Seven Keys to a Glorious Dinner Party - Sermon for the 17th Sunday after Trinity

Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
September 22^nd, Year of Our + Lord 2024
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, South Dakota
Seven Keys to a Glorious Dinner Party

Sermon Audio available HERE

Seven Keys to a Glorious Dinner Party

    Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ² with all  humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³ eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.   ⁴ There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— ⁵ one Lord, one faith, one baptism, ⁶ one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

      Jesus went to many dinner parties.  St. Luke especially likes to tell us about these meals.  Our Lord ate with sinners and tax collectors, and also with Pharisees, those teachers of the Law of Moses, very serious Bible scholars, who like to exalt themselves, and who tended to obsess about the rules, and feel self-righteously superior to everyone else.   

      Today a ruler of the Pharisees invites our Lord to eat on the Sabbath, a day filled by the Pharisees with rules about what you can’t do.  At the meal, Jesus heals a man with dropsy, that is, water retention within his body, a disease we call edema.  As He did many times, Jesus ignores the Pharisees’ made-up rules, trying to get them to see that God wants to serve mankind on the Sabbath, not be served by them. 

      Jesus then uses the Proverbs to teach the Pharisees about proper dinner etiquette for God’s people.  Jesus’ warning against self-promotion reminds me of an earlier dinner, in chapter 7 of Luke, when a prostitute came in and washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and her hair, anointing them and kissing them.  According to the Pharisees’ rules, she was not a worthy guest.  And again, the Lord didn’t care.    

      The Lord does care about getting dinner parties right.  Both our Old Testament and Gospel readings this morning teach us about how to behave when invited to dinner.  And very helpfully, these two are matched with the famous unity passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.  This works, because one of God’s goals with a dinner party is unity, that all the guests are well fed and enjoy each other, and end the dinner party closer to each other and Him than when they arrived.  

      Paul gives us seven “Ones” of unity, which help us better understand these two Pharisee dinner parties, one with a prostitute, and the other with this man who suffered from dropsy.     Ephesians 4 calls us to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, which is a gift from God, who is One.    

For there is One Body:  At a glorious dinner party, there is just One Body, sitting around the table together.  Is Paul referring to the Body of the Man, Jesus Christ, or to the Body of His Church, the congregation of believers?  Both, of course, for they are united.  Being united to Jesus by faith also means we are, each one of us, joined together into His mysterious Body, the Church.  We are members, of Christ, and of one another.  God’s dinner parties are intimate affairs. 

     Do the Biblical descriptions of this intimacy in the One Body make you uncomfortable, as they do me?  Remember Elijah and Elisha stretching out their bodies over the tops of those two dead sons as they brought them back to life?  Remember Jesus, spitting and touching mute tongues and putting fingers in deaf ears?  And there are these Pharisee meals.  Who wants to get close to a swollen person, suffering from edema, or accept the touch and kiss of a a woman whose life has been shot through with sexual sin? 

     Well, Jesus does, and thank God for His intimacy.  As He has drawn close to us, Jesus calls us to get close to other sinners.  As much as it pains me personally to say it, hugs and kisses all around, that’s the New Testament way.  This was a big problem for the Pharisees, so focused on purity and decorum.  They didn’t really want the sick, swollen man at their party, and they certainly would never let a prostitute wash their feet. 

     In the One Body, the first key to a glorious dinner party is to embrace the messiness that Christ invites to the table.  We are all a bunch of messy, unattractive sinners, whom Jesus has called beloved, precious, redeemed.  And so, the first key is to treat each other as He treats us. 

One Spirit: There is One Body, and One Spirit.  Everybody wants a spirited get together.  But a glorious dinner party requires some spiritual discernment.  For there are many spirits who oppose the Holy Spirit.  There is the spirit of self-righteousness, of claiming to be holier than thou, holier than the riffraff.  This is not the Spirit of Christ. 

     There are opposite spirits, who entirely reject the holiness and order of God.  Jesus welcomes sinners, who approach His table in repentance for their sins.  A spirit that says “anything goes,” that nothing is to be called sin, is equally demonic as a Pharisee, consumed with his self-imagined holiness.  This sin-denying, anything-goes spirit seems to dominate our world today. 

     The One True Spirit speaks the Truth, the truth about God’s will for our lives, the truth about our fallenness, and the glorious truth of Christ, stooping down to lift us up to where He is.  The Holy Spirit, telling us all that the Father has given us in Christ Jesus, His Word is the heart of glorious dinner conversation.   

One Hope:  You were called to the One Hope that belongs to your call.  Christian life is not a game of “choose your own adventure” where you get to choose your own ending.  Rather, the Christian sings out: “I am but a stranger here, heaven is my home.”  Unity with Christ means we are aliens and pilgrims in this world; our ultimate and greatest Hope is above, in Christ. 

     We all love a good meal, and thank God for good food.  But we also know there is a better menu to come.  Lord willing, every good meal here on earth will point us toward e heavenly banquet that has no end.  We have worldly goods, and receive them gladly, and with thanksgiving.  But, we hold them loosely, because Christ our true treasure awaits us.  We seek to live well and rightly, but we know are not going to live our best life now, not in this broken world. 

     And so, as Proverbs teaches and Jesus repeats to the Pharisees, we are not to strive for the best seats at earthly feasts.  Pridefully seeking the honor and glory of this world will ruin your dinner party, and your life.  Prideful self-promotion by sinners is pitiful.  It is also a danger to the faith which receives entrance to the eternal banquet hall as an undeserved gift of forgiveness.  And so, with the Spirit’s help, we live day by day in this world, rejoicing in every good gift, and at the same time honest about our personal lowliness.  We confess our sinfulness by choosing the lowest seats, and we look forward, longing for the best gifts, at Jesus’ heavenly table, where every seat is perfect.  

One Lord:  The Pharisees’ ultimate problem with Jesus is that He made Himself out to be equal with God, to be God in the flesh.  We might want to cut them just a little slack.  We must reject their self-righteousness and hard-heartedness.  But we can also recognize that grasping the mystery of God is hard. 

      The Lord, Yahweh God, who is One, is also Three.  Perfect Unity in Trinity, between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  This reality of God is beyond our full comprehension.  But we can grasp it in a simple way, and we rejoice in the Good News that the teaching of the Holy Trinity proclaims: for God loved the world in this way, by sending His only begotten Son, to take on human flesh, in order to save us.  The Holy Spirit brings us to God the Father by joining us to His Son, who in turn presents us to the Father as welcome dinner guests. 

      The One Lord is incarnate, made man.  And the One Lord is present.  The real presence of the fleshly Christ in the midst of His people is also hard to grasp.  The man suffering from edema, from water retention and painful swelling, seems to be a pawn, a prop brought into the dinner by the Pharisees, to trap Jesus.  Luke does not tell us if he was a disciple of Jesus.  Did he recognize before it happened that the LORD God Almighty was present to heal?  Hard to say.  But once Jesus took him and healed him and sent him away, now he knew: God had visited him to heal and rescue.  Alleluia!  Praise the Lord.   

      The prostitute whom Jesus forgave knew that the One Lord God Almighty was at Simon the Pharisee’s party.  So. she brought expensive ointment and sought her Lord.  Who cares if people curse her for entering?  What can the stares and murmurs of the Pharisees do to her?  She knows her LORD is present, and she knows He lives to forgive her and set her free from her sin.  So, she worships the LORD, and ignores the angry, contemptuous stares.  Because she knows her LORD is there. 

      Come Lord Jesus, be our Guest.  So we pray, and so the Lord is present.  The LORD is always at our meals, because God is everywhere, over all and through all and in all.  In Him we live and move and have our being.  There is no where we can go to escape Him.  And, for the faithful, there is no reason to run from Him, because we know He loves us.  Even more, the LORD is also at our meals because He is always with His people, dwelling in their hearts by faith, present to guide, correct, forgive and encourage.  God grant us to know and trust His presence.  Like the prostitute, let us rejoice to worship and serve Him, in joyful response to His great service to us.   

One Faith:  The prostitute who washed Jesus’ feet knew in Whom she trusted.  Through His Word, and perhaps through His miracles, she had grasped that God’s Son had been born into this world, not to condemn her, but to rescue and restore her.  Her tears of thankfulness overflowed, because she knew she could trust in Christ alone for all her needs, now, and forever.  For He is the Savior of all sinners, including her, including me, including you.   

     Hypocritically, the world praises the value of inclusiveness, in the abstract.  But always without regard for faith.  It can be glorious to host a meal for all kinds of different guests.  But if some gorge themselves and riot like godless barbarians, while others behave like self-righteous Pharisees, elbowing each other out for the best seats, the dinner will be ruined for everyone. Our Lord is the God of order, not chaos.  Only Jesus can save, and He only saves His way.  It is not for spite or bigotry that we insist on preserving and proclaiming that Jesus is the exclusive Savior.   We maintain this Truth because Jesus does, and because we seek to truly love our neighbors.  For there is no other Name by which we can be saved.  There is only one saving faith, the faith that trusts in Christ alone.   

One Baptism:  Did you hear the water flowing in these two meals?  Water is everywhere.  Water can be dangerous, like the Flood, or as it was for Egypt at the Red Sea, or for Jonah’s shipmates, as that prophet fled the Lord’s call.  The water swelling the limbs of the man with dropsy was debilitating, not regenerating.  Until, that is, Jesus applied His Word of grace. 

     Without the Word of Christ, water is just plain water, necessary for life, but also potentially harmful.  But with the Word of Jesus, water is God’s chosen instrument for the eternal cleansing of body and soul.  There is only One Baptism, Jesus’ washing of regeneration and renewal.  But the Baptized echo this Baptism in their daily lives. 

     As a sinner, now cleansed by Jesus’ Word, the prostitute responded by washing Jesus’ feet with streams from her thankful eyes.  Once her tears were filled with bitter shame.  Now, she cries tears of the highest praise and devotion.  She loved much, extravagantly, shockingly, because she had been forgiven so much.  God grant us to understand and rejoice in His amazing grace, which has forgiven each one of us, so much, and washed us clean.        

One God and Father of us all:  Our Father.  Because Jesus has become our brother, we can call His Father “Our Father.”  Jesus entered into the human race, becoming like us in every way, except without sin.  Now, we who know and trust His forgiving love are adopted children of His Father.  The One God and Father rejoices to give all authority and dominion to His Son.  The One eternally begotten Son rejoices to submit to His Father’s will, and give Him glory in all things.  The Holy Spirit rejoices to teach us all things about the Son, through whom we see and know the Father. 

     I was incredibly blessed to have an earthly father who led our family with love and discipline.  My dad was imperfect, but he raised us kids well.  I have powerful, wonderful memories of dinner, all seven of us enjoying Mom’s cooking, meals provided and presided over by my dad.  Did you have a dad who did that?  I know not all of us did.  All earthly fathers fall short, but by God’s grace, they can also reflect the love of God the Father. 

     Well, whether you have memories of glorious dinners with your earthly father, or not, hear this Good News:  Your God and Father, who sent His Son to the cross to save you, is providing and presiding over every meal you eat.  He rejoices to draw you to Himself, ever closer, through the Truth and Mercy of Jesus, especially here, at this Table.  And He looks forward to hosting you, face to face, at the heavenly banquet.  One God and Father of us all.  Alleluia, what a glorious dinner party, forever and ever, Amen.