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Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost – August 31, 2025
Proverbs 25:6-7a, Luke 14:1, 7-14
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
After worship one Sabbath day, Jesus was invited to dinner at the home of the leader of the Pharisees. They were watching Jesus closely, but Jesus was watching them too. And what Jesus noticed was how the guests all tried to rush for the best seats, the seats of honor. You see, there was a pecking order in the ancient world. The honored guests would sit at the head table with the host. The most important people would sit closest to that table. The more important you were, the closer you were to the front. The less important you were, the further away you were. Jesus watched as people self-selected their seats, going for the seats closest to the host. I picture it looking like a game of musical chairs, with everyone quickly trying to get their butt in a seat close to the host as fast as possible, trying to get that advantage, trying to bring honor to themselves.
Jesus, perhaps with the proverb we heard this morning in mind, points out how foolish this is. Don’t they realize that they might be asked to move seats by the host? Don’t they realize how embarrassing it would be for them to have to get up in front of everyone and go to a lower seat? Rather than shoving your butt into the chair you think you deserve, claiming it for yourself, Jesus says, take a lower seat. Let the king say, “Come up here,” rather than crowning yourself with that honor. Let the host be the one to say to you, “Friend, come up higher.”
It is good advice.
Jesus then turns from the guests to the host himself. Jesus seems to have noticed that the leader of the Pharisees only invited certain kinds of people to his sabbath day dinner. It appears that this host only invited friends, relatives, and rich neighbors. And it appears that the motivation for inviting these people was the expectation that they would return the favor in some way. Maybe he’d be invited to their house for dinner on the next sabbath. Maybe he would get an equally sumptuous meal a week later. Maybe the rich neighbors were invited because they would bring the best wine. Maybe they were invited to up his own status. Maybe they were invited because they were the biggest givers to the synagogue. Whatever the specifics were, the guest list for this banquet was based on what people brought to the table. It was based on whether they could repay the favor or not. It was based on what the host could get out of them, how he could benefit from their presence.
Jesus calls the host out on this. He challenges him to not invite his friends, relatives, and rich neighbors, but to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Jesus challenges him to invite people who bring nothing to his table, people who could not possibly repay the favor, people who don’t bring some kind of benefit or status to him. Jesus challenges him to stop treating people like commodities, like pawns used to advance his own status.
It is good advice.
Jesus is teaching two important virtues. He is teaching humility and hospitality. These are two virtues we should be cultivating in our lives today as well.
Humility is an important virtue. This doesn’t mean self-loathing. It doesn’t mean burying your talents. Assertiveness can be okay. Arrogance is not. Confidence can be okay. Cockiness is not. For example, it is important to sell yourself in a job interview. It is not a good idea to nominate yourself for Employee of the Month. Trying to bring honor upon yourself often has the opposite effect. It can lead to embarrassment. It can lead to shame. It is far better to humble yourself. It is far better to take the lower seat and then have someone say, “Come up here,” or “Friend, come up higher.” This is good advice!
Hospitality is an important virtue too, and part of hospitality is extending a welcome to people without regard to whether they can do something for you, whether they can return the favor.
There’s a bit of Jewish hyperbole here in Jesus’ words when he says do not invite your friends and relatives to dinner. Such hyperbole was common in a Hebrew manner of speaking, as it is in many cultures and idioms today. Jesus doesn’t mean we should never dine with friends and relatives! Jesus himself enjoyed the hospitality of his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in Bethany. Their home and their dinner table was a refuge for him. The Last Supper was a private meal with his friends.
And when Jesus says to invite those who are poor, crippled, lame, and blind, he doesn’t mean you must have one from each category at every meal. This is not DEI for your dinner table. This would just be repeating the same mistake from a different direction, turning people into commodities, into notches in your belt, into pawns to advance your own status.
The bigger principal Jesus is teaching us here is that true hospitality is free from ulterior motives. True hospitality means serving people regardless of whether they will ultimately bring some benefit to you. These categories of people represent those who brought nothing and who couldn’t possibly repay. True hospitality makes a place at the table for them too.
I remember in my first call in Montana when a new doctor came to town and then showed up at our worship service. You should have seen the way people tripped over themselves to welcome him! You could almost see people doing the math for how much his tithe would help our budget. I’m not picking on this congregation, which is full of good and godly people. In fact, we literally had a young blind man in that congregation who was dearly loved and warmly welcomed every Sunday. But I did notice that when there were new scruffy ranch hands in town who visited us for worship, they weren’t quite welcomed in the same way that the doctor was.
This kind of stuff happens everywhere, in lots of different ways, but Jesus calls us to a higher form of hospitality, a hospitality that welcomes people regardless of whether they bring something to the table or not. Whether we’re talking about the tables in our fellowship hall or the tables in our homes, this is good advice.
So we have good advice about these virtues of humility and hospitality. But this is Jesus, remember, and Jesus never just gives good advice. Jesus always has good news! The good news for us today is just underneath the surface of this good advice.
First, when Jesus gives his good advice about humility, he roots it in the good news of what God is up to. Jesus tells the guests what Luke calls a parable, which should be our first clue that this is about more than how to avoid embarrassing yourself at dinner parties. This is about the kingdom of God! Jesus tells the guests that they should stop rushing to take for themselves the seats of honor because “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” This is what God is up to in Jesus! God is humbling those of high status. God is bringing down those who would claim honor for themselves. God is putting the self-righteous back in their place and exalting all those who humble themselves by confessing their sin. Through Jesus, God is saying to all those who have taken the lowest seats in humility and repentance, “Friend, come up higher!”
And when Jesus gives his good advice about hospitality, he roots it, too, in the good news of what God is up to. He tells the host that he should invite the poor, crippled, lame, and blind because his reward is to be found in something other than what his guests bring to the table. “For you will be repaid,” Jesus says, “at the resurrection of the righteous.” In other words, this host doesn’t need to commodify people any more to advance his status, because he has already been made right with God through the grace and mercy of Jesus, who has an eternal banquet prepared for him!
This is Jesus. It is not Dear Abby. It is not Miss Manners. It is Jesus. And because it is Jesus, we have more than good advice to hear today. We have good news! As we gather in the presence of our King, humbling ourselves before him, he says to us, “Come up here!” Christ our King calls us close to himself! He calls you. You are important to him!
As we gather at the table of our Divine Host, confessing our sin before him and singing “Lord, have mercy,” our song of humble repentance, we hear him say, “Friend, come up higher.” Our Lord Jesus calls us his friends! And as his friends, Jesus invites us to take our places right next to him. He exalts us, giving us a place at his own table, the table of salvation, the table of grace.
We bring nothing to this table but our sin. We come as those who are spiritually poor, crippled, lame, and blind. We can never begin to repay what he gives us at his table. But in his great and perfect hospitality Jesus invites us to his banquet, that he might feed us with forgiveness and give us a foretaste of the feast to come.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church