Unsolicited Advice

"If you read Jesus�� parables, and they don��t offend you, then you haven��t understood them"

really struggled with what T-shirt to wear today. For those of you who are with us for the first time, wearing T-shirts to church on Labor Day weekend has become something of an annual tradition at Church of the Pilgrims. My T-shirt is from the Christian Peace Witness at the National Cathedral last March. I really do want the war to come to an end, but the politics of the war have become so partisan that I hesitated to wear it to church. I don’t mind offending people intentionally, but I hate to offend people unintentionally. I don’t mind taking up sides on an issue, but I don’t like to do so in a partisan way.

I’m not opposed to the war because I usually vote Democratic. I am opposed to the war because I oppose all wars. I think the President was wrong to bring us into this war in the first place, but I also think that most of the Democrats are just as wrong-headed in the way they talk about getting us out of it. I actually support the President’s notion of spreading democracy as a foreign policy goal, I just don’t think we achieve that best through military force. It’s not clear that any of the Democratic candidates, other than Dennis Kucinich, are any less committed to the use of military power. Hilary Clinton voted for the war, and Barack Obama is already talking about intervening in Pakistan. The only president who really pursued human rights as a center of American foreign policy was Jimmy Carter, and he was vilified for it by Democrats and Republicans alike. I am enough of a student of Reinhold Niebuhr to understand that we have to act in the world as it is, with all of it complexities and compromises, but I am also enough of a disciple of John Howard Yoder to be persuaded that the Christian community is called to bear witness to the alternative values and practices of Jesus, of which non-violence is certainly one of the most important. It’s kind of hard to fit all of that on a T-shirt.

So it is rather remarkable to notice how many people Jesus was willing to offend while sitting at the dinner table. Here he is a guest in someone else’s home, and he deigns to offer unsolicited advice both to the host and to the other guests. In this town, of all towns, we certainly can picture the scene of guests jockeying to be seated at the place of honor. If you could eavesdrop on a White House dinner, no matter which administration, you would see enormous care taken that all the guests were seated according to their proper rank. In Letitia Baldridge’s Complete Guide to Executive Manners she has a whole section on “Learning How to Rank Your Guest List.” “The most certain route to chaos at a dinner party,” she advises, “is not having place cards telling everyone where to go.” Now, I don’t expect to be invited to a White House dinner anytime soon, but even in the church, I seldom attend a religious function where clergy are not given a seat of honor. And there are certain clergy that everyone knows you had better have sitting up front, or they will not even show up.

But in Jesus’ day, his suggestions were even more radical. In our culture, we have the notion that what really matters is your own personal sense of integrity, not what others think of you. We still play a great deal of attention to social status, but it is not the only thing that matters. Not so for the ancient world. In that culture, everything depended upon the honor assigned to you by the group. For those who take their very identity from the eyes of their peers, the idea of eating together and living together without any distinctions, differences, discriminations, or hierarchies is close to the irrational and the absurd. Jesus was throwing a wrench into their whole system of meaning and identity.

T hat is hard enough already, but Jesus goes even further in the next section when we advises his hosts on who they should invite. Here he has hard words for us as well. The cardinal rule of the culture was to invite only those who could invite you back. The idea was to invite someone of higher standing who would reciprocate, thereby enhancing your status. Jesus suggests that they only invite those who are unable to reciprocate. John Dominic Crossan helps us to absorb the hard edge of Jesus’ words:

Think, for a moment, if beggars came to your door, of the difference between giving them some food to go, of inviting them into your kitchen for a meal, or bringing them into the dinning room to eat the evening with your family, or of having them come back on Saturday night for supper with a group of your friends.

So, by the time Jesus is done, he’s offended everyone at the table– even his disciples don’t quite know what to make of him. As if this passage was not hard enough, tthen we have the counsel from the close of the Letter to the Hebrews. Listen again to this list of advice. It reminds us how much both liberal and conservative Christians cherry pick the verses they like best and ignore most of the rest. If any candidate managed to slip this passage into one of their speeches, his or her handlers would go absolutely berserk. The pundits wouldn’t know what to do! What are they doing? Are they moving to the Left? Are the moving to the Right? Such a short list, but enough to make virtually every partisan in the room uncomfortable, and wish one or two of these items were left off the list:

S o here are a couple of my cardinal rules for reading the Bible– my own unsolicited advice. If you read Jesus’ parables, and they don’t offend you, then you haven’t understood them. And if you read the gospel and it doesn’t challenge some of your own most deeply held values, whether you are a Republican or Democrat, then you haven’t read it clearly enough. So my own goal in preaching is to be an equal opportunity offender. I don’t know that I always pull that off. You’ll have to let me know.

Which brings me back to the punch line of Jesus’ parable. After telling all the guests where they are to sit, he concludes: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus is not just talking about table manners, here. He is talking about reversing the roles that people play, turning upside down the way people are assigned honor in their society. This, he tells them, is what the Kingdom of God will be like.

Which makes the first exhortation in the Letter to the Hebrews much harder than we usually think: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.” The usual way we assign honor in our society is to welcome those who are like us. To welcome the stranger means to create space in our lives for those who are not like us, without requiring that they become like us before being offered a place at the table. That’s not easy to do. As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out more than forty years ago, Sunday morning at 11 AM is still the most segregated hour in America, further segregated by theological rank, stripe and style. In another wonderful little book by the Quaker writer and educator, Parker Palmer, he talks about the importance of strangers for the Christian life. He point out that it is often the intrusive presence of the stranger that is able to break through our usual perceptions and expose us to a larger truth about ourselves and about the world. He writes:

This function of the stranger in our lives is grounded in a simple fact: truth is a very large matter, and requires various angles of vision to be seen in the round. It is not that our view is always wrong and the stranger's always right, but simply that the stranger's view is different, giving us an opportunity to look anew upon familiar things.

The role of the stranger in our lives is vital in the context of Christian faith, for the God of faith is one who continually speaks truth afresh, who continually makes all things new. God persistently challenges conventional truth and regularly upsets the world's way of looking at things. It is no accident that this God is so often represented by the stranger, for the truth that God speaks in our lives is very strange indeed. Where the world sees impossibility, God sees potential. Where the world sees comfort, God sees idolatry. Where the world sees insecurity, God sees occasions for faith. Where the world sees death, God proclaims life. God uses the stranger to shake us from our conventional points of view, to remove the scales of worldly assumptions from our eyes. God is a stranger to us, and it is at the risk of missing God's truth that we domesticate God, reduce God to the role of familiar friend.

So, there you have it. An excess of unsolicited advice, all aimed at turning our lives upside down. Welcome the stranger. Don’t take the seat of honor. Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame. Keep your lives free from the love of money. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. Such a life is more than we can achieve. We can only receive it as a gift. So the author of Hebrews give us one last bit of help. He writes, “God has said, ‘I will never leave your or forsake you.’ So we can say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.’”