Of God and Lobsters

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.01.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Luke 14: 1, 7-24

It was years ago, and I was in Portland, Maine.  The reason?  A conference of scholars researching the dynamics of nonprofit organizations.  My organization provided research grants to those folks, and so I was moving from conference session to conference session, hearing the latest thinking.  And hearing it.  And hearing it.  And hearing it.

After a long day of sitting and listening to academics talking to one another, folks decamped from the hotel and wandered over to a nearby hotel for a great feast, the big meal of the conference.  Being Maine and all, this was to be a lobster feast.  Such a delicacy!  I’d actually been rather looking forward to it, as this was in a time before I’d given in to the siren song of tofu.

Folks gathered around, and settled in at tables, and although I was just a low level twenty-something admin flunky at my organization...the keeper of the files and the manager of the database...I found that there were no end of folks eager to sit with me.

Being affiliated with a giver-out of money often has that effect.

Everyone gathered, and a welcome was given, and the feast was brought before us.  On dining carts, piled high, were wheeled out hundreds of lobsters.  I’d always liked lobster, but that day, seeing those great piles of red carcasses, something snapped.  Maybe the long day of academic talk did something to my brain.  “The underlying semiotics of exchange in voluntaristic entities varies from that of profit-seeking enterprise in one hundred and twelve discrete ways, which I will now explicate in detail. As you will observe on slide 1.a...”  I don’t know.  Maybe that was it.

But those mounds looked to all the world like a heap of giant boiled insects, as appealing as a bowl full of pillbugs and centipedes.  It felt like I’d stepped into that feast scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or like when we entered the restaurant we’d stepped through a wormhole that brought us from Maine to the planet Klingon.  But there are those for whom lobster is still a delicacy, so to each their own.  I’m sure those antennae and mandibles are delicious.

I was reminded of that awkward evening recently, as I read through a sequence of articles in the business press about the latest challenge facing lobstermen, the folks who ply the waters off of Maine, pulling the critters up from the depths.

What was struck me about the crisis for lobster fisheries was that it was exactly the opposite of much of the rest of the fishing industry.  For more fishermen, the problem is that the oceans are dying after a century of industrial overfishing.   But the issue wasn’t shortage, or that the sea beds were denuded of lobster.  Instead, the issue was that the catches were huge.   Stirred by unusually warm waters, there was a huge surge in the numbers of tasty young adolescent lobsters.  The traps were full, and every boat that went out came back with a bumper catch.

It was the best harvest in decades.  In other words, it was a total disaster.  The entire industry has been jeopardized because the harvest was so abundant. Those boatloads of delicious buttery sea bugs were worth less and less, and livelihoods were jeopardized.

On the one hand, this makes sense.  It’s the law of supply and demand at work.  If you’ve got a whole bunch of a thing, or if you make too much of a thing, it becomes worth less and less.  If, say, Chinese industrial interests build too many factories to produce solar panels, as happened a few years ago, then suddenly there are too many panels.  Overcapacity makes it impossible to recoup your investment costs, and things fail.   Nice and simple.  On the other, it strikes me as peculiar.   Here you have an abundance, a rich harvest from the bounty of creation, and it’s a problem.

An overbrimming groaning table means financial wreck and ruin.  Feast becomes famine.  It’s a strange inversion of what one might expect from a harvest bounty.  So much of our world is like that.  

It seems, sometimes, like we’ve set up our entire culture backwards.

It was perhaps because of that peculiar reversal that we get Jesus pitching out a mess of reversals in today’s passages from Luke’s Gospel.  

He’s been invited to a feast, a big sabbath shindig at the house of an important muckity muck at the synagogue.  We’re not exactly sure where the event took place, but it was part of his journeying as he moved towards Jerusalem.

It was a big to-do, an event that brought him into connection with the important people in the community.  It was a place to see and be seen.  Where you sat and how you ate and who you talked to would have said a whole bunch about where you fell in the social pecking order of that community.

It was an elaborate social construction, a carefully staged dance, and Jesus knew it.  And when Jesus charged through those conventions like a bull in a china shop, it made for enough storytelling moments to fill a large chunk of this chapter.

He begins by challenging their assumptions about what is and is not appropriate action on the sabbath, and then quickly moves on to the way the meal itself is organized.  There were places of honor, nearer to the host or others of importance.  Then there were other seats and other places.  Jesus is being watched, but he is also watching those around him and observing their behavior.

He’s seen them jockeying for position and power, and then calls them on it.  He calls out his fellow guests, suggesting that perhaps their entire attitude is wrong.  Seeking glory for yourself may be the way of the world, but it is not the way Jesus teaches.  Instead, he says, seek the humble things.   When you look for a seat at the table when you arrive at an event, take the last one.

On one hand, this is actually rather cunning advice.  If you try to push your way up to a place that’s beyond you, you might get knocked down a notch or two, which would be seriously embarrassing.  Better to get called out and moved up by your host.  

Oh yeah.  I’m sittin’ in the good chair.

Subtle and passive aggressive as that might seem, that’s OK, because it’s not the point Jesus is making.

He’s declaring the entire power dynamic of the society around him to be at odds with the ethic he’s teaching.  It’s not just that you shouldn’t seek that best seat at the table.  It’s that...to the best of your ability...you shouldn’t even desire it.

His messing with the way things are becomes even more obvious when he turns his attention to his host.  Here he’s talking to a man who has invited his friends and his neighbors and business associates he wants to impress to a gathering, and he tells him: This thing that you’ve done and everyone does?  Don’t.  Sure, it’s the way we do business and the way we get to know one another.  It always has been.  It certainly is now.  If we want it to count for anything, our goal is not gain, or even that back and forth that constitutes much of the way human beings interact and develop relationships with one another.

“Invite those who cannot return the favor.  Invite those who can’t pay you back,” says Jesus, somehow managing to undercut every dinner party and social engagement ever.

Finally, Jesus hits ‘em with a story.  You know Jesus and his stories.  It’s a story about a meal, a great feast prepared.  The person in question sends out invitations, and then follows them up on the day of the event, only to discover that guest after guest had come up with excuses not to follow through.  

His response?  To fill the party with all of those who are on the margins of society, those who were broken and struggling.  And when there weren’t enough of them to fill the house, they just packed in anyone they could find.

Again, a most peculiar way to approach a feast, but here, Jesus was presenting his listeners and us with a pungent little tale with a very sharp point.  That point is that the way we do things, the structures of economics and relationship that rule human society, those things profoundly off.

It’s the kind of message that I’m sure had the host of the party summoning over his majordomo and whispering, “That Jesus guy?  Make sure we don’t ever invite him back.”

Because that, ultimately, is one of the great challenges of really engaging with the message of Jesus of Nazareth.  The more time you spend with the Gospel, the harder it becomes to see the world in the same way you’ve always seen it.

We can look at the way power is used to create power, the way violence is and always has been used as a means to create was passes for peace, and suddenly it seems like a false dance.

We can look at the way wealth and privilege become self sustaining, and hard work often seems divorced from reward in the same way that an abundant harvest is cause for despair.

The message of Jesus, listened to and taken in, changes all of that.

So much of what the world calls a feast, seen through the eyes of the Gospel, suddenly starts looking like a table full of dead bugs.

And as much as I hate to end a sermon that way, let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.