There is a book called The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, a remarkable story about slavery and race in America through the centuries. Near the end of the story, an elderly man, Uncle Root, explains to his young niece why he took his wife’s name when they were married in the mid-20th century, instead of asking her to take his name.
Born at the beginning of the 20th century, Uncle Root lived for most of his life on the plantation where his ancestors had been enslaved. And during that long period of slavery, it was not uncommon for the master of the house, and other white men, to take advantage of the powerlessness of the enslaved. It was known that many enslaved children were fathered by the master of the house, although they would never be able to call him father. And often these individuals were given the family name of the master, although they were never recognized by the law or by the community as members of the family. Everyone knew their place was among the enslaved.
In fact, this is why we so often find that there are both black families and white families in the south who have the same name. Yes, they are related.
Even after legal slavery was abolished, this sort of behavior continued, and Uncle Root’s father was a white man. But Root always knew that if he ever claimed that name in the community where he was born and raised, he would be scorned and ridiculed. Root was fully aware he did not have a place at the table in the white man’s house.
The table where you are invited to sit tells something about you and the people around you. The table where you choose to take a seat says even more about you.
Jesus seemed to go wherever he was invited. He ate with Pharisees as well as tax collectors. He did not flinch if a prostitute approached him while sitting at the table. He belonged everywhere.
He was fully aware that the tendency of humans is to segregate ourselves at the table. We invite people we want to be with, people whom we aspire to be like, people who might be able to do us some favor. When we invite others to our table, we usually reach up, not down. The ability to invite others to your table is often used as a power play.
And It was a kind of power play on the part of the Pharisees that day when they invited Jesus over for dinner. But not the kind you might expect. It appears the Pharisees wanted to put Jesus in the hot seat. They wanted to watch him. Closely.
But Luke tells us, Jesus was also watching them. Closely. As he usually did, he paid attention to their actions, and then he told a parable that was especially fitting. Unlike many of his parables, this one was very straightforward. It is right on point, such that it would be hard for them to miss the message.
When you are invited to someone’s home – or wedding banquet – do not go directly for the seat of honor, presuming it is yours. Because what if it turns out the host wanted someone else, someone of a higher rank, to have that seat? How awkward this would be for your host. How humiliating this would be for you.
Jesus tells them, it would be so much wiser for them to choose the seat of least honor. And then maybe the host will call to you and say, “come sit closer to me!” Then you would have the utter delight of being called by name and getting up and moving to a seat of honor as all the other guests looked on. How fabulous that would be.
Such advice would have sounded pretty savvy to these guests. Practical. Yes, they would have said, quite right. But his next lesson probably sounded downright wacky.
He said to his host: When you give a dinner do not invite your friends. Do not invite the people who will invite you back, or the ones whom you might want a favor from. Instead, invite the poor, the lame, the blind, the crippled – all the misfits. Invite the people who don’t even have a table to ask you to sit at. Do this, and my, how blessed you will be.
Of course, they didn’t want to do that. And there are so many reasons we, like the Pharisees, don’t want to do that. I don’t have to tell you we are the most comfortable with other people who are like us. We choose our friends among people who are of similar social and economic stations, even political persuasions. We feel the most comfortable with people who understand us and agree with us – and vice versa.
So, when we serve a meal at the shelter or the soup kitchen, we might believe that these people are not at all like us. and we keep a barrier between us and them. We decline any invitation to sit at table with them and enjoy the meal and conversation, because we are too different, we believe.
Jesus’ advice to invite the ones at the lowest rungs of society into our homes and to a seat at our table makes us feel uneasy. There is too much distance between us and them. We make choices to keep it that way.
We want to ensure that our place is as far away as possible from their place. But this is a problem, if we take to heart what Jesus says to the people around this table. It is a problem.
I think the problem stems from our forgetting that we are all, and always, the guests.
We are guests of others who are, or have been in the past, generous with their time and their possessions. And more significantly, we are guests of God from whom we receive all things. We are guests in life, invited each day to participate and enjoy this marvelous gift – along with all of God’s other guests.
We make a serious mistake when we forget our place as guests, assuming instead that we are ever and always the host. When we assume that we have a place of honor because our station in life allows us to play host as well, no matter what table we are at. We make a mistake when we assume that we are the ones who give, forgetting that everything we have is a gift from our creator, our host.
Then we hear Jesus’ advice, his parable, saying we should take the lowest seat – assume humility – lest we be humiliated by our grasping nature. Assume the lowest place, he says, and you will always know where that place is: it is among the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.
Jesus says to us: this is where you belong, because this is who you are: You are poor, needing God’s provision in everything. You are crippled, you are lame, so dependent on God’s mercy to take you where you need to go. You are blind, too often unable to see what you need to see, but with the help of the Holy Spirit, you will see.
On the plantations of the old south, there is no place at the master’s table for the slave, for the man, woman, or child, with dark skin. A belief so fixed in the culture that it persists to this day in some homes.
In the story I mentioned earlier, the master of the house became very fond of one of his illegitimate sons, although his place was, of course, in slavery on the plantation. Still, because of his love, the master wanted to make the boy’s life as easy as he could and so he directed that the boy should be given fine clothes and easy work in the master’s house, rather than to work in the fields.
But the boy, for his own reasons, begged to be sent out to the fields. He did not want there to be so much distance between himself and all the others who were enslaved. He chose the lower place, which was something his father could not understand. But this boy knew that to sit at the table among the enslaved, this was the welcoming table. And that welcome gave him more comfort than easy work and fine clothes.
May you hear the words of Jesus that turn our understanding of the world upside down.
May your love overcome your human pride.
May you know your place among God’s beloved and welcome all your kindred – the poor, the lame, the crippled, the blind – to sit there too.
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