What a build up Luke opens the fourteenth chapter of his Gospel with! Jesus is hobnobbing with the local gentry, and all of these important people are watching him. What will he do? What will he say? The spotlight is on him. What will happen next?

Well, for reasons that haven’t been explained to me, our lectionary skips five verses. The result is that our Lord and Savior, the Son of God, sounds something like a cross between Ann Landers and Miss Manners. The Jesus portrayed in today’s Gospel lesson is a rather benign inoffensive dispenser of pious etiquette and mild charitable exhortation. "[At a banquet] do not sit down at the place of honor…" "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors…invite [rather] the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind." We could read these sayings in the Sunday paper over our morning coffee and agree that this good man has a point before we flip through to see how much houses in our neighborhoods are selling for these days. Ah yes, Jesus as perhaps we would like him to be: a wise and holy teacher whom we can easily live with because he remains in our peripheral vision – polite, well behaved, unobtrusive.

What you haven’t heard this morning in the overlooked five verses is that those to whom Jesus addresses these platitudes are standing in stunned silence before him. Jesus has just healed a man on the Sabbath in their midst, thus trampling on their ancient and rigidly adhered to laws. Then he basically told them to deal with it. Jesus got in the faces of his host and fellow guests, sidestepped thousands of years of the tradition of his own ancestors, and then told them where to sit and who to invite to their banquets. In this context, the niceties presented in our lesson don’t sound very nice, do they?

You see, when put on the spot, when Jesus is made the focus of human attention, he doesn’t merely prattle on about how we should behave; Jesus demonstrates to us how God behaves. And he doesn’t just tell us how things should be, he tells us how things are in God’s kingdom.

A leader of the Pharisees invited Jesus into his home, and they were watching him closely. And what did they see? What do we see? We see that when we invite God into our midst, we probably want him to play by our rules. But he challenges, he disturbs, perhaps even casts aside our conventions and prejudices, and he won’t let anything stop him from touching us and healing us. We see that though we might seek status above our peers, God takes the lower seat, being born to a poor family in a stable, among the livestock. We see that though we might seek the security of the familiar and the comfort of giving without sacrifice, God gives his very self, his own body and blood to be food for many, for the salvation of us sinners.

Furthermore, we see a vision of the Kingdom of God – that ideal reality that every Christian and Christian community yearns for: a place that doesn’t stand of pretense but welcomes God’s actions no matter how unsettling they are. A place that dowsnt’ pander to the artifice of ego and vanity but recognizes and treasures the dignity of all people. We see a place where all give and receive as God gives and receives – with sacrifice and celebration.

Therefore, do not leave Church this morning with merely a couple of rules about parties in your heads. Know in your you hearts that Jesus’ words describe God’s actions, and they describe that which we will behold at the end of time, and they describe that which we participate in at this and every Eucharist: the Heavenly Banquet, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

Amen.