There have been two anniversaries celebrated in the media
this week. The first was the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights march in
Washington D.C. at which Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream”
speech. The other was the first anniversary of the opening of the Paralympic
games in London. Both were events which had an impact because they enabled
stories to be told and voices to be heard which had often been neglected,
ignored or even actively silenced. After the March on Washington, no one could
pretend they didn’t know about the suffering of African Americans. After the
Paralympics no one could pretend they didn’t know about discrimination against disabled
people and about how much these Paralympians had achieved despite that. There
is a long way still to go on both fronts but after those events it was as if the genie was out of the bottle, and it
wouldn’t go back.
And that brings me onto today’s Gospel reading. Martin Luther King had a dream, but he’d have
been the first to say that it didn’t begin with him. His dream grew out of the
dream, the vision, that Jesus had, a dream of the kingdom of God, where people
would live according to the ways of God, where the first would be last and the
last first, where every person would be regarded as God’s beloved child. It’s the
dream that inspired Jesus words at the dinner we heard about today, which took
place at the house of a leader of the Pharisees, a powerful religious figure. Everyone
was watching Jesus at this dinner, we’re told, but he was also watching them.
In particular he was watching the way they chose their seats – the subtle power
games they were playing, which revealed a lot more about them than they realised.
Jesus points this out by asking them to imagine another hypothetical
celebration. “Imagine,” he says, “that you went to a wedding banquet and
discovered, too late, that you had sat in the place reserved for a guest far
more important than you. Imagine that the host came in and unceremoniously demoted
you? What would you be thinking as you took that long “walk of shame” down from
the highest place to the lowest?” Almost
anyone anywhere would cringe at the thought of this, and Jesus’ hearers would
have done too. If it were me I’d feel mortified. How could I have got it so
wrong? Why had I thought this place was mine?
And that’s what Jesus is hoping his hearers will be asking
themselves too. How do they decide who fits where in the pecking order? What
are the assumptions they make when they calculate the worth of others and of
themselves? Most of us judge far more than we ought on the basis of appearance,
wealth, family background, educational achievement. But God’s view is quite
different, says Jesus, and those who want to be part of his kingdom had better
get used to it. Mary sets the tone in Luke’s Gospel, in the song she sings when
she hears she will bear Jesus. Through him “God has put down the mighty from
their seat and exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good
things and the rich he has sent empty away.” The way the world ranks people and
the way God ranks people are completely different.
I don’t suppose that either those words or ideas are
unfamiliar. I hope not, anyway, because they are absolutely fundamental to the
Christian message and if you come to church at all regularly you shouldn’t have
been able to miss that. But knowing a thing in our heads is different from
feeling it in our hearts, let alone living it in our actions. We may think
we’ve understood Jesus’ message, but if it were really so then there should
have been no need for a March to Washington for civil rights, and no need for
people with disabilities to have to struggle against the attitudes of a world
that makes their lives twice a difficult as they already are. We’ve had 2000
years to make Jesus’ dream a reality, but often we don’t seem to have got very
far. The 17th Century mystic Thomas Traherne wrote “What a world would
this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!” Amen to that! But it wasn’t so then, and it isn’t so now either.
So how do we get from where we are to where Jesus calls us
to be? It goes without saying that it’s not an easy journey, otherwise we’d be
there by now, but today’s Gospel gives us a clue. It’s all tied up in the image
Jesus uses of that place of honour, the seats on the “top table”, if you like.
Sitting there wasn’t about having a chair with more legroom or thicker cushions
or a better view, like a first class train seat or a place in the dress circle
at the theatre. What mattered was that it was a seat near the host. It was a
coveted place in Jesus’ time, and still is today, because when you sat in that
special place you had access to whoever was throwing the party, someone of
power and influence – the king, the boss, the leader. You could make your
point, pitch your idea, lobby for your cause over the course of the meal, and
the fact that they had put you in that position implied that they wanted to
hear what you had to say, that they believed it was worth hearing.
It’s really important that we grasp this because it changes
what Jesus is saying. It isn’t about kind to the poor or caring
for the downtrodden; it is about listening to those whose stories are
different from our own, listening and taking what we hear seriously, listening
with the possibility in our minds that what we hear might change us. That applies both to the one to one
conversations we have here and now, but also to the way we listen to history
and to the wider world. Whose stories do we hear and record and take notice of?
Whose voices get swept aside and forgotten? And what wisdom might we have lost
as a result?
To many people at the time Jesus himself was an outsider, a
shocking law-breaker, stirring up trouble with his message. His was a voice
that many people would rather have ignored. Repeatedly his critics try to put
him in his place – a place of silence.
“Who does he think he is? How could the son of a carpenter from a
backwater of Israel be God’s Messiah, God’s chosen one? Surely if God speaks it
will be through the High Priest, or a member of a leading family…or at least
someone who keeps the laws and obeys the rules.” They are offended by the acclaim
he gets from the crowd when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. “Can’t you
keep your followers quiet?” they demand. “If I could,” answers Jesus, “the
stones would start shouting hosanna instead…” You have to wonder though – if it
hadn’t been for the resurrection, would Jesus’ words have been forgotten, like
those of so many other dead martyrs?
Perhaps because he knew how it felt to be pushed aside, his
own ministry focussed on those who didn’t usually get noticed. A blind man who
called out for his help was told to shut up by the crowd, but Jesus heard and
healed him. A Samaritan woman, apparently ostracised by her own community, who
met him at a well, found herself deep in theological discussion with him in no
time at all. Women brought their children to him, despite the disciples’ best
efforts to send them away, and he gladly received them – the babble they
brought to the conversation was just as important to him as the words of the
learned religious experts. We treasure and ponder the words that Jesus spoke,
but his ability to listen had just as much impact. It was this which
communicated to people that he really did mean it when he said that God valued
them.
Jesus reminds us that the voices of the marginalised need to
be heard, not just out of kindness, but because they have things to say which
matter. A part of the picture, a part of the message God speaks to us through one
another is missing without them.
“If you just invite your friends and family and rich
neighbours to dinner” says Jesus, “you will have received all the reward you
are going to get.” You’ve had a pleasant evening together, with everyone saying
the same old things about the same old topics, reinforcing the status quo, but
that’s that. It’s a closed circle. There’s no chance of hearing a different
perspective, a challenging viewpoint, a new thought. It might feel more
comfortable to stick with what we know and those we know, but doing so leaves
no room for God, no room for the transforming joy of his kingdom to break into
our lives. It’s when we give up those games of “you scratch my back and I’ll
scratch yours” and simply let ourselves meet people as they are that we will
find the blessing we really need. Fifty years ago the voices of African
Americans enriched all those who heard them as they told their stories both of
suffering and of the hope that sustained them in it. Last year, the voices of
Paralympians did the same in different ways.
So today’s Gospel reading leaves us with the same questions
as it did those guests at the Pharisee’s dinner.
How do we decide who matters and who doesn’t, who gets to
sit at the top table, who has a voice worth hearing?
What about our own voices? Do we think we have anything to
say? The testimony of the Bible says that we do, whoever we are. If our voices
aren’t heard then others miss out on the gifts God wants to give them through
us.
Most of all this story calls us to listen like God listens,
not just to those who have the gift of the gab but to those who can only manage
a few halting words, not just to those who are at ease in the corridors of
power, but to those who struggle get by at all.
Every one of us has something of God to share, a sacred
story to bring to the great and loving conversation which is God’s dream for
his world. Amen
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