• Identify with those who are in prison as if we are in prison, with those who are being tortured as if it is happening to us.
• Honor fidelity in relationship as if the life of the whole community depends on it (because it does).
• Keep free from the love of money (which can also be translated as be generous and liberal) and be content with our possessions (and just to be clear, the writer of Hebrews wasn’t addressing a community nearly as wealthy as we are)
• Imitate the lives of those who have spoken to us of the love of God, and
• Continually offer sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving to God, which the writer defines as doing good work and sharing whatever we have.

And finally in the wild of the Gospel of Luke, we have instructions from Jesus about party manners as a rule of life. Although the part of the Gospel that we hear says, “And then Jesus told them a parable,” this is not the parable. The parable doesn’t start until verse 16. This is all preamble. The scene is a meal at the home of some Pharisees. Luke’s Gospel describes more meal-time scenes than all of the rest. One commentator has quipped that in Luke, “Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.” (5) Luke describes at least three meals that Jesus has with Pharisees, and we can assume that there were more.

I always feel the need to say out loud that Pharisees were not the “bad guys.” Any sense of that from the Gospel stories of Jesus is anachronistic – representing disputes that arose in communities at the end of the first century (long after Jesus had died), after Rome had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. In Luke’s account, Jesus spends a considerable amount of time with Pharisees. In this story, some Pharisees have just warned Jesus that Herod wants to kill him, and have invited him to a Shabbat meal. They’re keeping an eye on him. Sure, there is tension here: there’s disagreement about what can and cannot be done on the Sabbath, but it’s an argument among friends, not enemies. In spite of what you might have been taught in Sunday school, the Pharisees were literate, moderate, clean, polite, upstanding members of society. They were concerned with the renewal of Jewish spiritual life just as Jesus was.  We really don’t have a lot of historical information about the Pharisees. But whether Jesus was a Pharisee (as Rabbi Berman suspects) or a friend of Pharisees, we should understand that we have a lot in common with them. That said, even the good guys need to be reminded about humility.

In his instructions about where to sit at a banquet, I don’t think Jesus was arguing against something particularly Pharisaic or Jewish. Rather, he was taking a saying right out of the Book of Proverbs (25:6-7) and offering a corrective to Hellenistic culture of social status, public position or reputation, and systems of reciprocity in the wider society (not unlike our own systems of privilege in contemporary civil society).  Jesus was teaching about social pecking order – seeking places of honor, worrying about social status, keeping track of who invited whom to what, etc., and reminding everyone (those who were doing the jostling and those who were getting jostled) that there is no pecking order in the realm of God except that in the banquet to end all banquets, any who have been least, lost, or last shall be first.

In the wild, Jesus adds instructions to extend hospitality (that is philoxenía in the face of so much xenophobia). We have retained that word haven’t we? Jesus adds instructions to go beyond the usual meaning of stranger or foreigner to include those who are impoverished, diseased, or disabled. We can understand his instruction to be about extending hospitality to all who are on the margins socially, medically, politically, legally, or religiously. There really are no clear lines in Jesus’ time or now to distinguish between the categories. And while Emmanuel Church has had nearly 150 years of extending this kind of hospitality, there’s plenty of work still to do: in this building, in our neighborhoods, in this city, in the world.

In a society as individualistic as ours, it’s hard to hear wild instructions like these as pertaining to the congregation, to the community, to the state, or to the nation, and to find our place of responsibility, our moral obligation, within the group. And it’s often easier to agree to the need for humility and hospitality than to act humbly and hospitably. Larger groups, however, can actually provide both the encouragement and a certain amount of stability and security that are impossible when one is going it alone. Communities of faith can (and must) continue to engage in the kind of humble hospitality that provides compassion and mercy and protection, and that helps those who are strange or foreign, those in the margins of our society, find healing and recover a place at the table.