At the height of summer here in Northern California, in the midst of what scientists say is the worst megadrought in 1,200 years, the Prophet Jeremiah’s contrast between the living water of a river or spring and the stagnant water left in a cracked cistern has special resonance.  Jeremiah was speaking to people living in an arid Mediterranean climate not unlike our own.  During the long dry season, people relied on water stored in cisterns—bell-shaped reservoirs hewn from bedrock to collect surplus water from the brief rainy season.  A cracked cistern, from which water slowly seeped away, was not reliable, not life-giving.

What Jeremiah was really talking about, of course, was not water, but idolatry.  The people had turned away from the one true God—the stream of living water—and instead put their trust in false gods that like cracked cisterns gave the illusion of providing life but were not actually reliable.  Sound familiar?  The false gods may have different names now, but so often we too are guilty of putting the pursuit of something other than God at the center of our lives.  What do we worship?  Health, wealth, technology, social status?

Today’s gospel reading reminds us that pursuit of social status—the jockeying for position, putting ourselves above others—is a form of idolatry that distracts us from worshiping God.  In this excerpt from Luke, Jesus is invited to dinner and uses the occasion to offer advice to the guests and their host.  Jesus tells the guests:  don’t take the best seat.  Take the worst seat.  Be humble—if you are, you will be exalted.  Jesus tells the host:  don’t invite the privileged people who can return the favor.  Invite the poor and the differently-abled to your table—the ones who cannot return your hospitality and cannot raise your status.  If you do this, you will be rewarded at the resurrection of the righteous.

But just as Jeremiah is not really talking about water, Jesus is not really talking about good manners.  Jesus uses the metaphor of a social gathering to describe the kingdom or reign of God.  This is a direct challenge to the status-based patronage system that characterized 1^st century Palestine, in which social status depended on the ability to cultivate relationships with those of higher status.  But, as Episcopal priest and commentator Whitney Rice has observed, we should notice what doesn’t happen here.[1]  You might expect Jesus to promise an end to the whole patronage system in general and to status-based seating in particular—that He would say “no more jockeying for position and status”; in the kingdom of God, no one will have to jockey for a privileged place at the table.  But Jesus does not say that.  Implicit in His advice is the assumption that the status system is what it is, and that we will have to continue to work within it.  What He does promise is that if we act with humility now, we will be rewarded later.  Does that mean we will be rewarded later with the best seat at the table?  That doesn’t sound like the Jesus we promised to follow at our baptism.

Whitney Rice offers a different, and I think, compelling interpretation of this passage.  She asks, what if what Jesus has come to free us from is not low-status (the humiliation of sitting at the foot of the table), but from the tyranny of status-seeking itself?[2]  What if that status-seeking, that unrelenting drive to prove that we are “more than” by making others “less than,”—what if that is one of the false gods we worship?  Could it be that Jesus came to free us from that bondage, and to reorient us toward the true God, the God before whom all are equal and all are loved simply because they ARE, not because of what they do or have or where they sit at the Great High Feast?

Absolutely!  God loved each one of us into being, just as we are, perfect in God’s sight.  God loves us still, no matter what.  We do not need to prove that we are worthy of God’s love by grabbing at more and more shiny rings, by adding to our resumes, by acquiring more.  When we can rest confidently in the unconditional love of God, we will know that it doesn’t matter where we sit—that there is always enough room at the table for all of God’s children.  And if you find yourself struggling to believe that you are enough, if you feel that you need to prove yourself worthy, ask God to help you believe, to help you choose to take the lower seat and allow others to take the higher seat not out of a sense of false humility but out of a sense of abundant blessing, of God’s ample provision for all of God’s children.

A world like that sounds like the world described in today’s Epistle, an excerpt from the Letter to the Hebrews attributed to the apostle Paul that offers instruction about life in community.  “Let mutual love continue.”[3]  What does that mean?  The Greek word translated as mutual love here is philadelphia, which has a connotation of sibling love, reflecting the theology that we are all children of the same God.  As the Presbyterian pastor and scholar Christopher T. Holmes notes, “mutual love is a shorthand for practices and dispositions that preserve and strengthen the community.”[4]  Indeed, you could say that Hebrews offers us a different way to measure congregational vitality—it reminds us that in God’s economy, it isn’t the number of programs or the quality of the worship that reveals the health of a worshiping community, but rather, it is the way that people treat one another—that is, “the demonstration of deep love, radical hospitality, and solidarity with those on the margins….”[5]

What does that “demonstration of deep love, radical hospitality, and solidarity with those on the margins” look like in our context?  Here are a few examples.  Welcome the stranger.  Get involved in efforts to resettle refugees in our community—see the announcements in the bulletin for information about some upcoming informational meetings.  Think about who we DON’T see in church, and what barriers might be keeping them from attending.  Ask yourself, what would it take to make St. Martin’s a more welcoming and inclusive church?  Think about signing up to help staff our table at the Davis Farmers Market through the Invite Welcome Connect initiative.  Join a Sacred Ground circle or sign up for one of the upcoming diocesan workshops on racial reconciliation and healing—a great first step in doing your part to help heal the original sin of racism.  Sign up for St. Martin’s Seeds of Justice series this fall to learn about the racialized history of our land.  And no matter what you choose to do, remember the reason why you are doing it—we love because He first loved us.[6]

AMEN

[1] Whitney Rice, “What Seat Do You Choose?” Sermons That Work, August 28, 2016. https://www.episcopalchurch.org/sermon/what-seat-do-you-choose-proper-17-c-2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Hebrews 13:1

[4] Christopher T. Holmes, “Commentary on Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16,” Working Preacher, August 28, 2022.  https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22-3/commentary-on-hebrews-131-8-15-16-5

[5] Ibid.

[6] 1 John 4:19