Proper 17C (Luke 14:1, 7-14)  08-29-2010

Yesterday my family traveled to Long Island for the day, participating in a visit day that is part of my daughter’s college search. With the exception of the Hutchinson Parkway, the entire day was a great experience. And my all-knowing GPS unit quickly handled even the Parkway, so even that part of the day was just fine. Participating in the college visit day reminded me of the entire process of selecting a college. This is a big decision and the process should be a reflective exercise of what is important and an exploration of why certain items hold greater significance than others. And visiting is important also because being in a certain place and experiencing the people, the atmosphere and the surroundings is important.

However, the college selection process is also a two-sided street. Prospective students are not the only ones who get to make decisions – the college admissions offices get to make some decisions too. College applications must be filled out and submitted for review. Prospective students must write essays and list many facets of their academic, work and general life experiences. Reviewing college applications reminds me of my volunteer experience of interviewing prospective students for the US Naval Academy. After talking with the students for a bit about general information, I would ask them to describe one or two of their extracurricular activities. After listening to their description, I would ask them why the activity was so important to them…what was particularly important to them. As I listened carefully, sometimes their answers surprised me.

In our Gospel lesson this morning, Jesus was surprised by the conduct of his fellow dinner guests. He watched them select their seats and his reaction prompted him to tell them a parable…a parable about dinner seats! So, he must have been very surprised by what he saw. “Do not sit at the place of honor, but instead select a seat of lower honor and perhaps you will be moved up by the host,” Jesus tells his listeners. As Jesus was watching the dinner guests select their seats, he was watching and thinking – why is selecting the dinner seats so important to these people? And the actions of the dinner guests told the answer – the selection of the dinner seats was important to the guests because the seat told everyone at the party who they were and their importance in society. We might imagine the guests heading toward the table and rushing toward a particular seat of importance as they looked over their shoulder to be sure that their rival was not so close as to steal their coveted seat from them.

Jesus’ parable tells a different story. Jesus’ parable says, “my seat tells everyone I am a person of humility.” Jesus is teaching humility to his fellow dinner guests. But the humility of Jesus’ lesson is humility with integrity. Jesus was not teaching the dinner guests to rush toward the lowest seat in hopes that the host would parade them to a better seat…as if they were given a wonderful “red carpet” moment. This would be false humility and action such as this would lack the integrity that Jesus sought to teach. And although Jesus does not offer his guests any particular insights regarding how to act with true humility, we do hear some guidance this morning in our lesson from the Letter to the Hebrews. Our lesson begins, “let mutual love continue.” The “love” we hear in our lesson is from the Greek word “philadelphia” – meaning mutual love toward each other. The “City of brotherly love,” Philadelphia was the metropolitan center of the colony of Pennsylvania, known from its earliest days as a place of religious toleration and acceptance…a character largely different than many of the other early colonial areas of settlement. The author of Hebrews is pointing the way for us by exhorting us to engage our neighbors – all of our neighbors, in the care and affection of mutual love. With mutual love for others, the dinner guests would be more concerned with fellowship with each other and not concerned with their place at the table. They should be more concerned with getting to know each other than trying to calculate their distance from the host’s seat.

As I think back to the many prospective student interviews I conducted, I remember that I was often surprised by the answers I heard. Sometimes my surprise was the surprise of disappointment as I heard the student tell me that the importance of their experience was to help their college application and prove that they are in fact a well-rounded person. More often I was surprised at the depth of their care for others and their insightful understanding of how they had changed because of their experiences. Mutual love for others enacted in a character of honest humility is Jesus’ lesson to us today.

Why is this lesson so important? Because by doing so, “some have entertained angels without knowing it.” (Heb 13:1)  AMEN