piece of classical music would be playing in the background and at some point he would tell us what it was and something about it. When we sat down to dinner there would be plates and more silverware than I had ever seen. We would learn what each was for and how to use them properly. George was a gourmet cook and when he served each course he would explain what it was and how it was prepared. After dinner there would be brandy and an opera which he would explain to us. Need I tell you that I learned more from George outside of class than in class? I still remember some medieval history, but what I really remember is the man.

In reading Luke’s Gospel it is evident that Jesus did not have a tutor in the social graces. On seven different occasions Jesus uses the dinner table as a place to reveal the nature of the Kingdom of God and its inherent clash with the world as we know and embrace it. Historically, the symbol for Luke’s gospel is the ox because it bore great burdens, but I really believe the dinner table is a better symbol. It is at the dinner table that he takes on the Pharisees and the powers-to-be who questions his authority and it is at the dinner table that he reveals himself as a savior who dines with sinners and outcasts as well as the rich and righteous.

William Wilomon, the former Chaplain at Duke University and now the Methodist bishop in Birmingham, Alabama, reminds us that Jesus and his disciples were beggars. Matthew implies that Jesus was a carpenter’s son and, therefore, one himself, and we know that many of the disciples were fisherman before they became disciples, but nowhere in all the gospels is there any indication that they worked at their trade after Jesus’ baptism and his calling of the disciples. They apparently traveled from town to town and begged for their room and board. Sometimes they dined with the rich and sometimes they ate with outcasts, for which they were loudly criticized.

In today’s gospel Jesus is invited to a wealthy Pharisee’s house for a Sabbath dinner party. There he notices a man with “dropsy”, nowadays known as congestive heart failure. Jesus asks the Pharisees. “Is it permitted to heal on the Sabbath?” When they refuse to answer he heals the infirmed guest. He then adds insult to injury by commenting on how the guests jockey for positions of honor in the seating arrangements. And finally, Jesus tells his host that if he really wants to give a dinner party, he should invite all those derelicts who can’t possibly return the favor. Talk about bad social behavior! Miss Manners wouldn’t be happy! But this really isn’t about social etiquette, is it?

Evelyn Underhill, the great spiritual writer, everyone has three deep cravings by virtue of being human. The first craving is the longing to go out in search for a lost home, a better place, a Garden of Eden, if you will. It’s this longing that makes all of us pilgrims. A second craving is of the heart for another heart, a soul mate for our soul. This craving makes lovers of us all. And finally, she says all of us have a craving for purity. That longing for purity often produces saints.

Ms. Underhill’s list is accurate and probably comprehensive, but I would suggest a fourth craving and that is the craving for recognition, the lust to be somebody. This craving, in the best of circumstances, insures that things will get done, children will be born, houses will be built, and society will progress. But it can also be the motivation for folks like the Pharisees in our Gospel lesson to seek out the seats of honor. This form of self-assertion is expressed by Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, where he sings, “If I were a rich man, I’d have a seat near the eastern wall.” The eastern wall is the [place of honor in the synagogue.

Spiritually speaking however, the danger of self-assertion occurs, as today’s Gospel shows, when the craving to be somebody comes from comparing one’s self to others: “I am because you are not; “I am somebody because I hold a place of honor at the table and you do not.” When we have to put others down in order to build ourselves up, we are headed for trouble. This is what Jesus was trying to tell the dinner guests. Before it is all over with, he says, someone is going to ask you to move to a lower position and you will be humiliated. What he is ultimately is that affirmation comes from Abba, Father. It is God who calls you his own and thereby makes you somebody. Last Sunday we baptized two little boys, gave them names that set them apart as somebody’s. And then we made that mark of the cross on their foreheads, that indelible tattoo they will carry the rest of their lives and proclaimed, “You are marked as Christ’s own forever!”

You and I are somebody of infinite worth and value, not because of what we have or where we live, or what seats of honor we occupy, but we are somebody because of whom we belong to-God’s own forever.

During the blitzkrieg of London in the early days of WWII, a young woman sent her husband off to war and she volunteered in a children’s hospital. Every morning she would get up and walk through the rubble and devastation of the night’s bombing and duck into a church to pray for her husband and all the children she would see that day. On this particular morning she knelt in prayer and shortly she was joined by a tall gentleman in a naval uniform. At first she didn’t pay any attention, but then she glanced to her side and gasped. She stood up and, as she did so, the naval officer reached up and pulled her back down to the kneeler. He turned to her and whispered, “My dear, in this place you and I are equals and we need to say our prayers.” And that night when she wrote a letter to her husband she told him how she had met the King..

Jesus told his host to invite all the derelicts to dinner if he really wanted to give an interesting dinner party. I daresay none of us is going to try that. We keep score of whom we owe and try to insure that we keep the ledger balanced. You know the only place that we come close to that kind of dinner party is when we invite you forward saying, “The gifts of God for the people of God.” That little piece of bread and that tiniest of sips of wine will have to do you until the final banquet, but it’s a start, it’s a start. Amen.