After preaching a sermon today and after a lot of time wrestling with the lectionary for this week, I was glad to run across this wonderful and challenging sermon from Curtis Almquist, the Superior to the St. John the Evangelist Society (SSJE) up in Cambridge, MA. "Knowing Our Place," challenges me as I begin working this week at an independent, Episcopal school that largely caters to the affluent in this city. I will be eating lunch, and sometimes dinner, with the students and faculty and wonder how open our table is here ... and whether our own sense of being Christian would be challenged by Jesus' table fellowship....
Curtis Almquist, SSJE
Monastery
Pentecost XII
September 2, 2007
Luke 14:1, 7-14
There’s more going on in this story Jesus tells than meets the eye. Jesus’ most obvious point is about distinctions between people, the invidious, sometimes tempting desire to distinguish ourselves from others to make ourselves look better, more important, higher than we might otherwise appear. I’ll come back to that. There’s also something more subtle going on here in this story about who is at the table. In Jesus’ day, given the practices of both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, there were no controversies about what to eat and with whom to eat. The cultural mores were absolutely clear. Eating shows our common vulnerability. Eating is a very revealing necessity. Whether you are a prince or a pauper, you must eat. In Jesus’ day, you ate with your peers. Period. To do less, to lower yourself to some other class or caste of people would be a violation and a vulnerability to be avoided. In our own day, in our own culture, there are some similar norms.Read the rest of the sermon here.
