On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath, they were watching him closely.
When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, `Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."
He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. 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."
Sermon by the Rev. Carole Horton-Howe
There’s a board game that’s been around forever called Chutes and Ladders. I think everyone has played this at some point in their lives either as a child or as a grown-up with a child. Since it is a game for little ones, it’s simple and straightforward to play: You spin the arrow and move around the board. As you go, you hope for ladders and to avoid the chutes and slides. Land at the base of a ladder and you get to advance all the way to the top beyond where even the highest spin can take you. Land at the bottom of a chute and - oh no! – you have to slide way down, back to a place you’ve already been.
Chutes and ladders gives us some insight into the culture in which Jesus lived. Scholars tell us that first century culture operated under the binaries of honor and shame. This basically meant that people’s behavior was shaped either by the threat of being publicly shamed or the promise of being publicly honored. And not just your shame or honor but the shame and honor of many people who mattered to you. Our individualistic culture makes it a little harder to feel the import of that, of how terrible a setback it was to be shamed or how being honored moved you forward in a big way. It was akin to Chutes and Ladders
I sometimes wonder why these upright religious folks kept inviting Jesus to dinner parties, because he always caused a ruckus. At a dinner party at another Pharisee’s house, a disheveled and disreputable woman crashed the party, threw herself at Jesus feet, and began weeping. The host of the part got very upset, but Jesus apparently told everyone that she had done a beautiful thing.
He may be he’s invited so they can rip him up, take his temperature. But Jesus, in the end, always takes theirs. And today he’s done it again. In today’s story, when we hear Jesus is invited into the home of a Pharisee for a meal. You just know there is going to be trouble.
Jesus arrives, maybe he makes a little small talk, and then he watches how the guests jockey with each other for a seat at the cool table. They called it a table of honor but it’s the same thing. You know they’re all doing that delicate dance that has all the subtlety of a junior high cafeteria where everyone wants to sit and be seen at the cool table with the cool kids.
So Jesus watches this for a while, and then he launches into a story, which basically skewers the pretensions of all the guests. He says, “When you get invited to a banquet, don’t seat yourself in a place of honor, because someone more important than you may come along, and then you will be asked to give up your seat, and you will be disgraced in front of the whole party.”
It’s like Jesus, too, has played Chutes and Ladders and is telling them: you will find yourself at the top of the chute and you will have to slide from the seat of honor all the way down to the seat of shame. Oh what a long, lonely walk it is from the first table to that one in the back near the swinging door to the kitchen.
And then, to make sure they do not confine this thinking to dinner parties, Jesus utters the great saying, “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Those who make their own honor the goal of their lives will be ashamed of themselves in the end. And those who are humble, repeatedly putting others first, will experience the true, deep and lasting honor of the Kingdom of God.
On the one hand, this is very practical advice, the kind of thing you might find in a Poor Richard’s Almanac. Humility – true humility – is always the best mindset. It is preferable, Jesus says, to let others recognize your achievements than to address them yourself.
And on the other hand, these parables go much deeper than practical advice. They speak to the arc of our lives. What if the point is not about climbing all the right ladders of achievement and prestige? What if our true purpose is to slide down as many chutes as possible in compassion and companionship, standing with our neighbors?
Psychiatrist Robert Coles tells a story about his first encounter with Dorothy Day, the great social activist, who was living and working with the poor in the slums of New York City. Coles was in Harvard Medical School at the time, proud of his status, and also proud that he had volunteered to work with Dorothy Day in helping the poor. He arrived for his first meeting to discover the famous Day deep in conversation with a dirty and disheveled street person. When she noticed Coles had come into the room, she asked him, “Did you want to speak to one of us?”
Robert Coles was astounded by Dorothy Day’s humility. She had identified so completely with what society would call a “nobody” that there was no distinction between them. Coles said it changed his life. And, he said, he learned more in that moment than in his four years at Harvard.
He saw in her a groundedness, a genuine humility. And I think we’d so ourselves a favor to understand genuine humility: it is open to new learning combined with a balanced and accurate assessment of our strengths, our imperfections and our opportunities for growth.
Genuine humility does not deny or downplay ourselves, our gifts or our accomplishments. It does not embrace low self-esteem or meekness. It does not let people walk all over us.
It is not taking on a certain posture of lowliness in order to try to curry favor with God. Indeed, the God who created us with all our strengths and challenges looks to us to utilize those strengths while working out those things that challenge us.
True humility involves understanding our contributions in context, in relation to both the contributions of others and our own place in God’s Kingdom. True humility says “I’m here to get it right, not to be right.”
I started today talking about a game, Chutes and Ladders and I’ll finish with another, slightly more challenging one: Jeopardy. Ken Jennings won $2.5 million dollars playing 74 consecutive games. Now he’s the host.
During a recent taping of the show while they were resetting the stage, Ken asked the studio audience, “Any other questions for me while we have a moment?” A gentleman asks him. “Do you ever finish a particular Jeopardy episode and at the end realize “boy, that contestant don’t know a darn thing?” Ken laughs out loud. Then he replies, “I lost to a lovely lady from Ventura named Nancy. She knew Final Jeopardy and I didn’t. And you know what she thought? “That guy doesn’t know a darn thing.” True humility. Ken let’s others sing his praises. And he pokes fun at himself. Because he knows he’s smart guy and he knows what he did. And also he know he still has more to learn.
We can’t free ourselves from the status system. Jesus points that out by assuming that there will always be a table and there will always be fighting for higher positions at the table. Where we have a choice is where we choose to sit. And if we ask, Jesus to be with us to help us take the lower seat, help us to embrace groundedness and save us from false humility.
We won’t need to make a big show of it. We will know our true worth. We will know deep in our bones that our worth is not determined by where we sit, but by whom we are loved. And we are loved by Jesus. Amen.