For the past
several Sundays, we have been following the teachings of Jesus from the Gospel
of Luke. To help us remember these teachings, we have been using vanity license
plate messages.
Since this is the last Sunday for this
series, let’s see if we can remember each of these license plate messages.
We’ll put one at a time on the screen and just go ahead and shout out the
message. Hopefully, many of you will
remember these. So, let’s look at the first message:
KISS – Keep it simple, saint. This was the
story where Mary and Martha spent time with Jesus. Martha missed out on
learning from Jesus because she was distracted by being too busy, while Mary
kept things simple by focusing on what Jesus wanted to tell her.
NOK2OPN – Knock to Open. This is where Jesus
taught the disciples how to pray by teaching them the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus said
that all we need to do is to knock and Jesus will open the door to us. That’s
all we need to do.
ENUF – Enough. Jesus teaches us the meaning of
enough. He tells us to guard against all
kinds of greed and to not store up treasure for ourselves but to instead, be
rich toward God.
REDE2DN – Ready to the end. Jesus tells us
to always be ready in our faith because Jesus will come back at an unexpected
hour. Be ready to the end.
STAN4ME – Stand for me. Jesus tells us
that people will not always understand why we follow him. It will cost us
something. Being a follower of Jesus isn’t always easy.
HOPE4ME – Hope for me. This was last
Sunday’s message and it’s where Jesus heals a woman who had been ill for
eighteen years. With Jesus, there is always hope for us. God is always reaching
out to us with his healing love.
And here’s today’s vanity license plate. This
one stands for Jesus, Others, & You. Jesus wants us to have our priorities
in order.
For this Sunday, Luke tells the story of
the time when Jesus went to the house of a Pharisee for a meal and it was a
Sabbath day. It’s interesting that the people who were around the table with
Jesus were watching him closely.
That’s what I hope we have been able to do
over these past several Sundays. I hope that we’ve been able to watch Jesus
closely through the Gospel of Luke. When we watch Jesus, we can learn what it
means to follow him. We can learn from him because he has so much to teach us.
In today’s gospel reading, we learn some
table manners. Now, I don’t have the best table manners. I always have to think
really hard about which bread plate or which drinking glass is mine. I don’t
always get this right. I do know to put the napkin on my lap, to not eat until
everyone has their food, and to have polite conversation.
Well, for whatever reason, these aren’t
the table manners that Jesus wants to teach us at this dinner scene. Jesus has
some other table manners in mind. And I don’t think that his actions and what
he had to say went over very well with the people who were carefully watching
him. It certainly didn’t go over well seven chapters earlier when Jesus attended
a dinner party.
So, here’s the first table manner lesson
from Jesus. God is the most important part of the dinner gathering. The most
important thing at a meal isn’t the placement of the utensils or where you
should place your drinking glass. The most important thing is to know that God
is present at your meal.
During the time of Jesus, the religious
leaders had all kinds of rules about what you could and couldn’t do during a
meal. One of those rules was to not allow anybody who was considered ritually
unclean with a disease to be part of that meal.
And guess what? Here at this meal was a man
who had a disease. He was considered a nobody and yet Jesus healed this man!
Not only did Jesus affirm this man’s place at this meal, but he also healed him
on the Sabbath which was another rule that was not meant to be broken.
The reason Jesus broke the rules was
because he knew that the most important table manner of all was to keep God and
not rules as the most important part of the dinner gathering. By keeping God
first at that meal, Jesus was able to offer healing to this man with a disease.
What would it be like if we would remember
to keep God first in everything we did?
I think that this would help us to know which table manners to keep and
which table manners are not worth keeping. Jesus is helping us to see that we
can know where every fork and spoon should be placed at a table setting but if
we don’t keep God first, none of these other rules really matter.
The second table manner that Jesus teaches
us is to put others first. Immediately
after Jesus broke the table rules by healing a man on the Sabbath, Jesus
teaches a lesson about where people should sit during a meal.
Jesus says that instead of going for the
best seats, to first think of others and to let them have the better seats. Like
in many social settings today, in the time of Jesus, people believed that those
with titles and social standing were superior to everyone else and should have
the better seats. And so Jesus teaches them that to be his follower, they need
to humble themselves and allow others to be first.
On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks
often occur there was once a crude little life-saving station. The building was
just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a
constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves, they went out
day or night tirelessly searching for the lost.
Many lives were saved by this wonderful
little station, so that it became famous. Some of those who were saved, and
various others in the surrounding areas, wanted to become associated with the
station and give of their time and money and effort for the support of its
work. New boats were bought and new crews were trained. The little life-saving
station grew.
Some of the new members of the life-saving
station were unhappy that the building was so crude and so poorly equipped.
They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge
of those saved from the sea.
They replaced the emergency cots with beds
and put better furniture in an enlarged building. Now the life-saving station
became a popular gathering place for its members, and they re-decorated it
beautifully and furnished it as a sort of club.
Less of the members were now interested in
going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired life boat crews to do this
work.
The mission of life-saving was still given
lip-service but most were too busy or lacked the necessary commitment to take
part in the life-saving activities personally.
About this time a large ship was wrecked
off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boat loads of cold, wet and
half-drowned people.
They were dirty and sick and some of them were from foreign places and spoke strange languages and the beautiful new club was
considerably messed up. So the property committee immediately had a shower
house built outside the club where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up
before coming inside.
At the next meeting, there was a split in
the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club's life-saving
activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal pattern of the
club.
But some members insisted that life-saving
was their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a
life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they
wanted to save the life of all various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in
those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast.
They did.
As the years went by, the new station
experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. They evolved into a
club and yet another life-saving station was founded.
And as the story of the lighthouse goes,
if you visit the seacoast today you will find a number of exclusive clubs along
that shore. Shipwrecks are still frequent in those waters, but now most of the
people drown!
I think of this story of the saving
station and how Jesus taught us to put others first. There is a real temptation
for us to forget the primary purpose of the church. The purpose of the church
is to think of others before we think of ourselves. It’s to remember our
primary mission and why we exist in the first place.
Jesus has taught us two table manners so
far. God is the most important part of the dinner gathering and we are to think
of others before ourselves.
And the third table manner – Remember that
you are also invited to be at God’s table.
And so, the table manners begin with God, they extend to others, and
they also include us. Jesus, others, and
you. That’s what Jesus wants us to remember.
Toward the end of the dinner in our gospel
reading, Jesus tells us that if we put God and others first, that we will be
blessed. He even says that we will be repaid at the resurrection of the
righteous.
Just a few months ago, some leaders in our
community including people from our church helped launch an exciting community
wide program called “Sharing Hope.” It’s a program to help people in our local
community get out of poverty and to make a better life for themselves.
Each gathering includes people who are in
poverty as well as people who want to help make a difference in their lives.
Whenever they meet, they have a meal together. And during that meal, it doesn’t
matter the economic levels of the people who are there. What matters, is that
everyone is there to help and encourage each other.
I wasn’t able to attend the first dinner
gathering but I was able to attend the second meal gathering. One of the
community leaders who is helping with this program has been preparing the meals
and donating the food because we’re on a shoestring budget, especially for this
first year.
When this kind hearted volunteer with a
heart of gold saw me at our second dinner gathering, he said, “Robert, last week’s gathering was just
incredible. During our time of sharing around the circle, a woman in the group
really opened up about her life making us all tear up, and that was just our
first meeting. This gathering really is about sharing hope!”
You should have seen the smile on his face
as he told me this story. I know that Jesus said that we will receive our
reward in heaven, but I could tell that this man was receiving his reward a
little early.
As we come to receive Holy Communion this
morning, we come because Jesus is the host. And we come with others because
there is always room for one more. And we come to this table, because we need
to eat, too.
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