The Seat of Honor and The Seat of Welcome

TranscriptioN

It's good to see you this morning on this holiday weekend. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and I am grateful to be with you here this morning.

One of the books that I read several years ago that had a lasting impact on how I view ministry and think about even the process of starting a church is a book called “The Gospel Comes with a House Key,” and it is all about the nature of hospitality and ministry together. The author of that book shares the story of her conversion to Christianity, where it wasn't a result of preaching or even going to a church, but it was the result of regular invitation to this couple's home for dinner weekly, or at least on a regular basis. The husband did happen to be a pastor, but it was over the course of those dinners that conversations were exchanged, that life was shared together, that trust was built, and because of all that, Jesus became trustworthy. And so, hence the title, “The Gospel Comes with a House Key.”

In today's gospel passage, Jesus is having a midday meal with a Pharisee, a ruler of the Pharisees, and he shares two parables about how humility and hospitality are supposed to be dispositions of the people who are going to follow Jesus as their Lord. It's part of what it looks like to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. They're characterized by humility and hospitality. And so, as we look at the nature of those two things—humility and hospitality—let me begin by praying for us.

“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”

In the first parable that we read, Jesus tells this story about somebody who's invited to a banquet, and having somebody's seat in close proximity to the host or the organizer or the special guest is a place of honor. It's a measure of status in the company of all who are gathered. In attempting to put oneself at the seat of honor, someone risks something. You risk the embarrassment of misunderstanding how important you are and being reminded of the social ladder when the host comes and they bring you down some seats in front of everybody, and they make room for those who should rightly be there. Instead, Jesus says it's better to start by choosing the lowest seat, and then when the host recognizes you, they can say, “Oh friend, please don't sit all the way over there; come closer.” And they're invited into the seat of more honor in front of everybody. And on the one hand, it sounds like practical wisdom, and it is, but it's also a parable about the nature of the kingdom of God.

All of our passages have something to do with humility or hospitality this morning. We read one from the book of Ecclesiasticus, which, if you're new to the Anglican tradition, you may not have even heard of that book before. The book of Ecclesiasticus is also called the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and in the Anglican tradition, sometimes in our daily readings and in our Sunday readings, we're encouraged to read these books that are called deuterocanonical books or the Apocrypha. They're part of our readings as we live together and learn about life in the kingdom of God. And they give us wisdom, and they give us wisdom from a really unique perspective. These are Second Temple Jews who are living in the centuries leading up to the New Testament, and so we're given perspective on God's wisdom in those centuries in the Apocrypha.

And it was interesting, in today's passage from Ecclesiasticus, we hear about the nature of pride, and he gives some really tangible examples. He says that sovereignty passes from nation to nation because of injustice, insolence, and a lust for wealth. Also, sort of famously, today's king is tomorrow's corpse, right? And ultimately, this is continuing in the biblical tradition of wisdom as it reminds us that the beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord.

To abandon the Lord is the beginning of pride. To move from dependence on the Lord to autonomy and to self-reliance is that soil that the seeds of pride are sown into. And I also love that Ben Sirah reminds us that pride and arrogant disregard for other people—those aren't things that were created for people. So when you see people acting in them, it's making them less human, not more human. As image bearers of God, we were created for fellowship with God, to be in the presence of God. If you think back to Genesis, walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And pride and arrogant disregard for others are foreign to who we are. They don't help us to see ourselves rightly, to see God rightly, or to see creation rightly. They make us less human, not more human. And that's precisely because the nature of pride is to move away from the Creator, to move away from the God who's made us and loves us, and therefore to move away from wisdom. Wisdom begins with the fear and knowledge of the Lord.

It sort of reminds me of a child. This isn't my child; this is a hypothetical child. This reminds me of a child—it might have been even me when I was young—who receives for himself a model airplane. And having never built a model airplane in this child's life, and they can't read, they decide that they want to try and do it themselves. And they say, “I don't need those instructions, I can do it myself.” Now they tear open all the packaging, they start thumbing through all the parts, getting them out of all the places that they're being held, with their labels, the numbers that they are according to the instructions, and they start just gluing everything together according to how they think it ought to be. And then they start putting the decals on, because that makes the plane look really cool, but all the decals are in the wrong place, and what's left is a bunch of pieces that are still in the box.

Now imagine, as that child looks at their plane that they've made, they look back at the box, they get frustrated, because what they've just built looks nothing like what's on the box. And then they go to their parent and they say, “This is broken, it looks nothing like how it's supposed to look. The parent's gonna lovingly say, “Hmm, let me wonder with you for a moment. I think you're right. I wonder how that might have happened. I wonder how those instructions might have been helpful in showing you where all those pieces go to that model airplane, and where the decals go.” And that is the story of what we do over and over again when we give in to pride, which is foreign to us. And this nature of insolence or disregard for others—we say, God, I don't know how things ended up like this. This is not at all how they're supposed to look.

But we've moved from dependence on God, and we've said, I can do this myself. And I'm reminded again of Genesis chapter 3, when God is walking in the garden in the cool of the day, expecting to find fellowship with these image-bearers that he's made. This was their routine, to be in fellowship with one another, in dependence on their Creator. And he comes, and he asks them this question; He says, “Where are you?” The reality is, they've hidden themselves. They know that things are not the way they're supposed to be. They're realizing that they were the reason that it ended up that way. And God invites them in with this question: “Where are you?”

When pride has made a mess of things, God lovingly invites us back with that question over and over again, which is an invitation to ask what we were made for, which is fellowship with God. To forsake the Lord is the beginning of pride, and pride, autonomy, insolence, this blatant disregard for others—those things were not created for human beings. We were created out of love from God, for fellowship, for union with our Creator. And it's in returning to that fellowship over and over again that we learn not only who God is, but what we were made for, and what creation itself was made for. It gives us a right perspective and true wisdom.

One of the things that I've been reading lately is a book called “The Apostolic Fathers,” this collection of writings of people who came right after the Apostles died. So these were—some were the people that the Apostles ordained. Whether or not they were ordained by the Apostles, they were like the second and third generation.

And in the Letter to Diognetus, there's a lot of really interesting political theology in there, so if you want to look it up online, you can read through it. The author in that book touches on this connection between humility, and service, and rightly seeing the world. And he says this: by loving God, you will be an imitator of His goodness. And don't be surprised that a person can become an imitator of God. One can, if God's willing, for happiness is not a matter of lording it over one's neighbors, or desiring to have more than weaker people, or possessing wealth and using force against one's inferiors. No one is able to imitate God in those things.

On the contrary, these things are alien to His greatness. So he's continuing in this biblical tradition of humility—becoming humble, following the Lord, rightly esteeming ourselves in God's sight, taking the posture of serving others. That's going to be the way that the kingdom of God is revealed.

And we learn exaltation in God's kingdom when we learn humble service in God's kingdom. And so, along with this parable about humility, Jesus gives another parable in verse 14 about the nature of hospitality, which is the love of strangers. Hospitality is something that ought to be given in this parable, not exchanged.

There seems to be this problem that Jesus is addressing where people would throw a banquet, and there's sort of this transactional disposition behind it. In this scenario where you're showing hospitality in a very calculated and transactional way, you're expecting something in return. Doesn't this now obligate my guest to throw a banquet on par with what I've just done? Can I invite somebody who's going to return the favor in the future? And you're kind of looking in a calculated way at who you can invite so that you can benefit from them. Who can I invite that's going to return the favor?

Instead, what Jesus says is the one who follows him is the one who gives hospitality without reciprocity. That we give hospitality, we don't exchange it. And I'm struck then by the reading that was read in the book of Hebrews, where it says, let mutual affection continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. And that reference goes back to Genesis chapter 12, where Abraham is welcoming three strangers in, and he gives them shelter, some water, some food, and come to find out that these strangers that he welcomed in happen to be divine messengers who are giving him a message from the Lord for him and for his wife.

One of the keys from this book that I had mentioned earlier, “The Gospel Comes with a House Key,” is that hospitality moves people from being strangers to neighbors, and by God's grace from neighbors to the household of God. Hospitality moves people from being strangers to neighbors, and by God's grace from neighbors to becoming the household of God. And hospitality then, like welcoming the stranger, is a practice that is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, and it's because of Israel's history, but also because of Israel's history, we find it in the teachings of Jesus. And so it's always been foundational work in the kingdom of God, because we don't know as we welcome people in who we're inviting and what we're going to learn of the kingdom as we invite them into our lives. So we make space for all kinds of people at our tables.

There was a previous church that I'd worked at. One of the things that we did at that church that was really helpful—for a season we had these weekly dinners, and we would invite our neighbors over to our household. And Ashley and I, back then, we lived in an apartment complex over on Columbia Pike in Arlington. It was a really diverse apartment complex, and so we started inviting our neighbors over. Some we had gotten to know, some we didn't. We met some neighbors who were Ethiopian Orthodox, some who had completely deconstructed from the faith, some who were Christians but going to another church, some who had moved here from Guatemala and they were going to another church. And in fact, I remember as we dinnered, the Guatemalan family had asked if I would come to their church sometime and teach church history, and he would translate it into Spanish for their small group, which I thought was such a cool opportunity as we got to know our neighbors.

All of us ate around the table, and we learned to make conversations and learned to get to know each other from our different vantage points. We eventually moved to Alexandria from there, and then Springfield, and we've met new neighbors. But I think back to that season as something so helpful and paradigmatic for moving forward as I think about how the kingdom of God moves forward. Hospitality opens us up to receiving God's kingdom work in other people, and when we open our tables, we open ourselves up to being surprised by the kingdom work that God's doing in others.

When you look at the website for the church, if you go to the "About Us" page, one of the first core values of our church is hospitality. And there are a lot of ways that we do this. I was even thinking this morning that big three-by-three-foot sign over there and hanging it up in the morning is an act of hospitality because I want people to easily find where they're going, right? We give a lot of thought to: how do people enter the room? What does it feel like? How are people welcomed when they're here by you? These are all really important things on a Sunday morning to show hospitality and welcome people into the congregation. I'm always grateful when we are not on a holiday weekend and we pack out these chairs and someone thinks, I should get more chairs so that other people can sit here. That is an act of hospitality.

So, to commend you all for doing a great job and to encourage you to keep on doing that as we move forward. And then beyond Sundays, there are ways that we want to show hospitality in these formation groups as we welcome people into our homes and eat together. And I'm always encouraged when I hear stories of you all getting together on your own without any prompting from me. I love hearing, “Oh I got coffee with so-and-so and we had a great conversation.” Those are acts of hospitality that welcome in the kingdom in surprising ways that we wouldn't have anticipated had we not taken the risk to get to know somebody. And it can feel a little bit like that.

And we do have to be wise and we have to have appropriate boundaries, of course, but there is a goodness to the risk of welcoming those who are not yet known with generosity and kindness, because that's one of the ways that the love of God is known in community. When you think of your own story, who welcomed you in and how have you experienced the love of God? And that's why I love celebrating house blessings. So to those of you who have just recently moved—I saw some nods like, oh yeah, we got to talk to Morgan about that. I love doing house blessings because it fills our imaginations for the ways that God can use the places that we live, the tables that we eat around, and the backyards that we play in. And so if you've never had a house blessing and you want one, please let me know. I would love to get that on the calendar and we can talk about that.

So humility and hospitality, as we close—these are challenging. They're challenging, but they're worth it. I love how one commentator framed humility and hospitality in this passage. He says, humility and openness to all are two major facets of following Jesus's ethics. For the disciple, service and meeting the needs of others is not an option. It's the appropriate response to Jesus's call to follow him. The church is not to worry about the chair of honor. Rather, it is to make chairs available to those who are looking for a place to sit—even for those who think there are no chairs for them.

Humility is challenging because it requires us to be secure in who God's made us without thinking of ourselves too highly. In other words, it's the constant work of rightly esteeming yourself in God's sight. And it also requires us seeing and loving the image of God in other people when they might be challenging. When there's that one neighbor that you wish wasn't your neighbor. Hospitality can be challenging for several reasons. It requires risk of opening ourselves up to receive other people into our lives. It costs us something to feed people.

I was realizing the other day that if we're gonna have people over, our bathroom door needs to be able to lock. So I had to go to Home Depot and buy a handle and replace it so that we could actually lock our bathroom. It's an act of hospitality. You're welcome the next time you visit. Right? It costs us something. It is risky doing life together when you see the ways that I am—I'm gonna use myself—when I am not a perfect parent, or in the ways that I don't keep my home as clean as I wish it were. And there's some risk of rejection when you invite somebody over or take the initiative to invite someone to coffee or a meal somewhere. That can be really hard. There's a lot that goes into that. But let's continue in mutual love as a community.

Grow in humility and answer God's call to come back when he keeps asking over and over again, “Where are you?” He is inviting us into his life. And because he invites us in, as we respond, we can invite others into that life as well. Learn dependence on him and live out of that deep place of abiding in God's presence. And then continue in hospitality to learn more about the love of God and the work of Christ in you and in others.

Let me pray for us.

“O God, who created all peoples in your image, we thank you for the diversity of races and cultures in this world. Show us your presence in those who differ from us, and enrich our lives with their fellowship, until our knowledge of your love is made perfect in our love for all your children, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.