"Of
course your church isn't prejudiced," my Hispanic pastor-friend reassured
me. "You welcome anyone to sit at the table in the Kingdom of Heaven. .
.as long as they eat with a spoon. But we Hispanics want to eat with a
tortilla."
Jesus
isn't just doing a stint as Miss Manners, giving advice on not embarrassing
your host. And he isn't talking about "leadership" and the importance
of self-deprecation or giving everyone in the organization a voice. And he
isn't giving you a pass on having the in-laws over next Thanksgiving.
("This," quips Dallas Willard, "may immediately become your
favorite verse in the Bible, depending on your relatives!")
Our
Lord is talking about the Kingdom as a place that upends every standard his
Jewish listeners (and Luke's largely Jewish church) held. Don't just invite the
token poor person (or the occasional Gentile) to conform to your way of being
church. Give up control of the table manners by making yourself a minority in
your own house!
The
same goes for the church in America as we read Jesus' parable in our own
context. Don't just clear an occasional slot for the
red-and-yellow-black-and-white (as the old song has it). Taken together this
pair of parables tells us: Don't just give the outsiders "a" place;
give them the whole place!
In
his novel Love Feast Frederick
Buechner imagines Leo Bebb, huckster-evangelist extraordinaire, planning a
Thanksgiving banquet designed to reach the clean-cut college kids of Princeton
University. Only the frat boys shun the feast, leading Bebb to invoke this
parable and send his pitiful handful of followers into the streets to live it
out. "As for me," confesses the narrator, Bebb's son-in-law Antonio
Parr, "I ended up by the Palmer Square tiger full of claret and half
convinced that either I was dreaming the whole thing or was having a nervous
breakdown. How did you invite people to a
parable?"
How
indeed? And yet Jesus "parable" (v.7) involves no less than five
imperatives! Jesus actually expects us to do this. Don't just
"include" those who are unlike you; actually invest leadership in
them. Don't just make room for the minority; make them the majority. Don't just
take them in; let them take over. Otherwise, we may find ourselves with full
plates at an empty banquet.
Come 'N' Get It!
Doug
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