Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
September 2, 2007: Pentecost 14
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 14:1, 7-14
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.”
There’s a riveting exchange in Chapter 2 of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s famous novel set in Russia in the 1860’s. Raskolnikov, a young student in serious trouble, goes to a tavern and meets the unemployed Marmeledov whose addiction to alcohol is destroying his life. Raskolnikov and others in the tavern within earshot listen as Marmelodov tells his story.
As you can imagine, it’s not a pretty story. Marmeledov’s drinking has ruined his health and upended his family. His teenage daughter, Sonya, his wife, and their younger children live impoverished in a small room and never have enough to eat. Things have become so desperate, in fact, that Sonya has been selling herself on the street. Even with this, her father does not, cannot mend his ways. He steals money from his wife and borrows money from Sonya for drink.
It’s a horrific tale in which Marmeledov portrays himself as the villain, and so all are shocked when at the end of it, Marmeledov turns to those who have been listening to him and asks: “Do you not pity me?”
“What are you to be pitied for?” asks the tavern-keeper.
“There’s nothing to pity me for!” Marmeledov replies. “I ought to be crucified…not pitied! (And then pointing to his empty glass). . . “Do you suppose…that this pint…has been sweet to me? It was tribulation I sought at the bottom of it, tears and tribulation, and I have found it…but (God) who has had pity on us all will pity us…, God, who has understood all (people) and all things (will pity us.)
At this Marmeledov begins to describe his idea of what will happen at the last judgment.
God will call forth the good and the evil, the wise and the meek. God will judge each of them and will forgive each of them.
And then Marmeledov continues, “And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. “You too come forth,” He will say, “Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!” And we shall all come forth, without shame and shall stand before him. And God will say to us, “Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!” And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, “Oh Lord, why didst thou receive these men?” And He will say, “This is why I receive them, oh ye wise ones, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.”
Believing ourselves to be unworthy and this orientation leading to union with God: today our gospel is all about this.
As I hear myself say this, there’s a big part of me that wants to take exception. For the idea of human worth is an important good for Christian people, one that many of us struggle a lifetime to accept. And so I want to distinguish between human worth, something I believe that is of God and is in fact God-given and a sense of worthiness that’s more akin to the sense of entitlement that Jesus seems to be taking aim at in the parable he tells in our gospel this morning.
And so to our parable.
It’s no accident that this parable is told while Jesus is present at a meal with others. It’s no accident that he uses meal imagery in a parable about entitlement.
For running around and through our experience of many meals are currents of entitlement. Who, for instance, is entitled to be invited to the table? Who is entitled to sit at the head of table? Who is entitled to speak? Who is entitled to sit and be served? Who is entitled to the best piece of meat or the first slice of cake?
Years ago I was doing some counseling work with a woman with a husband and two teenage children. Though she, like her husband, worked outside the home, she was the one who routinely prepared the family’s meals. One day as she was serving the plates in the kitchen, it dawned on her that instead of giving her husband the best looking pork chop, that she could give it to herself. “It was about time,” she said, “After all these years I realized that maybe, just maybe, I was entitled to it more than he was!”
Now while my heart soared like an eagle when I heard her say this (because I believed it was about her claiming her worth) her comment does get at one of the fundamental issues with entitlement—in it, we lay claim to something, we take something in relationship to others who will then not have it.
In a sense, then, entitlement is all about deeply held assumptions, oftentimes unconscious, about what we have a right to lay claim to—what we are due simply because of who we are. And so our entitlement is as close to us as our very breath, as natural to us, Jesus would observe, as which seat we typically find for ourselves at a communal meal.
And, of course, this is the hard part. For each of us has little idea of the specific entitlements we’re operating out of. It’s natural and invisible to us. Along with this, each of us tends to be clueless about the effect of our entitlement on others, for our entitlement has edged others out, and so we will not be sitting across the table from them, passing them the food or hearing their voices.
And so I believe no one of us can escape a sense of entitlement and the negative effect it has on someone else. The question becomes: what does God in Christ tell us about this predicament and how does God in Christ open for us the possibility of a new way that is more grounded in God, more connected to others?
The story of God in Christ is a story about God letting go of God’s own entitlement to be first, to be the worthiest and to take the highest, most honored position at the banquet table at the center of the universe. God in Christ is about the worthy one, the one who is entitled to it all, taking his place with the rest of us in the cheap seats (to mix the metaphors).
And so for us the cheap seats are forever a place where Christ is likely to show up, the perspective from which Christ is likely to see things. And though we will never be able to let go of our many sources of entitlement, we can place ourselves at the table in this community, at the table in our workplaces, at the table in our civic life with those strangers whom our entitlement would normally have shut out. We can place ourselves at the table and trust that in the sharing of food and conversation, God’s saving realm will be made manifest. And perhaps in that process we will even be fed in a new way—if we keep coming back, if we keep coming back to the table.
Many years ago I found myself sitting in an Al-Anon group. My situation in a sense had forced it upon me. I sat in the group, chair pulled slightly apart from the table, determined not to be a part of the gathering, nurturing an idea that someone of my education, my accomplishments, would not, could not find anything there of use to me. I sat at the table, my chair pulled slightly apart. But as the hours and then the weeks unfolded and as I saw that my life was reflected in the lives of these strangers, strangers who just like me had been humbled by a family member’s illness, some of my entitlement melted away and was replaced by something far more precious, far more spacious—companionship, kinship, a greater understanding of my humanity and my need of others.
At the end of each meeting we stood up, held hands and said these words, words that may be familiar to many of you, words that I will end with today:
“Keep coming back; keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it”
Works Cited or Consulted
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
