Eating together as enacted mission and enacted future (Luke 14) #1

The Crowded House hosted a conference for people interested in missional church and church planting tied to the book Total Church. This is the third talk that I gave at the conference:

What do we say about this passage? All the themes we have met so far are present.

We see again God’s grace to us. We are the poor, the blind, the crippled, the lame in the parable of the great wedding banquet. God welcomes us – the undeserving and the unimportant. Indeed, he compels us to enter, when left to ourselves we would draw away. The kingdom of God is good news to the poor because it’s a kingdom of grace. You don’t need money or status or brains to be saved. Indeed these things can be a positive hindrance. They make it hard for people to accept their need. In the parable of the banquet, the original guests reject the invitation because they are more interested in their investments (the field), their consumerism (oxen) and their families (marriage) – not so very different from today! You remember how Jesus said, ‘How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ (Luke 18:24-25)

But we also see again that God’s grace is the foundation for Christian community. Did you notice when we read this passage that Luke (virtually) repeats the phrase ‘the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame’ in this chapter (vv. 13 and 21)? Its the only time Luke uses this phrase in the Gospel. He wants us to make connections. our experience of God’s welcome determines and shapes the welcome we give to others.

We also see again the world of grace colliding with the world of religion in the healing of the man with dropsy. But I want to focus on two elements.

Eating together as enacted mission

Look at verses 12-14:

‘Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbours; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”’

We are called to follow Christ into a broken world. And that means coming close to the poor and the broken. Simply writing a cheque keeps the poor and broken at a distance. But Jesus was the friend of sinners.

Of course in Jesus’ day homes were often semi-public and communities more tight-knit. There are risks involved in inviting strangers into our homes. We have a link with a household church plant in Chicago in which a guest abused the eight-year-old daughter of one of the leaders. But I think here practising hospitality in the context of the wider Christian community can help. People can initially be welcomed and befriended in the context of larger gatherings.

But risks will remain. There will be a cost. This is more than charity. To invite someone for a meal in Jesus’ time was an expression of association with them, of identification with them. It was an expression of friendship and, to use a word which should have a strong Christian connotation for us, fellowship. That is why Jesus’ habit of eating with tax-collectors and sinners was so scandalous. He was saying, these are my sort of people. Christine Pohl says:

Often we maintain significant boundaries when offering help to persons in need. Many churches prepare and serve meals to hungry neighbours, but few church members find it easy to sit and eat with those who need the meal. When people are very different from ourselves, we often find it more comfortable to cook and clean for them than to share in a meal and conversation. We are familiar with roles as helpers but are less certain about being equals eating together. Many of us struggle with simply being present with people in need; our helping roles give definition to the relationship but they also keep it decidedly hierarchical.[1]

Too often we have not grasped the radical implications of grace for our attitude to mission and the poor. We think we are enacting grace if we work among the poor, if we serve them, if we provide for them. But we are only half way there. It is not really grace. Because we still act from a position of superiority. We give the poor a meal on our soup runs, homeless meals. We do the equivalent in a thousand projects. We think we are serving. How humble we are! But we have missed entirely the dynamic that is going on. What we really proclaim is that we are able and you are unable. I can do something for you, but you can do nothing for me. I am superior to you. We clock our superiority in compassion, but superiority cloaked in compassion is not love. It is paternalism. It is patronising.

Mrs Jones, a participant at a ‘poverty hearing’ organised by Church Action on Poverty said this: ‘In part it is about having no money, but there is more to poverty than that. It is about being isolated, unsupported, uneducated and unwanted. Poor people want to be included and not just judged and ‘rescued’ at times of crisis.’

Think how different the dynamic is when we sit and eat with someone. We meet as equals. We share together. We behave as friends. We affirm one another and enjoy one another.

Our first instinct when faced with someone in need is to give something to them or do something for them. ‘Rescuing’ the poor, as Mrs Jones put it, can be appropriate in times of crisis or important as a first step. But if it never moves beyond this, it reinforces the dependency and helplessness at the heart of poverty. The poor remain passive. It does not produce lasting or sustainable change. This is why a central theme of the literature on development is the importance of participation … But the poor need more than that. They do not want to participate in projects. They want to participate in community. A woman told me: ‘I know people do a lot to help me. But what I want is for someone to be my friend.’ People do not want to be projects. The poor need a welcome to replace their marginalization; they need inclusion to replace their exclusion; they need a place where they matter to replace their powerlessness. They need community. They need the Christian community. They need the church.[2]

Consider Jesus. Yes, he takes off his outer clothing and adopts the attitude of slave when he washed the disciples’ feet. But think, too, how often he accepts service. He ask water from the woman of Samaria. He lets the women at Simon’s house wash his feet. He accepts hospitality from Matthew. He is not just the helper of sinners, still less their project worker. He is the friends of sinners for he eats with them.

We have seen that eating together is enacted grace. Now we discover it is enacted mission. But it is enacted mission because it is enacted grace. It represents mission that flows from, and is shaped by, grace.

If you tell someone they are a sinner who needs God while you are handing them a cup of soup then they will always hear you saying they’re a loser who should become like you. But when you eat together as friends and you tell them what a messed up person you are, then you can tell about their sin and about God’s grace.

Christine Pohl again:

Although we often think of hospitality as a tame and pleasant practice, Christian hospitality has always had a subversive, counter cultural dimension. ‘Hospitality is resistance’ as one person from the Catholic Worker observed. Especially when the larger society disregards or dishonours certain persons, small acts of respect and welcome are far beyond themselves. They point to a different system of valuing and an alternative model of relationships …

Because the practice of hospitality is so significant in establishing and reinforcing social relationships and moral bonds, we notice its more subversive character only when socially undervalued persons are welcomed. In contrast to a more tame hospitality that welcomes persons already well situated in the community, hospitality that welcomes ‘the least’ and recognises their equal value can be an act of resistance and defiance, a challenge to the values and expectations of the larger community.

In others words, our lives can and should be a challenge to the values of our world and a proclamation of a different world – just it can be just as revolutionary as it was when practiced by Jesus.

Two quick clarifications.

1. First, by hospitality I don’t mean a dinner party. In Total Church we talk about ministry as performance. Well the dinner party is hospitality as performance. It promises intimacy, but in fact maintains distance through formality. I wonder if this is a simple test of what I mean: do you clean your house specifically before hospitality? If you do then maybe you’re not sharing your life; you are sharing a sanitised version of your life.

We were talking over the meal last night and something clicked for me. I have heard people say that working-class people or poor people don’t do hospitality. But in fact what people are saying is that they don’t do middle-class hospitality. They don’t do dinner parties. Middle-class people invite you over ‘next week’. Working class people invite you now. You drop round for a cup of tea and then they might ask if you want to stay for tea.

2. Second, by now it should be clear that the hospitality that Jesus is calling us to cannot be institutionalised in programmes and projects. Mission as hospitality became institutionalised as the church became institutionalised. Our words ‘hospital’ and ‘hostel’ both reflect this process. The first hospital was established by the church. But Jesus challenges us to take misison home, into the home and to practice hospitality in the context of the Christian community. Don’t start a hospitality ministry in your church; open your home.

The command of Jesus to invite the poor for dinner violates all our notions of separation, distance, detachment. Mission as hospitality undermines the professionalisation of ministry. Mission is not something I can clock-off from at the end of the day. It reminds us again that mission is a life-thing.

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[1] Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 1999).

[2] Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church (IVP), 77-78.

[3] Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 1999), 61-62.