Luke 14:1, 7-14

14:1 On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

14:7 When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.

14:8 "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host;

14:9 and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, 'Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place.

14:10 But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.

14:11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

14:12 He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.

14:13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.

14:14 And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

Jesus consistently challenged the people of his time to look at the secular rules of their culture and place them in the culture of God’s Kingdom to see if they would hold up to that scrutiny. Perhaps it would be a good idea if we would remember to continue this practice. Would the cultural norms we live by day-to-day hold up in God’s Kingdom?

If you want to know how to begin this practice just follow Jesus’ lead. He spent a lot of time calling attention to rules people lived by, without thinking, that didn’t come from God. And it isn’t just the big rules we need to examine, but those pesky day-to-day things we do without thinking. For example, look at the basic rules of entertaining.

Jesus often used banquets in his parables to illustrate the contrast between human culture and the Kingdom reality. For example, in Luke 14, he actually addresses guest lists. If my mom had been present, she would hear this story unfolding about entertaining etiquette and sit up and take notice: Hoping to pick up a tip of two. He asks, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do you invite your friends and business acquaintances with the understanding that they will owe you something in exchange for the invitation?” Mom would think, but of course! She knew her entertaining rules: Once you entertained someone, the next time you got together, it would be their turn to entertain. In the case of business dinners, it was understood that taking the time to invite someone into your home would soften the energy needed to close the deal. As far as I know, everyone my parents associated with followed this cultural rule.

The etiquette rules Mom followed were passed on to her by her mother, and she passed them on to me. We didn’t think to question if they were pleasing to God. After all, entertaining had nothing to do with God, it was just entertaining… Rules had to be followed for everyone’s sake.

So Mom, if she had been present for Jesus’ story, would have understood what Jesus was saying as being a true fact of good manners. But then Jesus dropped a cultural rule bombshell: He said don’t do it anymore. From here on out invite people with the intention of just blessing them. Don’t expect anything in return.

Just as it surprised the people of Jesus’ time, this would hit my mom’s ears as a totally new concept. His audience was not made up of bad people. They, like so many of us, spent their lives following the cultural rules they were taught and never questioned if they were right.

How do we decide which cultural rules work? Try spending some time looking at them through God’s filter. In stories about Jesus, we read over and over how he turns the cultural norms of his day upside down and offers new ways of looking at things. How can we think, even for a minute, that this examination was only needed in his day and not an ongoing need?

Look at Luke 14, Jesus is not asking us to question who we invite into our fellowship, but to question WHY we invite. What is our intention? We are to become aware of our motives behind the things we do: Are we doing things for others in order to get, or are we doing in order to give?

Mom was convicted by God about ‘doing for others without expectation of return’ only months before she died. She was already homebound and no longer entertaining. One day I called some friends to see if they could come by for a visit. They could not as they were cooking at Manna House that day. When I relayed their answer to Mom, and that Manna House was a kitchen that served around 180 meals a day to people in need, she got visibly upset. Through her tears she related that never in her life had she done anything like that and now it was too late for her. There is so much more to her story, but I believe God is using her in a mighty way in his Kingdom with the servant’s heart that was born that day in her.

Our roots are not just from our families and culture, but our true origin is, “As those created in the image of God”. If we could just keep this fact as our intentional centering it would aid us in examining the rules of our culture and bring us into a more natural alignment with the rules of God’s Kingdom.

The Reverend Dee Shaffer, Vicar
Our Savior at Honey Creek
Spiritual Care Director Heartland Hospice