NRS Proverbs 25
6 Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence
or stand in the place of the great;
7 for it is better to be told, "Come up here,"
than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.

NRS Luke 14
1On 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.
7 When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. 8 "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; 9 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. 10 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. 11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."
12 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. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14 And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

Dear Friends in Christ, may the Lord grant us the grace to seek him in all places and find him in all people; for the sake of Jesus the Messiah. Amen.

On the surface, today's First Lesson and today's Gospel have a lot in common. They both speak to appropriate behavior when you're invited to a banquet or a special dinner. They both recommend against putting yourself in a place of honor that might be taken from you. Likewise, they both argue that there's greater honor in being asked to take a higher seat than in being escorted to the peanut gallery after you've overstepped your bounds. But for all these similarities, there's also a world of difference between today's saying from Proverbs and the parable of Jesus in St. Luke.

The Book of Proverbs is, as you know, all about wisdom, or what the Greeks would call philosophy. In the broadest possible terms, Proverbs asks, "What is the good life?" What does it mean to be a good man or a good woman? What distinguishes a wise person from a fool? What's the right relationship of a parent to a child or a king to a subject? What Proverbs tries to do is distill the basic principles that God has woven into the fabric of creation for living well, doing right, and acting wisely. It's a good book!

But unlike Proverbs, Luke is, like all the gospels, telling a story. As you know, Proverbs is pretty much just one wisdom saying after another, but in the gospels the wise sayings of Jesus have a particular context, and in today's gospel, it's a context of conflict and hostility. In the very first verse of this morning's lesson we learn that as Jesus goes to eat a Sabbath meal with a local religious leader, the Pharisees "were watching him closely." The verb suggests that they were looking for him to mess up, which was not an especially hard thing to do given the etiquette of the ancient Middle East. Meals were not, you know, just about eating and drinking, but were really highly scripted affairs for establishing who was up and who was down, who was in and who was out, who mattered and who didn't. A meal like the one to which Jesus was invited was much more about pecking order than about breaking bread. What's more, you could only accept the invitation if you were able to reciprocate by inviting your host to a commensurate meal in your home. Not returning an invitation was considered a gross breach of etiquette. In that environment at that time, and even today, the great rule of economic life was, "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."

So, okay, you get the picture? Jesus is not on friendly ground. He's being watched closely by people who do not wish him well. He is, in other words, being set up to fail and be condemned. But instead of being all nice and diplomatic and tiptoeing around the social trap that's obviously been set for him, Jesus just plows ahead. [I love this about Jesus! It's like he says, "You wanna play? Okay, we'll play."] Now I have no doubt that Jesus was familiar with the saying from Proverbs about taking the lower place, but sharing that wisdom in this context was more than just idle conversation. Rather, what Jesus effectively does is to "dis" the pecking order. He dumps all over the carefully choreographed seating chart and the social order it represents. Even more outrageously, Jesus then gives instructions to his host instructions on who he ought to be inviting. Rather than inviting anybody who can return the favor, Jesus tells his host to invite "the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind," that is, exactly the people who have neither the means nor the opportunity to scratch anybody's back for anything. Again, Jesus is not just making a wise saying on the importance of compassion, but he's blasting away at the very foundations of a society obsessed with who's first and who's last, who's on the top and who's on the bottom.

What Jesus really brings to the Pharisee's Sabbath dinner is the perspective of the Kingdom of God. Jesus looks at all the jockeying for position from the vantage point of the rule that God will bring to earth at the resurrection of the righteous. And from that viewpoint, all these meal time rituals are not just foolish, they're comical. Because in God's Kingdom, what matters is not how people see you, but how God sees you in the light and beauty of Jesus Christ. What matters is not what place you hold in this world's pecking order, but what place God has reserved for you at the banquet of his Son.

When I was still a very young pastor, I accepted a call to succeed a man who had served that congregation for only three months. On the night before Palm Sunday, while his wife and young child were out of town, that pastor had gone into his garage, and sealing up all the cracks around the doors, had started the engine to his car. When he didn't show up for Sunday School the next morning, the vice president of the church council went to the parsonage and found the car still running with him in the front seat, dead from asphyxiation.

My first couple of years in that parish I had dozens of conversations with people who wondered why hadn't they seen, what could they have done, what was going on that led him to such a desperate act. I know something about depression, and I'm sure there was some clinical pathology driving that suicide. But I also know how this world and events in it can sometimes conspire to convince us that we're done, that life as we know it is over and we might just as well make it official. We slip, we fall, we make a bad choice, sometimes with terrible consequences: bankruptcy, divorce, addiction, scandal, maybe even arrest and incarceration. It happens, and sometimes it happens without anything really dramatic coming down on us. The ball takes a lousy bounce, the cookie crumbles. Or we just get tired, and we can't see anything beyond the burdens and the bills and the bitterness of this life.

And that's when you've got to know - you've got to know! -- there's a kingdom coming. There's a kingdom coming in whose light, says Paul, "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us" (Romans 8: 18). Whatever shame, whatever indignity we may suffer at the hands of this world or by our own sin, there is a Kingdom coming that shames our pecking orders and upends our social ladders. There is a Kingdom coming that offers us, instead, endless hope, boundless forgiveness, and eternal love. And not only is this Kingdom coming, but it's already here. It's here in the cleansing waters; it's here at the table of mercy; it's here in the Word of Jesus, calling, claiming, and commanding us to wash in the water, feast at the table, and live now the Kingdom, for the power and the glory is ours by God's grace through faith in the cross and crown of Christ Jesus our Lord.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.