Most of the time people hate being told what to do unless they want something, then they love to be told what to do in order to get it. I am an amazingly frustrating pastor to some people because they’re bent towards pragmatism and I’m often very reluctant to tell them what to do, even when they beg me. Maybe I’m just too emergent/post modern (see the t-shirt )

In the text I get to preach on this week Jesus is being about as pragmatic as you can. He’s simply laying out advice to a group of religious leaders who invited him to a sabbath meal possibly to condemn him. In Luke 14:7-14 Jesus comes across very much like a “cut to the bottom line” guy. You can re-engineer the passage and have it answer the question: “how to I gain a reward at the resurrection of the righteous?” AND “how can I receive adoration and exaltation in the presence of an audience?” It’s simple. “Take the low seat and wait for the host to promote you. When you do a meal, invite the poor and disabled instead of your friends, your relatives and the people who can reciprocate.”

OK, there it is, black and white, plain and simple, easy to follow steps to be exalted and praised in the presence of the crowd and to be honored by God at the resurrection of the righteous. It can’t get much clearer than that.

No matter how practical, pragmatic, or how “bottom line” you really are, you can’t be that way MORE than Jesus, because anyone at this point who receives this intending to employ it as a strategy to qualify for adoration and divine repayment will immediately request clarification. “How often must I do this? Who exactly must I invite? To what degree must I practice this?”

Why would we ask this? Because we approach this entire project as a form of sacrifice that we willingly undertake in order to get something that we want. In other words we are about to approach this project in exactly the same manner that we approach giving luncheons or dinners to those that we hope to use to elevate ourselves. Now instead of using the rich for our own advantage we’ll use the poor and disabled hoping to cash in on the Father with the full sanction of the Son and Jesus gives not one indication of trying to close this loop hole because he doesn’t have to.

As a pastor I get lots of other questions too. “How often do I need to attend church? How often do I need to pray? How much money do I need to give to the church? How many hours should I volunteer?” and the questions go on. They are all the same question.

In Luke again and again the focus is on eating with Jesus. Eating with Jesus is always revelatory. Jesus turns on the light and we usually don’t like how we look in his light. When Jesus turns on this light, gives us this challenge, we will begin to look bad. We can take Jesus at his word and start on this project. We can decide to devote every waking hour and every dollar in our bank accounts to putting on meals for the poor and disabled. We can labor day and night and devote ourselves 100% to this and one of two things will happen: either we’ll resent the people we’re trying to serve and resent Jesus and his impossible qualifying standards or we will begin to recognize that we’ve stopped the project and we are just now simply eating with friends, thus once again finding our pragmatic scheme come undone. If we discover that we in fact are the poor and needy then we begin to see that Jesus in fact is the host and the shepherd and that he has set a table before us in the presence of our enemies but that all is being transformed. We now see that we have been invited into a banquet for which we do not qualify, and that we are being promoted to a better seat than we deserve, and that in fact we have been blessed in such an abundant way that the most joyful, hilarious path is to start sharing our excess with others. We begin to see that even with limitations there is always more to give and always more to give to and that we no longer ask “how often must I do this” but ask “how often CAN I do this because I want to do it as much as possible.”

When Jesus sat down on a mountain side in front of a multitude of hungry people he told his disciples “you feed them” because he wanted to share his joy with them. They of course were dumbstruck and didn’t understand, so after they deferred he turned to share his joy with them all and there were baskets of food remaining.