1 September 2013

“On common sense and true humility”
Proverbs 25:6-7; Luke 14:1-14
OT 22C
1 September 2013


At first read, our texts today from Proverbs and Luke’s Gospel appear, well, less Scripture-like and more, just plain old-fashioned common sense.
The Word from Proverbs is proverb-like: When you’re in the presence of the king or someone else who is your superior, don’t assume to put yourself on their level, because you will likely be asked to step down from that place.
And Jesus builds on this word, a word he surely knew well, as do we, too … when you’re invited to a wedding banquet, don’t automatically take a seat at the head table, because … unless you are the bride, or groom, or in the immediate wedding party, you will undoubtedly be asked to move when those who are supposed to be sitting there, finally come and take their places.
So Jesus’ observation about how those guests of the religious leader jockeyed for position at the table … Luke calls it a parable, but it really isn’t, it’s just Jesus making a reflection on his observation that would, likely, have given everyone around the table pause … left them staring at their shoes … because the thing about stating the common sense word, the practical response, is that it’s simply not arguable.
Oops. We goofed.
And it doesn’t take a rabbi to point that out. A child could have said the same thing.
No, it’s not a parable at all until Jesus makes a subtle transition in his words to them … that “summing up line” is what makes this parable-material, a theological teaching moment for him, rather than just stating the obvious:

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

Here, now, is where faith comes into the conversation.
Jesus takes this from a reiteration of common sense living together to his saying, giving, teaching, a Word about humility.
Oh, yes, common sense living had, has a word to say in this second half of the story, too. It’s called reciprocity, the way the world works, in the vernacular, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
Why had Jesus been invited to this dinner?
Perhaps the Pharisee … the text’s label for that nameless religious leader … perhaps he thought that because he had invited Jesus to dine with him, perhaps Jesus would show his gratitude by doing some sort of miracle there before him, before them, at that dinner.
That is, after all, what Jesus has just been about, in the Gospel text from last Sunday … healing the woman crippled for eighteen years … that is also what Jesus has been about in the verses “missing” from our text today … you’ll note that the Gospel reading goes from chapter fourteen verse one, to verse seven.
What happens in those missing six verses is that Jesus once again heals someone, and once again heals on the Sabbath … last week, the crippled woman; this week, a man who Luke says has “dropsy,” an ailment which we’d call today congestive heart failure or chronic kidney disease.
Two healings, on the Sabbath, the day when the religious leaders said no work was to be done, a rule so scrupulously enforced that the letter of the law … the “you shall not” … took such precedence over the “you shall care for your neighbor” spirit of the law … and this is why Jesus does what he does, showing God’s care, God’s love for people, God’s people, the very people God gave the law to protect, to comfort and bless, that law now turned back on them to keep them from the life … rich, full, abundant … which God so wishes and wills for us … this, Jesus gives, Jesus does for them.
Rules, laws, organizing principles we humans create for ourselves … they have a way of doing that to people. The very structures we create with the purpose of giving and bringing life … followed too closely, too scrupulously … the letter of the rule, the law, the organizing principle, now takes life from the spirit of the rule, the law, the organizing principle … and starts to work, not for life, but for death. The death of the group … the organization … the people.
Jesus knows this. That’s why he chooses to “break” the Sabbath rule, in both these occasions. Because this organizing principle for this religion of this time needed to be broken, to be changed, to give and bring life. Jesus wants life.
So even in their indignation … these rule-bound religious of Jesus’ day … they could get that something new is happening here. Something new which they want to witness, to be part of. So performing a miracle … that would be about the only thing which Jesus could offer the religious leader in “exchange” for the “honor” of being asked to dine with him and his guests.
But Jesus doesn’t offer reciprocity, “giving” to “get.” Instead, he offers a word about humility.

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

This is a difficult word.
It’s a difficult word for all those people in our Gospel text for today … those seat-scramblers at the religious leader’s dinner party.
And it’s a difficult word for us, too, today.
Especially us “church people.” Especially us “Lutheran church people.”
Because it’s such a part of us, our Northern European heritage, “God’s frozen chosen,” “Minnesota nice,” whatever. Humility. That’s it.
But it’s a humility that works itself out in, niceness.
To be humble … to many Christians, to most Lutherans, is all about being nice.
But is being nice what Jesus is talking about here?
Some of us, South King Cluster pastors, have been reading and discussing a book this past summer called “Failure of Nerve” by the late rabbi and family-systems expert, Edwin Friedman. Those of you who were on congregation council here at Nativity a few years ago will remember that I used this book as a guide for a council retreat.
To Friedman, this kind of humility which gets worked out in the world as “niceness” is part of the “failure of nerve” which is playing itself out in our society … namely, here, in what Friedman calls the “herding instinct,” in which the system … whether it’s a society, a school board, or a church congregation, because it’s “nicer to be nice” … the system tends to support or adapt to their most incessantly demanding members.
In other words, because we equate humility with “niceness” … we choose passivity over activity … making the good, right, faithful choices is abandoned for “door-mat-ness” (letting others walk all over us).
And sometimes it gets downright ugly. Sometimes, because we so link “niceness” with “humility,” we allow ourselves to be held hostage to bullies.
A church consultant I’ve quoted before, Bill Easum, wrote an article titled “On Not Being Nice for the Sake of the Gospel.” In it he says,

I’m convinced that one of the main sins of the Church is that we have taught ourselves to be nice instead of Christian. In spite of aspiring to be Jesus’ disciples, we teach that the essence of Christianity is to be nice.
Where do we get such a notion? Certainly
not from the actions of Jesus.
People who would rather be nice than Christian do not love enough. They do not have enough
compassion. Instead, they are afraid of hurting someone or of being hurt. Remember, fear is the
opposite of love. "Perfect love casts out all fear."
If we really loved people, we would
not base our decisions on whether or not people would like us for those decisions. Being nice or
being liked is never a goal for followers of Jesus.
What does being nice accomplish in the church?
• more dysfunctional people
• fewer spiritual giants
• an intimidated congregation
• an inability to spread the Gospel
• little hope of renewal or growth
• discouraged church leaders.
Being nice is not what Jesus wants from any of us.

The kind of humility Jesus embodies in his life, in his teaching, in his preaching and serving, it’s certainly not this “passive-nice.” It’s active, indeed pro-active, making choices and standing by them, choices especially for those he cites in the last two verses of our text:

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.

This is humility … and this is what Jesus does, as he embraces those who the world rejects.
This is the word we’ve heard throughout this year of Luke’s gospel … and especially during this summer of texts in which Jesus takes a laser-sharp focus on the contrast between how the world reacts in moving away from the poor, and how he moves instead in the opposite direction … to, for, with them, in love.
Make no mistake – it is courageous humility of which Jesus speaks here, a lifestyle, a living of courageous humility into which Jesus is calling us.
Because taking the side of those to whom the powerful of the world turn their back, this takes courage.
Many of us were reminded of this kind of courage this past week as we marked the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march on Washington, DC. Yes, Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech was the hallmark and highlight of that August 28, 1963 … because it began a whole movement … but what we sometimes forget was that this movement … this unpopular, counter-cultural movement toward equal rights for all … it began with, and was anchored by, “church people.”
Some of them were even Lutheran … the famous, like Dr. Richard John Neuhaus, Dr. Albert “Pete” Pero, one of my seminary professors … and others, whose names were not so famous, but equally effective, such as the Lutheran pastors in Montgomery, Alabama, who worked alongside their African-American colleagues in that city, the epicenter for African-American equality.
But their courageous humility often came with a price.
One story even some of you lived through brings this out clearly. Dr. Fred Schiotz was, at the time, the president of the American Lutheran Church … one of the predecessor denominations which formed our Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The ALC’s Luther League (what that denomination’s youth organization was called back then) … the ALC’s Luther League convention in 1961 in Miami Beach had invited Dr. King to be its keynote speaker. However, the 18 regional bishops of the ALC asked the Luther League board to change its mind, citing the great division in the ALC over Dr. King … some thought he was a prophet, but many more viewed him as an agitator, even a Communist.
But Dr. Schiotz publicly expressed his disagreement with the regional bishops, and the Luther League invitation to Dr. King stood … and was accepted … and even though some congregations pulled out of the convention … 14,000 youth attended, and heard Dr. King speak about racial equality in what was at that time the largest Lutheran youth gathering in American history.
Another who lived this courageous humility was the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. You have heard before how Bonhoeffer’s faith led him to take an active stand against the melding of church and state patriotism that was at work in Nazi Germany … to work against it even to the point of sacrificing his own life.
This year’s vacation time led me to read another of Bonhoeffer’s works, titled Discipleship.
This quote, I thought, was quite pertinent today, with this text from Luke before us:

Discipleship is that to which Jesus calls us:
• To live together in faith and self-giving love;
• To follow Jesus even to the cross;
• To take the risks necessary to deliver our society from evil;
• And to trust in the divine promise to provide sustenance in a hostile world.

That sustenance gets its start at another banquet table … the table of Holy Communion … where Jesus Christ himself takes on that courageous humility … giving us, we who are most certainly, by God’s standards, the undeserving … sinners all, each and every one of us, falling short of living into the promise, the freedom, of life … rich, full, blessed to be a blessing, sharing, living, loving toward others, especially those to whom Jesus’ Word and Work shows great preference … the poor, the outcast, the abandoned, the marginalized, the powerless … those who the elites of this world count as less, or of little or no account … of these who Jesus especially loves, we fall short, every day … because we prefer slavery to the self-justification of rule-bound living rather than the freedom that comes from being chosen by Christ, chosen to follow, chosen to be discipled by the One Son of God.
And yet, we are invited each week … invited to dine with Jesus … and so we come … we come to this table … we come where, despite and in spite of our rebellion, our arguing and jockeying for position, our sinfulness and separation from God and each other … here we come and are welcomed. Unconditionally.
Here we are given the body and blood of our Lord, his very self, to eat and to drink, to become part of us … a gift, given from the One who without condition gives it all, even himself, to make us whole, and right, and new. With God. And with each other.
And then we are sent out … to do the same, to live the same, live courageously humble lives, into this world God loves.
Here, here is Jesus. So come and eat. Come and drink. Come and receive the faith and hope that allows us to trust, to risk, to live … not simply for ourselves … but for them. Always, always, for them.
For there, there, in them, is Jesus, too.
Amen.