Bible Text: St Luke 14:1–11 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
There’s a story about Charles Spurgeon, who even though he wasn’t a Lutheran is rightly known as one of the greatest Christian preachers ever. He was visiting a rich woman who was dying. And the woman asked him if it was really true that with God there is no distinction of persons (that God doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, slave or free, male or female, Jew or Greek). And she asked because, she said, she couldn’t bear the thought of her servant being equal to her in heaven. Spurgeon told her, “Well you won’t have to worry about that at all, as long as that’s what you’re holding in your heart, because you won’t be in heaven.”
Only those who humble themselves will be exalted to heaven. Humility is the mother of all Christian virtues. Everything starts with us realizing that we are sinners who cannot claim anything from God based on who we are or what we’ve done. We deserve punishment not praise.
Jesus tells the little parable of our Gospel lesson to drive this reality home to us. If you get invited to a dinner, don’t sit in the place of honor, but go to the lowest seat. It’s significant that Plato, the Greek philosopher, tells a similar story, but gives different advice. He says, take the middle seat. You don’t want to take the lowest seat, because you might just have to stay there and you’ll be humiliated, but you don’t want to take the highest seat either, because you might get moved lower and that would be humiliating. Seems very practical. Aristotle calls this the golden mean. There’s a place between arrogance and humility. Arrogance, pride, is evil, because it means you think too much of yourself (plus, no one likes arrogant people, no one likes people who talk about themselves and care about themselves and their problems and not about yours). But then Aristotle says that humility is also evil. He calls it a vice. Because that’s thinking too little of yourself. And this gets brought into our day with the teaching of self-esteem, that what you really need is to think more of yourself. We have to be careful about this. That might be a good thing to tell a kid who has low confidence, who really needs to know that he can learn to read, or he can if he puts his mind to it, compete with the older kids in football, or whatever. You have to have a certain amount of confidence in the abilities God gave you to make it in life. But as a religious principle, it’s simply wrong. Before God you should have low self-esteem, the lowest. You should know that you deserve nothing from him. I know people think it’s a revivalist hymn and an altar call hymn (it’s not, at least that’s not why it was written), but the hymn puts it very well, “Just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me,” “Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind.” That’s how we come to Jesus, who “came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
I used to think that Paul was only talking about himself when he said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief.” Paul did persecute the church. He killed Christians. That’s about as bad as it gets. He’s the chief of sinners. But Pastor Richard pointed out to me that Paul says, “This is a faithful saying, that Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” It’s a saying. That means it’s generally applicable, it’s what you are supposed to apply to yourself and I to myself, “I’m the chief of sinners.” And this is not an act, it’s not me trying to be pious, saying but not really believing that I’m the worst. No, you take the lowest seat because you actually believe you deserve it. Why? Because I might know others’ sins and be able to say, “Well, I’ve never done that!” But the only heart I know is my own. The only heart you know is your own. And you know what’s in there, the pride, and the self-pity, and the lust, and the unbelief, and hatred. You know your heart, no one else’s. We call this “existential,” a totally overused word, pretentious in most contexts, but here very appropriate. I know my own existence, my thoughts, my desires, my guilt, and I stand before the holy God alone, I don’t get to compare myself to that guy or that gal who did this or that, I can only take the lowest seat. I’m guilty.
Jesus isn’t giving practical social advice for a party. It would be bad advice. If you came to my house, and you’re an adult, and I invited you for Thanksgiving, and you went and sat at the kids’ table, that would just be awkward and weird. In this world we still have distinctions. A dad has to still discipline his children, a wife still submits to her husband, a citizen still obeys the police officer. No one comes up here on a Sunday morning and says, “Hey, pastor, I’ll be preaching today.” No, that’s not your job. There are still distinctions. Luther once, when he was kidnapped by friends and hid in the Wartburg castle for his own safety, got news from Wittenberg that the other professors there were giving up on titles like “pastor” and “doctor,” because there wasn’t supposed to be distinctions between pastors and people. So they were going out in the streets to ask little children their thoughts on what they should teach and preach. Luther, and this was dangerous, because he was considered an outlaw, came out of hiding to preach against this nonsense. A man is still a man and a woman still a woman, a dad a dad, a mom a mom, a child a child. We have distinctions in this life.
But, even when we are making distinctions, we still keep the humility. A chapter after our epistle lesson, we have Paul telling wives to submit to their husbands. There’s a distinction. But then when he talks about the leadership and headship of the husband, he says that the husband should love his wife as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her. How did Christ love the Church? Jesus says that He came not to be served, but to serve and give His life as a ransom for many. And in the Greek, that’s the word for serve as a slave. To be in authority means to serve, means to act as a slave, in the Christian faith. The pastor is called minister, that means servant. Because he serves the people with God’s Word. The dad when he spanks his kid for being naughty in church (that was the main reason I got spanked when I was a kid), does it because he is serving his child, making sure that he doesn’t grow up a disrespectful hoodlum. The husband serves his wife, by protecting her and providing for her and leading the family especially to church.
So St. Paul says, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that there is one faith, one Lord, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all. That one faith is not one among many. It is the faith that we all hold together and that changes our lives, totally reorients our perspective. We each, individually, take the lowest spot. And we each, individually, hear our Lord call us to take the higher seat. The Greek here is beautiful. Jesus adds a word, the translation says “Move up higher,” but Jesus adds a little prefix, προς- which means “beside,” beside Me, is the point, move up to the place by Me, because that’s where Jesus puts us, beside Himself, and that means He gives us His honor, His glory, His righteousness, His status as child of God. And that means there can be no competition between us, vying for the higher place. We each died with Christ and rose again with Him in our Baptism. His life is our life. It’s the only life we have. And we have it together. He is Lord, our Lord. Only Jesus gives the higher place. We can’t earn it. He lifts us up to it.
It is only His to give. The place we need is with God. It is holy and perfect. And we have not been that. We are not that. But our Lord is. He is the eternal Son of the Father, God of God. And for us men and for our salvation He was born of the virgin Mary. Our Creator became our brother. His life was perfect. What you see Him do in healing the dropsied man is not the obeying of rules, but the fulfilment of love. He loved always, from a perfect heart. He loved us to the death, so much that He took the punishment for our sin on Himself. And He rose again to give us His life, His righteousness, to lift us up from the lowest place and seat us with Himself in the heavenly places.
This is what happens at the Lord’s Supper. It’s been my practice for years before taking the Lord’s Supper, to say, “Lord, I am not worthy that You enter into me, but only say the words, and my sins will be forgiven.” And the words the Lord speaks are, “Take eat this is my body given for you. And “drink of it, this is the new testament in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” We kneel down at the Lord’s Supper. We take the lowest spot. And Jesus lifts us up to be beside Him.
That’s why we keep the Sabbath. It’s not a rule we follow. There are no outward rules in the New Testament. They don’t exist. There is no you must go to church every Sunday. Search the Scriptures, you won’t find it. There is no you must give ten percent of your income – that was a rule the Israelites followed in their theocracy. It’s not a rule given in the New Testament. We just want to be with Jesus. We want to hear His word and receive the Lord’s Supper, because our Lord continues to serve us. That’s what He uses His high place for, to serve sinners. We’ve been lifted to the same high place, to sit with Him, and from that place we serve one another. Amen.