The SkyBox

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda 09.02.07; Rev. David Williams Scripture Lessons: Proverbs 25:6-7; Luke 14:1, 7-14 In pretty much every new sports stadium...and most older stadiums around the country...there are seats and then there are SEATS. If you’ve gone to any big venue event, be it baseball or football or full contact extreme team macrame, you know the drill. First you get yourself a parking space, preferably one where you can actually see the stadium with the naked eye. After making your way with the rest of the throngs, you work through the entrance and begin searching for your seats. You’re herded along with thousands of others into seating that makes airline seats seem like an overstuffed Barcalounger. Unless you’re willing to forego meals or electricity or both next month, getting to those seats seems like you’re trying to climb the north face of Everest. Up and up and up you go, one step after another. Finally, you take your seat, and try to catch your breath. A vendor walks down the aisle, shouting “Beer! Hotdogs! Oxygen!” From your perch in row 197 FF, you look down, way way down, to the tiny little dots running around on a patch of green far below. Wait...what color is your team wearing today? But at least you can watch the game on the Jumbotron, right? It makes perfect sense to fight your way through traffic for an hour and pay good money to watch a game on a TV. Sure it does. Just have a beer and a big hit from the oxygen tank, and try not to think about how the other half lives. You know the folks. They’re down in the boxes. But, of course, those boxes aren’t really just boxes with seats. They’re suites with seats. You get your own special parking places. You have your own V.I.P. entrance. When you get to your seat...it isn’t like everyone elses. The chairs are huge. The food is copious. They’ve got waitstaff who’ll attend to your every need. They’ve got anything your heart could desire. At Chase Field in Phoenix, some of the premium boxes come with their own swimming pools, so that you can lounge in the water with a margarita while you watch the Diamondbacks. They don’t have swimming pools at FedEx Field, but they’ve got a facility that Forbes Magazine described is “nicer than the nicest country club in the country.” And anyone who wants can have one, so long as they’re able to hand Dan Snyder $100,000 a season for a small box, and upward of $200,000 for a bigger one. And that’s not a problem for most folks who run in the Skybox set, because when you get right down to it, Skyboxes have very little to do with sports. They’re about wealth and they’re about power. If you want to make a positive impression on a Congressman who’s considering legislation that could impact your widget making business...well, you’re not sending him up to the nosebleed seats. If you’re trying to cement a business deal, nothing sways that new potential client better than the roar of an enthusiastic crowd filtered through the lens of luxurious seating, attentive servers, and several glasses of single malt scotch. Where you sit has everything to do with power, and everything to do with wealth. In that regard, very little has changed over the last several thousand years. In fact, the short reading that we heard from the Book of Proverbs today reflects a similar interest in seating arrangements. There’s a little bit of difference, though, in that this saying isn’t describing a sporting event, but political maneuvering. I know, I know, in this town political maneuvering is practically a sport, but we Washingtonians are just strange that way. In the court of the Kings of Judah, who sat where and why was even more intensely important than it is to us today. This saying is part of a collection of teachings found in the Book of Proverbs known as the Solomonic Sayings. This part of the collection runs from the beginning of chapter 25 all the way to the end of chapter 29. They can be loosely described as an instruction manual for newbie scribes and young nobles, sort of a “How Not To Have the King Disembowel You...For Dummies.” One surefire way to lose influence in the court was to be impatient or assume that you had the right to speak with boldness before the King. Yeah, you might think you were hot stuff, all full of new ideas from your Court Management classes at the University of Judea. You might think it was a good idea to shout out your idea in front of the throne, as a way of impressing the court with your wisdom. But that’s not how the court worked. To speak out of turn, or to speak without the bidding of the king...well...it just wasn’t smart. Only the great and the most powerful were permitted that honor. At best, you’d lose standing in the court. At worst...well...let’s just say that the royal human resource department did it’s exit interviews a bit more intensely than we do today. So the wisdom of the scribes over the ages was simply this: be humble in the presence of the king. Don’t presume. Speak when spoken to. Step up where you’re asked to step up. Good, basic information. It was this bit of royal wisdom that Jesus was referring when he spoke up at a dinner to which he had been invited by a local bigwig. Luke’s Gospel makes it completely clear that this was not a dinner like others, as Jesus was being observed carefully to see how he acted and what he said. Jesus, however, was not just being monitored. He was also paying careful attention to how his host and the other guests were acting. When he spoke, it was to tell them a parable of a wedding banquet. At this banquet, to take a seat that was not yours by right was to risk public humiliation. You’d be better off taking a humble position, and then having your host invite you up to a position of honor. For the other guests at the dinner, this would have seemed both wise and familiar advice. Of course, they thought. You have to appear humble, so that you’ll then be honored by the host. Looks like our strange guest from Nazareth has read the Solomonic Sayings. He really does know how to play the game. But then Jesus turned to the host, and gave words of advice that took the proverb in an entirely different direction. With a room full of this man’s friends and brothers and rich neighbors, all invited to a meal, Jesus tells him that he’s invited the wrong crowd. All of these people who are jockeying for position, all of these important and significant people...well...they’re just not important. The people who should be around the table aren’t those whom the host hopes to impress. They should be people from whom the host expects nothing, seeks nothing, no tit-for-tat, no quid pro quo, no I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine. Nothing. And to avoid the temptation of expecting anything from those people, Jesus suggests that he should have invited the poor, the lame, those in Judean society who would have been regarded as so low in the pecking order as to be barely human at all. If you wanted this to count at all, Jesus says, you should have filled these seats without considering who they were at all. Those words would have hit hard back then...and they’re not much softer now. Ours is a society that thrives on hierarchy, where the rich and the powerful mingle and network with one another. It’s easy to emulate that, to play at that, to try to gather power by showing favor to those who we think might be able to give us something in return. But you can’t buy Christ’s favor. You can’t show off your riches to the Creator of the Universe. The only thing that God seeks in us...the first and most important thing God requires...is that we show care for others out of no desire for repayment. He’s got no need for skybox seats, because he knows our game all too well already.