Sunday August 28th, 2022 Worship

I felt at a loss for where to start this week’s sermon, as I dwelled in the texts, because hosting large gatherings, especially with strangers, feels so far removed from the lives we have been living for the past few years. Less than two years ago, I was celebrating my first Thanksgiving here in Seattle, unable to accept any of the invitations to gather with families in my community because of the increasing rates of COVID. Even before that though, it seems like hosting meals and gatherings wasn’t something that we did very frequently. We would meet friends for coffee or for a meal, but there are so many expectations we put on ourselves when we are hosting someone at our homes. If you are like me, you stress clean as I call it, where I start to clean everything, even things that people won’t be checking, like the top of the doors. Nothing motivates me to clean quite like having people over!
Yet, this Gospel today isn’t even about just the meal, but it is about remaining humble, and, I think, also about our motivation for why we gather, who we deem worthy of gathering with us, and even about how it is that we see our value in the world. In so many ways, it feels like we place our value in things like the size of our house, the state of cleanliness of said house, what we wear, what kind of car we drive, what kind of job we have. We give power and honor to celebrities, to the people who are rich and famous. We forget that we all intrinsically have value because of our identity as children of God. Our status with God, our belovedness, is not determined by the same standards of worth that our society gives.
We are reminded of this when Jesus directs people to invite the poor, the physically infirm, and the blind (Luke 14: 13). This is about seeing all people as having worth in the eyes of God, especially those who were not considered to be a full part of society, especially because at the time diseases and blindness, etc. were associated with sin. While our views aren’t quite that extreme today, it can be really painful for people to be excluded or to have their accessibility needs dismissed or considered as an afterthought. We are instructed to look around the table and see who has not been invited or who is waiting for an invitation, and then not just bring them to the table but make sure that our table is accessible for them, as God’s beautiful children too.
It is about our motivation for extending the invitation. It’s not just about following Jesus’ command and inviting them for the sake of patting ourselves on the back for tokenizing others, and it is not something we do just to grow numbers in the seats, but it is about loving our neighbor that way that God loves us. We are unique and varied and God does not value one life more than the other, but God does ask us to change the way we value those around us. To address our conscious and unconscious biases about someone’s value in our world.
It becomes about seeing people as people, not just as objects who will give us something that we want or need. This is what Jesus is getting at when he says to not just invite the people we know will reciprocate our invitation; it’s about giving away without the expectation that what we will receive some object or invitation in return. When we give in that way, though, we do receive, something more valuable in return, genuine relationship with one another.
It is these genuine relationships that I have been thinking about in relation to humility this week, especially because I have always wrestled with what it means to be humble. I think this struggle comes from a few different things, including the large quantity of false humility in our world, the extra pressure that sometimes gets put on women to be humble, and the idea that humility is completely putting others needs and wants before our own. I think this has had some negative effects on us as a whole society because we did not always get to learn the healthy boundaries of relationships. Humility isn’t supposed to turn us into a doormat, but it is still turning us toward one another in love. Humility doesn’t tell us that we can’t work towards our goals in life, but that we should acknowledge and appreciate the people who have helped us get there along the way and help others achieve their dreams too. Humility is about creating a more connected community that is motivated by love and not just what we can get from one another. I think humility can be really beautiful when it is used to enrich peoples’ lives, not just to create more shame.
Humility is beautiful when it gets us to see the world around us in a different way, which is what Jesus is pointing us toward in today’s Gospel. Jesus is acknowledging that the value of people in the kindom is different than how they are valued by others in society. The people who have been excluded should be invited to the table, and not just as an afterthought, but as the guest of honor. It is a radical shifting of how people relate to others around them. But, I think that this can be extended further to think about how we relate to our larger neighbor, the Earth and all that God created.
How do we value the Earth and all that God created? I’ve been seeing so many news stories this week about droughts around the world that are dropping water levels to never before seen lows, and at the same time people are trying to figure out how to hold celebrities and others with money accountable to following the water restrictions in California. Some days it feels like all we know how to do is take from the Earth. Yet, I have also experienced a completely different ways of connecting to the Earth:
When I was in college, I spent quite a bit of time studying East Asian religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism. While studying the practices of Jain monks, I learned about how they value the lives of even the smallest bugs, and go to large lengths to protect them. They would not boil their own water, and there were only certain foods that they could eat so as not to disturb or accidentally kill the bugs in the soil or on the vegetables. And, when they walk, they have special shoes with holes in them so that they had less impact on the ground, while also sweeping in front of them with a broom to minimize the amount of bugs they would step on. As someone who grew up in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 mosquitos, I can’t imagine having that much reverence for the bugs.
So, while this was an incredible example to study, I know that it is the practice of few people in the world. But, I also took a course on Buddhism, where one of the practices we did was contemplative eating. Now, imagine sitting in a busy college dining room at breakfast time with the instruction to just slowly eat and think about what you are eating. What it was, who prepared it, who grew it, the entire process of its life from field to our plates. It was one of the most incredible experiences I have had, even though we got a lot of weird looks and questions from our friends because we did not acknowledge them in any way and just sat there eating with our eyes closed. But, it connected us with our food, our nourishment, in a way that none of us had ever experienced. It made us more grateful for all that went into feeding us on a daily basis. I took time to think about what I was eating, instead of just consuming as quickly as possible to move on to the next thing, and I became more aware of how food nourishes this body that God created with so many other things that God too created. I became more thankful for the gift of food and life.
I think humility has more to do with acknowledging who we are and whose we are, than anything else. It is a connection back to the one who created us and everything else that God created. It isn’t just a tool to be used to manipulate people into doing what we want, but it can completely change the way that we view the world if we can begin to strip away the false societal value that we place on people and things. Our worth doesn’t come from what clothes we wear or what car we drive or how big our house is, but we are inherently valuable because we are God’s created ones. Humility calls us to drop all the false notions and reclaim our identity as children of God. To acknowledge all the people who love us and support us through life. It is a reclaiming of a power and identity that we all have, not just the rich and famous, as we continue to shape our identities through genuine relationships with all that is around us. To express a word of thanks and to enjoy meals in the company of all God’s beloved, knowing that everyone has a place at God’s table.