08.28.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 14: 7-24
LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:
Over the last week or so, I’ve been deep back into a project I’d set aside for a year.
It’s my doctoral project, which I’d written and run by a long suffering group of adult ed folks here at Poolesville. I sat on my computer and edited it for about the seven hundredth time, folding in y’all’s insights along with those of my advisor. I always intended it to be a readable thing, which is why I didn’t name my project the way most doctoral level writing is named. I could have called it “Towards an Ecclesiology of Relational Intimacy: Exploring the Dynamics of Intentional Microcommunity,” which would have been a great way to have no-one read it ever. But I called it, as some of you might recall because I talked about it incessantly, The Strawberry Church.
It’s a book about little churches and why they’re awesome.
My goal: get that project out there into the world, into the hands of other small church folks who might find it faintly interesting. There’s a mental image we have of the American church, of huge congregations with big screens and big parking lots, but that image is wrong. Most churches aren’t huge. Of the over nine thousand Presbyterian churches in our denomination, more than half are the size of this church or smaller. So now, it’s a book, one that explores the dynamics of the small church, something that hopefully I have some clue about.
And I love smaller communities, I do. Big churches are all well and good. They can do a whole bunch, thanks to the miracle of old fashioned economies of scale. The worship is seamless and tightly choreographed, every Sunday as tight and energizing as catching Hamilton on Broadway. The programs are perfectly professional, not a single hair out of place. A large church with its heart turned towards mission and service can do a whole bunch of good.
But I like a church that feels like a home, not a Nordstroms. Our world already has so much corporate perfection, big shiny seamless machines. It’s what our culture expects.
As much as I like teeny tiny churches, there’s something in that book that’s particularly difficult for me. It’s the role of the pastor in the small church. After reading dozens of books and engaging with the best thinkers in the world of tiny congregations, the conclusion is inescapable: in a healthy little church, the pastor shouldn’t matter all that much.
Oof.
So the Good Lord leads me to love little churches, to spend a substantial portion of my adult life flinging myself through the endless fiery hoops of the ordination process, to go to grad school for seven years, to get my doctorate, only to reveal that all of that not only doesn’t that matter, it shouldn’t.
But that is just how the Good Lord do.
If you get into this Jesus thing expecting your ego to be inflated, you’re in for a surprise.
Ego and our tendency to want to be at the center of things is exactly what Jesus gets to talking about in the passage from Luke this morning.
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 this took place, but it was part of his travels as he moved towards Jerusalem.
It was 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 crafty 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. Lookit me. I’m sittin’ in the good chair.
Subtle and passive aggressive as that might seem, that’s not the point Jesus is making.
He’s declaring the entire power dynamic of the society around him to be at odds with being a citizen of Kingdom of God. 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 are 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.
That, I think, is the greatest strength of the small church, of the sweet fruitfulness of simple, humble relating. You don’t get caught up in the clutter, in the mess of human distraction, in the bog of our systems and structures. You don't worry about power, about control, because really? In a little church, none of that should matter. You’re just here, with people face to face, learning to be the Kingdom together.
So here, in a place where that is possible,
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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