At the beginning of my junior year of college, I found myself in a time of social transition. As a freshman and sophomore, much of my circle of friends had come from one of two groups: the Naval ROTC and 7 other students with whom I shared a suite in a high-rise on the south end of the UNC campus. But at the end of my sophomore year, I left ROTC, sensing that I needed to go in a new direction, and I made the decision to move to a new dorm with a new roommate. So, I found myself looking for a new community, a new place to belong. I found that that place at the Baptist Student Union. Many of my fondest memories of college revolve around the folks I met at the BSU, and that’s not just because I meet Nancy there—though that’s a big part of it! There were game nights, intermural sports, retreats, Bible Studies, evenings in a packed TV room watching the latest episode of “Friends” or a UNC game, study sessions upstairs, late night conversations about all manner of topics both serious and silly.
The sense of welcome and community which I found at the BSU was largely a reflection of the personality and leadership of the Rev. Bob Phillips, the long-time Baptist Campus Minister at UNC-CH. He had a gift for welcoming all kinds of people. The BSU meet in the Battle House, the 19th century home of a UNC chancellor, and Bob helped to make that place into a home away from home for so many students over the course of 34 years.
Following Bob’s death in 2016, his obituary summed up his life’s work well: He found his calling in the campus ministry and lived it out in North Carolina in a 34-year career at UNC-Chapel Hill. He worked ecumenically as a Baptist and held yearly hospitality events for international students and encouraged "any and all" Carolina students to find leadership roles, encouraging dialogue and mutual respect among the variety of students who came to UNC. Bob helped students combine religion, science, personal faith, and a commitment to work for social justice.
One of the things that sticks out in my memories of Bob is the way he welcomed everyone, the way he made a place for different people. He wasn’t like a lot of the Baptist ministers I had meet in my young life. He was a man who was drawn to liberation theology, a school of Christian thought arising out of the experience of extreme poverty in Latin American. He took part in the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr. back in 1963. And yet he could connect with the most traditionally minded of students from the most conservative, tiny rural NC congregations. It didn’t matter if you were traditional or progressive in theology, it didn’t matter if you were black or white, male or female, rich or poor, city or country, native born or foreign born, Baptist or Catholic, Bob would greet you with a smile and he would gladly sit and listen to your struggles and provide wise, compassionate, empowering advice.
Perhaps the thing that made us feel most welcome was the meal held every Thursday night. We would come together for our weekly meeting and then, when it ended, we would rearrange the room, put up some tables, and eat together. Sometimes the meal would be prepared by a local church, sometimes one of the BSU committees would prepare it. Those meals drew us together into community. They made us feel welcome. They made us feel cared for and important. I suspect that was Bob’s intention. He knew the power of a meal and the power of hospitality to tear down walls and create relationships.
Jesus too knew the power of meals and hospitality. Jesus used meal time, used table fellowship to demonstrate what the Kingdom of God is like. In our reading this morning, Jesus is a guest at a meal in the house of a Pharisee. He observes how the guests all tried to take the best places at the table for themselves. Where one sat at a meal was an issue of social status. Meals were important social occasions and seating was hierarchical. There were places around the table for those with higher social status and places for those with lower status.
Observing the guests jockeying for the best, most honorable seats, Jesus gives what at first appears simply to be good social advice. Don’t overestimate your station. Sit in a lowly place. It’s better to be honored and asked to move to a better seat then to be embarrassed by being asked to move to a lower place.
But Jesus concludes this advice by saying “all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” The implication is that it is God who will do the humbling and the exalting.
Suddenly, Jesus’ words have been transformed from a mere piece of social advice to spiritual counsel. He is warning against pride and exhorting his hearers to humility.
Pride is listed as one of the Seven Deadly Sins because it cuts us off from God. It is trusting ourselves instead of our Creator. The apocryphal book of Sirach observes, “the beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. For the beginning of pride is sin…”. But pride also erects barriers between people. It causes us to believe that we are superior to others because of our education, class, race, job or wealth.
And this is why Jesus next turns his attention to the issue of who is on the guest list. He tells the host that in the future, he should invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind.” These are precisely the people that a self-respecting host would not invite! This is a direct challenge to his, and his guests’, pride in their social and religious status. Socially, inviting someone of a different status was highly uncommon. Religiously, there was a basis for the exclusion of the people Jesus mentioned. Leviticus forbids the lame, blind and crippled for serving as priests (21.17-21). The Jewish sect at Qumran on the Dead Sea took this exclusion even further. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, we learn that they barred the crippled, lame and blind from joining their community and even thought that such people would be excluded from God’s great victory banquet at the end of time. But these were exactly the people to whom Jesus had come declaring the Good News. These persons who were outcasts in their society would find acceptance and welcome in God’s kingdom, and so Jesus welcomed them as guests at the table and among his followers.
Humility is the key to following Jesus’ example and teaching. If pride separates, humility tears down the walls we erect between us. Humility is an honest appraisal of one’s own frailty, sinfulness, and fallibility. To be humble is to recognize one’s deep need for God. It is to understand that God is good to you, not because you deserve it, but because God is love.
This leads us to a greater sense of equality with others people, because when you realize your own sin and failure and need, it’s a lot harder to look down on or judge your neighbor. When you realize how incredibly good, how amazingly gracious God has been to you, it is easier to show similar kindness to others, to reciprocate what God has given to us. Humility opens us up to the possibility of a life of love for and service to God and neighbor. The humble person is less worried about where he or she sits at the table than with making sure there is room for others around the table, making sure that more people are invited to take a seat at that table. Humility fosters within us hospitality.
An important part of this hospitality is to listen to others and to refuse to belittle or vilify others. In light of this week’s horrific shooting at Assumption Catholic School in Minneapolis, a lot has been said about folks with mental illness and trans people. There is no evidence that either of these groups are more likely to commit a crime like this than any other group of people. In regards to trans persons, we are talking about a very small percentage of the population of the country, a vilified group within the population, a group which many of us don’t understand because they are different and we don’t share their life experiences or know a trans person. Let me suggest that instead of vilifying them, we should listen to them as they speak of their experiences. We should listen because listening is often the first act of welcoming the other; it is the step toward recognizing the other person as a human being like ourselves, one with immeasurable value in God’s eyes.
As for mental illness, mental illness is a common but often stigmatized condition. In recent decades, we have done a lot to lift the stigmatization of mental illness and we’ve done a lot to provide better care. But there is still clearly work which needs to be done. Yet we need to be reminded that most mentally ill persons are not usually a danger to other people—they may in some cases be a danger to themselves but they are not usually a danger to others. So, we need to be very careful, even while we talk about providing better care for the mentally ill—which is important—not to further stigmatize a condition that many of us, especially men, already have great trouble talking about or seeking care for, because we see it a type of weakness. It is not weakness; it is an illness of the brain just like the flu is an illness of the respiratory system and we want to encourage, not discourage, people to seek medical care.
So, listening, seeking understanding, that’s the first step to welcoming them at our table, even if we don’t understand them. It’s essential to recognize that God loves them and welcomes them and to try to do the same.
Jesus is issuing a challenge to all who hear his words. It is a challenge to set aside cultural expectations that define who is acceptable and who is not, who is in and who is out. It is a challenge to set aside our pride and instead humbly conform our lives to the values of God’s kingdom. It is a challenge to imitate him, by showing hospitality to all of God’s children. It is a challenge to welcome those whom others do not welcome, for that is exactly what Jesus has done.
Dan Clendinen tells of the wedding of Lisa, the daughter of a friend, who was marrying Chris, pastor of a church in Waco, Texas:
[T]hey wanted to invite their entire church, but budgetary constraints prohibited that. Instead, after the service, they had the local police block off the main street in downtown Waco, Texas. Guests danced in the streets and enjoyed refreshments from a Baskin Robbins ice cream cart. The gazebo in the park next to the theatre sheltered the wedding cake.
Lisa's husband, Chris, had made friends with a number of homeless men who lived under a bridge. As a pastor, Chris had employed them for odd jobs at his church. "Coyote," the leader of his homeless friends, attended the wedding in his standard attire of jeans with holes in the knees, a scraggly beard, and unwashed hair. He organized his friends to clean up the streets after the wedding, then sat on the curb with a big smile and smoked a cigar.
Another guest was Lisa's next door African-American neighbor. The little girl loved to spend time with Lisa, and really wanted to come to her wedding. So the mother, the daughter, and the grandfather all came. The 70 year-old grandfather was soon the center of attraction as he went out on the street and danced to the music. Soon the college girls were vying to dance with him.
As passersby strolled by and inquired about what was happening, they too were invited to the wedding. There were guests dressed in their nicest clothes alongside guests who wouldn't feel at home at a formal occasion. However they dressed, every person felt welcomed as an honored guest, just as God himself welcomes us to himself, and invites us to welcome each other.
Who we eat with, says a lot about who we really are. Who we associate with reveals whether our deepest values are those of the world, or those of God’s kingdom. So, people of God, who’s on your guest list? Who, Church, is welcome at our table?