A sermon on Luke 14:1, 7-14
Preached at Ballston Spa UMC on Sunday, August 31, 2025

Would you pray with me?

God, you call both the rich and the poor to your table, and give the best place to the poor. Thank you for calling us together into your presence here today. Shape our hearts and minds to match yours. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

As someone who is currently planning a wedding, I feel personally attacked by our gospel passage this morning. As many of you probably know, there is nothing more stressful during wedding planning than seating arrangements. The only thing that gives seating arrangements a run for its money in terms of stress is figuring out who to invite in the first place. The RSVPs are due tomorrow, and this is what the lectionary reading is for today?

Now, truthfully, I have nothing to complain about when it comes to wedding planning. My partner, Ian, has been great about splitting the work with me, my mom and my future mother-in-law have been incredibly supportive and helpful, my wedding party is full of people who ask good questions and come up with good solutions, and we’ve been able to save and make economical decisions throughout the process, so we’re not breaking the bank. I’m very lucky. But our passage this morning sends shivers up my spine. What if someone sits at the wrong table? What do I do??

Because everyone we’ve invited to the wedding is someone we want to be at the wedding. That’s been the most beautiful part of this whole process: it’s a celebration not only of the lifelong connection that Ian and I are promising ourselves to, but of all the connections that led us up to this point. We want our family members there. We want our friends. We want people who have been important to us throughout our lives to all join together in one place and celebrate with one another. We want all these folks to be there. We want to throw a banquet for them.

But there are, of course, always people who you want to honor at your wedding, people who have been particularly important in your life. I simply don’t know what I’d do if someone sat in my future mother-in-law’s seat. I don’t know what I’d do if someone sat in my mom’s seat. Like I said, everyone we’ve invited is someone we want to be there, someone we’re connected to, and I can’t imagine any of them just waltzing up to a table close to the front and disregarding the seating arrangements. But I dread even the thought of conflict at my wedding reception. I can’t imagine having to tell someone to move down the table.

And of course, once we get past the seating arrangements in the passage, Jesus hits me hard with this comment about the guest list. “Don’t invite people just so you’ll get invited to their wedding.” Now, we didn’t do this, in the end, but there was a phase in early guest-list-planning where we had quite a few names on there because they invited us to their wedding. In one of the few times Ian has been a stereotypical man during this process, Ian didn’t understand why these people made the list. “Why are we inviting five Sarahs? I don’t even know the last one, and she lives in Texas!” Sarah Timaeus Bowman, if you’re watching, know that I fought for you and we’ll come visit you!

But Ian wasn’t really aware of that standard of reciprocity, those expectations that we have. If a cousin invites you to their wedding (or a cousin of your mother invites you to your second cousin’s wedding), you invite them to your wedding. You’re connected, and this is how you honor that connection. In the end, we really had to trim down our guest list and some of those folks came off, but it was a tough decision.

I don’t think Jesus is really coming after those invitations, though. Jesus is reprimanding the “send them an invitation so they give you a good gift” kind of invitations. I thought that was a joke, something that a bridezilla would do on some reality TV show, but I’ve been surprised to hear folks say that to me as I stressed out about the guest list. “Just pay for the invitation! They’ll never come, but they’ll buy something nice off the registry.” It breaks something in my brain to hear that. Why would I invite someone I don’t want to be there, just for the gift? Why host them if I’m not really connected to them?

Because I really do think that Jesus is trying to get us to think about connection through these teachings. Jesus is asking us to think through who we’re connected to, and why, and what impact that has for how we treat one another.

Here’s what I mean:

First, notice who Jesus is eating with: a leader of the Pharisees. The same Pharisees who have been testing Jesus, who have been disagreeing with him, are now eating with him? Not only one Pharisee, coming to Jesus in the night, like Nicodemus, but a leader of the Pharisees has invited Jesus over for a meal on the Sabbath.

What’s going on here?

Well, Jesus was connected to the Pharisees. In fact, he may have been a Pharisee himself.

When we get into the story of the gospels, we tend to forget that Jesus was Jewish. He was trained as a teacher, well-versed in Jewish scriptures, and he spends much of his ministry discussing, and sometimes arguing, about how to interpret those scriptures. While we can’t know for sure, a lot of his teachings and the way that he taught are very similar to how the Pharisees spoke and taught. Jesus is called a rabbi in the gospels and this makes sense: the Pharisees are the predecessors of today’s rabbis. They’re not the villains of the gospels. They’re Jesus’s spiritual family.

And don’t we always save our harshest words for those closest to us?

Second, the scripture tells us that they were “watching him closely.” The part of the scripture that we didn’t read this morning is another story of Jesus healing on the Sabbath, coming right after the story we read last week. This leader has invited Jesus over for the first-century Jewish version of Sunday lunch, but he also knows that Jesus has been messing around and breaking the rules. Jesus is that one cousin at the big family meal who can’t help but stir the pot, so all the other cousins are watching him to see what he’ll do next.

And the third thing I want us to notice is that Jesus speaks to the person who invited him. He was there because he was wanted. We could see this as a trap or a trick, I suppose, but that’s not the vibe I get from this dinner. It’s not like Judas in Gethsemane or the time that scholars try to back Jesus into a corner by asking about taxes. This is a big sabbath meal. Folks are talking. And Jesus notices what’s going on, and comments on it. The discussion is welcome, because they’re all connected. They value one another.

But Jesus wants them to notice what’s going on in their connection. He notices how the guests are choosing the place of honor, and he’s uncomfortable with it. “Look, I don’t think any of us should be trying to be up at the place of honor,” he says. “Imagine if someone more important than you were invited to this meal! You’d feel foolish being told to move to the bottom of the table. Don’t get too full of yourself. Better to be humble”

We don’t get to hear anyone else’s response to what Jesus said here. Maybe they argued. Maybe they just took the point. But they didn’t kick him out, and he continues to think about how they organize their dinners. “In fact,” he says, “it’d be better if we did away with all of this. When you plan a banquet, don’t invite people who are just going to invite you back. Don’t play with favors. Invite people who can’t pay you back: the poor, the sick, those who can’t work, those who need care. That’s the best way to do this.”

Jesus is getting at the problem he’s seeing at dinner: we have forgotten that we’re all connected. Not just friends, not just family, not just the people we share our meals with, but everyone. It’s a radical idea for a Sunday lunch, but radical in the original sense of the word: to grasp something at the root. “Here is the root of what’s wrong here,” Jesus says. “We have forgotten that we’re all connected, and that we all belong to each other. We all owe each other.”

When you’re jockeying to sit at the right hand of the head of the table, you are forced to forget that you’re connected. You have to step on people along the way. Instead of trusting your connection to your host, instead of trusting that you’ll have enough, you break your connections with those around you to try to get ahead.

And it’s the same with money, and, I’d argue, health and productivity. If you are only focused on how much you can earn, if you put profit over people, you’ll have to forget that we’re all connected. The boss can’t make everything on his own: he is connected to the workers, because it’s only by their work that the business runs. When we forget that, when we forget that we are connected, rich and poor, Jesus calls us to reconnection. And, speaking for myself, how often have I lost touch, lost connection with someone when they dropped out of work, or when they became sick and I didn’t see them as often? When we are focused on what we’re achieving rather the people around us, and we forget that we’re connected, Jesus calls us to reconnection.

With this in mind, I suppose I’m not so nervous about my seating chart after all.

Because everyone at my wedding is someone I want to be there. There are others I want there, of course, and not everyone I want to be there will be able to make it, but I’m guaranteed that each person will be there because they’re someone I’m connected to. They’d understand that we’re saving special seats for some folks today and they’ll be glad to move if they need to, because they know that there will be another day when the meal’s in their honor. There will be more meals and more celebrations, because we’re all connected. We all belong to each other. We all owe each other this kindness.

Just like we owe it to every other person on this planet. Across the globe and down the street, we are all connected. We all belong to each other. We all owe each other. And I think it’s the work of a lifetime to learn to live like it.

But that’s what Jesus calls us to: a life a connection, no repayment required.

What a gift.

Amen.