"Jostling for Position with God"
There are many things to love about
living and working in Washington D.C. where, until recently, I served the
cathedral. It is a beautiful city, full of interesting people, with great
museums, good restaurants all around, and the natural world close at hand.
Every day that Kathy and I woke up in Washington I counted myself happy and
lucky to be there.
There is, however, one great
drawback. As the seat of governmental power, Washington is what we might call a
court culture, somewhat like living in a perpetual “Game of Thrones”. It is
literally true that when a powerful person walks into a room or opens their
mouth, everything else stops. So living in Washington is also like being in an
endless E.F. Hutton commercial: when a person with real or perceived power
speaks, people listen. Everyone there seems to be jostling for position with
the powerful: organizing a big state occasion ceremony at the cathedral was
like wrangling egos on a movie set. In the planning sessions for those services
the battles over who would get to be on the platform—and who could be closest
to the person of the moment--could be intense. And I’m sorry to tell you the
church folks were often worse than the politicos. During these precedence and
protocol food fights I would often wonder, “Is this really what Jesus had in
mind?”
Well, if you listen to today’s
gospel (Luke 14:1, 7-14), apparently not. In the passage we just
heard from Luke, Jesus tells us to avoid sitting in the place of honor at a
banquet lest we be told to go back down to the cheap seats. Instead, Jesus
advises that we sit in the lowest place and then be invited to move higher up. Good
advice, but I doubt Jesus would have had much of a career in Washington
protocol.
This passage is an odd one because in it Jesus
gives what sounds like just plain talk, but Luke tells us that it is a parable.
Now parable is a loaded word. In the
New Testament, a parable is a story that demonstrates or enacts something about
the nature of God. So Jesus is not really talking like Emily Post, Amy
Vanderbilt, or Miss Manners here. In this little story about where to sit at a
dinner party, Jesus is telling us something about God.
As if to emphasize what it is Jesus wants to
show us about God, he finishes the story with another piece of advice:
"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."
So at the conclusion of this gospel passage,
here is what we have: an opening parable about position and precedence with
some advice about sitting at the lowest place, and a concluding saying about
whom you should invite to your own banquet. Don’t, like a Washington hostess,
invite the rich and powerful. Be instead like God: invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and
the blind. This is theology masquerading as etiquette. If you want to jostle
for position with God, do what God does. Care about, get to know, and serve,
the poor. If you want to curry favor with God, start by currying favor with the
poor.
The poor. I remember them. We used to talk
about them a lot. How long has it been since we have heard anyone in American
public life mention the poor? In this election season we have heard about a lot
of other things—about emails and walls and syringes and hand sizes, but we have
yet to hear one serious word from either of the major candidates for president
about the poor. Hillary Clinton says, “I
believe America thrives when the middle class thrives.” Speaking to that same
middle class, Donald Trump says, “I am your voice.” But who speaks for the
poor?
Here is what Matthew Desmond, a professor of
Sociology at Harvard and author of the recent book Evicted says,
We don’t have a full-voiced
condemnation of the level or extent of poverty in America today. We aren’t
having in our presidential debate right now a serious conversation about the
fact that we are the richest democracy in the world, with the most poverty. It
should be at the very top of the agenda. [New
York Times 8/11/16]
As if to emphasize this point, this
week brought a particularly depressing anniversary. On Monday, August 22, it
was exactly 20 years since President Bill Clinton signed the so-called Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996—the law we have
come to call the Welfare Reform bill. In those 20 years the government has cut
benefits to the poor dramatically, yet the rate of what we call “deep
poverty”—the share of the population “living on a household income less than
half of the official poverty level” has increased. The current U.S. Government
poverty level is $16,000 a year for a family of two. So we are talking about
people living on $8,000 a year. And extreme poverty—people living on $2 a day
or less—has doubled since the signing of that law in 1996. To the extent they
can, most poor people cobble together an income made up of low-wage work, food
stamps, and disability benefits. And no one in this election cycle is talking
about them.
Worse than that, hardly anybody in
the church is talking about the poor this year. A couple of weeks ago someone
shared a cartoon on Facebook which accurately depicts the problem. Jesus is
giving the Sermon on the Mount. He lifts his hand and says, “Blessed are the
poor.” Someone in the crowd shouts back, “Blessed are all lives, Jesus.” We
seem to have relegated the poor to being yet another interest group iin whom we
have lost interest. But in the gospel
they are much more than that.
Those of us who follow Jesus seem to
have forgotten what Jesus himself said about his own priorities. For good and
understandable reasons we have expanded the circle of our concern to include
almost everybody, and it is right that we do so. But in expanding that circle
we seem to have forgotten that the poor stand at that circle’s very center and
demand a preferential place in our attentions. It is hypocritical to blame either
of our major party candidates for their obliviousness about poverty in America
when we have become oblivious ourselves. In focusing on giving more benefits to
those of us who are already comfortable, they are merely reading back to us our
own priorities.
Listen again to Jesus:
When you are invited to a . . . banquet,
do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than
you has been invited by your host. [And]
when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the
blind.
Taken together, these stories tell
us something about God and ourselves. You and I are like guests at an exclusive
cocktail party who spend our time sucking up to the host, and it turns out that
the host wants us to turn our attention to the people who couldn’t get into the
party in the first place. We tend to think that we can curry favor with God by
listing our accomplishments. We are a bit like people on the cathedral platform
jostling for the position closest to the most famous and powerful person. Jesus
knows we can’t help ourselves in this regard, that we will continually fall for
the bright shiny objects of fame and power and seek to have them for ourselves.
And here is his point: if you want to
get in good with God, turn your attention away from those trinkets and turn
toward the concrete reality of people who are up against it. If you want to
jostle for position with God, do so by knowing and loving and serving the
people everyone else has forgotten. Most of the things we value are worthless.
And the people we often call worthless mean the most to God.
“I believe America thrives when the
middle class thrives.” “I am your voice.” Our political leaders will only speak
for the poor when we who follow Jesus speak for them. Churches all over America
are looking for new and innovative programs to make themselves relevant to a
post-Christian age. How about we start with the big idea that Jesus gives us. Jesus’s persistent calls for us to love and
serve the poor tell us something deep and true and important not only about the
poor but about what it is to be human in the first place. Living in the
affluent part of America and trying constantly to prove our worth to ourselves and
others is exhausting. As Lily Tomlin said, “Even if you’re winning the rat
race, you’re still a rat.” The poor have nothing and yet they are blessed. They
are us, denuded of all the worthless stuff with which we encase ourselves. All human
beings—especially the poor--are blessed in and of themselves. We do not need
all the effluvia we tack on to ourselves to be important. We matter, as the
poor matter, because we bear the basic dignity of what it means to be human. We
honor that dignity when we honor those who have nothing, who most purely
reflect human dignity back to us. And that dignity, borne and redeemed by God
in Jesus, is all that finally counts about us and about those we serve.
Our political leaders will only wake
up to the importance of poverty in America when we wake up to it ourselves. And
we will only begin to take it in as we come to see ourselves in those who are
up against it. We reject the poor because we deny the possibility of being poor
ourselves. But given the world’s economic, environmental, and social fragility,
each of us could be wiped out in a moment. Accepting one’s vulnerability is a
hard but vital spiritual task. And it’s the basic first step of what it means
to follow Jesus. So let’s take that step and see where that journey takes us. Let’s
make poverty in America both a social and a spiritual priority. Maybe then our
politicians will listen. Maybe then we’ll all have jostled ourselves into a little
bit better position with God. Amen.
