Pentecost 14C - "Give It Your All"

Saint Luke 14:25-33

I must confess to you that I do not read any of our neighbouring churches websites or newsletters.  I don’t know why but I don’t. However, I do peek in on what other churches in far away places like Boston, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Charlotte and a couple in New York City are doing and it seems like all of them are planning big celebrations this weekend.

They come in all different names like “Get Connected Sunday”. One church was preparing for what they called “Homecoming Sunday” with pictures on their Facebook page of one of the pastors stocking the pews with those little pencils – popular in churches and golf courses – and another of their pastors eating a corn dog.

Those with exceeding long memories will remember that this day was known as Rally Day in which everybody received a ribbon with the year printed on it.  The ribbons were designed to be pinned to one's clothing, and the colors of the ribbons would change through the years. I remember some members, who at the time I thought to be quite old, but who are probably younger than I am now, had long flowing strands of ribbons that showed how long it had been since they have been attending this annual event.

At your Academy we try to match the Chicago Public School schedules and so we had all of our fun with backpack blessings, a tour for members of the church, student families and friends, an amazing lunch, followed parents and children romping in the playground serenaded by the music of Los Perros Cubannos in the middle of August.   Even so, for some of us who always returned to school on the day after Labor Day, it all seemed a little early for summer to call it a day.

So, we might envy those churches who are having today what we had a couple of weeks ago even as we wonder Jesus words from today’s gospel might put a real damper on things.  One of my favourite preachers has titled his sermon for this Sunday: “Envisioning My Year.” And another has promised in a promotional post that if you came to church you would find “fantastic music, revels, and clergy in unusual hats.”  Envisioning a year filled with revels and unusual hats? It’s just a guess but I doubt any of this will be based on Jesus words: “therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”1

You have to hand it to Jesus: he believes in truth-in-advertising. He doesn’t sugarcoat his message in order to sell it.  He doesn’t cut corners, and he doesn’t soften the blow.2  Jesus is not like one of those slick, smiling, television preachers who tell us that if you just follow Jesus we’ll get everything we want.  

In fact, he says that if we follow Jesus, it may cost us and cost us dearly.  We just may wind up like Mr. Rich Uncle Milbourn Pennybags from the Monopoly game.  He is dressed well, in perhaps a Georgio Armani morning formal complete with spats on his shoes, but his pockets are empty.  He’s broke.  Maybe that’s how we come to Jesus? 

We come empty-handed which is pretty uncomfortable for us self-sufficient people.  

We even had diluted the idea of carrying our crosses as something we can do.  “Bearing a cross has nothing to do with chronic illness, painful physical conditions, or trying family relationships. Cross bearing requires deliberate sacrifice and exposure to risk and ridicule in order to follow Jesus.”3

In our age we don’t even risk that.  Announce to someone that you are a member of a mainline Christian denomination and, if there is any reaction at all, it will be a shrug.  Perhaps you’ll be asked what church you go to.  Perhaps they’ll announced something like, “Oh yes, I was baptized a Lutheran.  Or was it a Presbyterian?” but after this exchange the conversation will most assuredly move on to something else.

To be a follower of Jesus in the early centuries of the church, as we know, meant being cut off from family, friends, society, and maybe even losing one’s life. In some fundamentalist Moslem countries to embrace Christ is to bring a death sentence upon oneself. And if you are a Mormon, even though you are a member of “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”, or like David Auchuleta embrace who you are and your sexual identity, and you will be “dis-fellowshipped,” a polite way of saying, dead to your family and friends.

Jesus wanted his followers to count the cost and choose wisely so many took another look at Jesus, really heard what he had to say and bolted for the door. Some translations point out the obvious, that at this point the crowds become significantly smaller. I’ll bet!

Jesus is asking us to worship something other than our possessions, our accomplishments, maybe even worship something other than our family and friends.

Several years ago, I was presiding over a funeral that – even though there have been hundreds between then and now has stuck with me to this day. It was all because of a sign on one of the “memory boards” that the family had put together. The pictures, the crowds, the family all lead me to believe that the man was a good guy albeit a guy who had lots of stuff. There were pictures of him on his speed boat, an on his jet-skies, and at his “cabin” (which was nicer than my house), on snow skies, and water skies. The man had even souped up his lawn mower to make it go faster. At the center of all the pictures was a sign – the most inappropriate sign I have seen in my 50+ years in and around funeral homes. It said: “He who dies with the most toys, wins.”

I’m not making that up. I looked at the sign and then I looked at the 67-year-old dead guy in the casket. I looked at the sign and then I looked back at him and then back at the sign and back at him and the only thing I could think of was: “No, he who dies with the most toys is just dead.” 

While this man may have had more stuff than you or I could ever hope to have, in the end he was dead. Stone cold, definitely dead. 

He may have tried to build his own personal towers of wealth and possessions, but he failed to count the cost.

The painfully sharp point in Jesus’ words is that the sign just doesn’t work. Toys won’t do it for us. In fact, to have chosen them over everything else is not to have chosen life, but death. You have chosen life – a full, rich, life maybe – but still a life that is less than was intended.

This is the bottom-line truth that Jesus is insisting upon.

Choose to place your career in the hands of Jesus and it may not come back exactly as you wanted but it will come back raised to a higher purpose.

Choose to place your family, your friends, your dear ones, in the hands of God, and those relationships will come back tempered with a deeper love.

Choose to place your hobbies, your joys, your frustrations, your satisfactions, your sorrows, your joys, your money, your church, in the hands of Jesus and they will all come back to you with a higher and deeper meaning because you have chosen to place them where they belong.

If we are to follow Jesus, we have to do it with everything we have. It’s an all or nothing deal. It a core affirmation of the faith that when you place everything – your riches and your worries, your health and well-being, your family and friends, in the hands of Jesus in the end it won’t matter how many toys we have but it will matter that we have given it our all.

________________

1. St. Luke 14:33. (NRSVUE) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

2. Debie Thomas, “What It Will Cost You,” Journey with Jesus, September 1, 2019, https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/2346-what-it-will-cost-you.

3. Brian Stoffregen, “Luke 14.25-33 Proper 18 - Year C,” Exegetical Notes, accessed September 6, 2025, https://www.crossmarks.com/brian/luke14x25.htm.

 

Pentecost 12C - "Must Be in the Front Row"

 

Proverbs 25:6–7a

Saint Luke 14:1 & 7–14

Last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune featured an article about Leo Burnett who, in the midst of the great depression, started an ad agency. People scoffed, wondering about “the waste and extravagance of advertising,” in the midst of the biggest economic downturn of the 20th century.

Burnett ignored the skeptics and over the years gave us some of the most memorable commercials in the history of television. Tony the Tiger’s proclamation that Frosted Flakes were “Great!” came from them.  The creative minds at Burnett made the Minnesota Valley Canning Company into a household name by posing their mascot “smiling broadly and holding a corncob like a barbell” like a very happy green fellow and eventually re-branding the entire corporation, The Green Giant Company.

For me the best of the best was the Miller Lite, “more taste lest filling” campaign whose drummed up controversy lives on until this very day.   And of those commercials one stands out as a classic.  It is Mr. Baseball, Bob Uecker's “I must be in the front row commercial” for Miller Lite! 

The premise is simple and begins with Uecker claiming that one of the best things about being an ex-big leaguer is getting freebies to the game.  “All I did,” he says pulling a ticket out of his pocket, “was call the front office and bingo.”  

Almost as soon as he sits down an usher approaches and informs him, “You’re in the wrong seat buddy.” to which Uecker says, “I must be in the front row.”

In the next scene we see him in the upper, upper deck of Dodger stadium about as far away from the action as one can be and still be in the ballpark. 

In real life Bob Eucker was an unassuming, humble guy who made constant fun of his lack of ability as a player, once saying, “Sporting goods companies pay me not to endorse their products.”

Eucker and the Milwaukee Brewers went along with the gag to the extent that there are two statues erected in the honor of their long-time broadcaster. One statue is in a prominent place outside of the ballpark and the other is way up there “behind the last row of section 422 in the upper deck.”

In getting a place of prominence and a place of humility, it seems to me, the Brewers said that while he may have always wanted to sit in the front row Eucker was still perfectly happy sitting in the back.

Jesus attended a dinner party once where it looked like a lot of the people there thought they 

deserved to be in the front row.

We might be feeling pretty good about ourselves remembering that Jesus “lived in an honor/shame society where everything someone did was to accrue honor for you and your family’s name and avoid shame.  At whose house you were eating and in which particular spot you were sitting mattered a [great] deal. Honor only meant something if it was publicly recognized; that is, if other people saw you do something honorable or witnessed honor conferred upon you. Likewise, shame was so damaging precisely because everyone else agreed that you were of less value.”1

There can’t be anybody here who thinks this practice has died out.  Just try organizing a wedding banquet and discovering that the only places left for the people the bride calls Aunt Bertha and Uncle Hermann, but who are really third cousins twice removed, are at the very back of the banquet hall near the swinging doors to the kitchen at the back of the hall. Do this and one must gird themselves and be ready for the dear couples wrath at being embarrassed like this “after all we’ve done for you.”

Jesus sees and notices, but Dr. Fred Craddock warns:

The human ego is quite clever and, upon hearing that taking a low seat may not only avoid embarrassment but lead to elevation to the head table, may convert the instruction about humility in a new strategy for self-exaltation. Taking the low seat because one is humble is one thing; taking the low seat as a way to move up is another. The entire message becomes a cartoon if there is a mad competitive rush for the lowest place, with ears cocked toward the host, waiting for the call to ascend.2 

Jesus does not offer a divinely approved way for a person to get what he or she wants.

Jesus is not offering a lesson on humility, or how to finagle you way into the front row, he is telling us how things are and should be for people who claim to be members of the Kingdom of God. Jesus is telling us that the secret for those of us who want to proclaim the reign and rule of God is to let everybody in and don’t worry about where they or we sit.

Go out into the streets, Jesus says, and "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you...”3

Make those people who are worried about who they are sitting with and where they are sitting, Jesus seems to be saying, if I hear him correctly, dine with everybody and anybody who wants a little lunch.  Maybe they won’t come. Maybe they will choose to stay home and pout or complain about the quality of the feast, or that they have to eat with the riff-raff from the wrong side of the tracks.  That’s their problem not yours, Jesus says, because they will be missing something.

Unfortunately, the today’s Gospel reading ends one verse too soon.  It leaves out the punchline!  For Saint Luke goes on to tell us that Jesus’ little admonitions triggered a response from one of the guests: ‘How fortunate is the one who gets to eat dinner in God’s kingdom!’”4

That’s us! We’re the fortunate ones who have been invited to the feast!  We’re the ones who Jesus has called to gather around his table!  We are not onlookers anymore because we all have been invited to dine with Jesus in his good rule and reign.

We’re not the ushers who are checking tickets to see if one person is not in their proper place, but neither are we the disinterested bystanders in the little dust up between Jesus and his hosts.  

We’ve been invited to the feast!  We are the fortunate ones!  We are the ones who are the recipients of God’s great grace. What we do with our good fortune is up to us.

I  know I have told you this story before and I also know that I have told you that when a preacher starts to repeat himself or herself too often they have been around too long but this is too good to resist because I think I might have seen this gospel being played out in some small way while worshipping one Sunday at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

The cathedral is, as one might expect from the Episcopalians, a first-class operation.  It has a history of great preaching, magnificent music, and liturgical pageantry that even on an ordinary summer’s Sunday would put most church’s worship on festivals to shame.  In other words: They process in everybody and anything that is not nailed down.

They also have a strong commitment to social justice and social outreach that feeds the poor, lobbies for the oppressed, and seeks to serve the least, the lost, and the lonely.

All the pageantry paled to something that happened at coffee hour following church when I caught a small glimpse of their care for everybody in person.

On the Sunday I was there about a dozen or so of the unhoused had congregated on the cathedral’s plaza before worship.  One man in particular looked especially disheveled.

 

After worship there was a coffee hour on the plaza for the people who had attended.  The usual was offered: coffee, tea, coffee cake, cookies, and juice for the children.

When things were winding down the bedraggled man slowly approached one of the tables as if he were working his way to the head table at a royal banquet or trying to sneak into the front row of the ballpark.

He started to reach for a piece of the well picked-over coffee cake when the well-dressed, well-coiffed woman serving said to him.  “Oh!  No!  No!  No!”  

I gasped and the man pulled back but then the woman continued.  “No! No! No!” she said again.  “Those have been out far too long.  They’re a little stale.  You don’t want those.  Let me get you some that are fresh.”

She reached behind her and grabbed another full tray of treats.  She unwrapped the cellophane and placed the tray right in front of the surprised man.

“Take as many as you like.”  She said.  “We always have plenty.  Enough for everybody!”  

He filled his hands and even put some in his pockets for later.  The woman smiled, so did I, and I must admit I felt a tear run down my cheek.

When the well-healed serve the downtrodden.  When the outcasts and the insiders feast together.  When it doesn’t matter who you know.  When a homeless man is treated as well, and maybe even better, than the wealthiest person in the congregation. When all are welcomed, it is then, Jesus says, everyone in the great and promised kingdom “must be in the front row.”

________________

1. Philip Martin, “The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost,” A Sermon for Every Sunday (asermonforeverysunday.com, August 23, 2022)

2.     Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Interpretation Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 177.

3. St. Luke 14:12-14. (NRSV)  [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

4. St. Luke 14:15. (MSG) [MSG=Eugene H. Peterson, in

\The Message: The New Testament in Contemporary English (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1995

Pentecost 11C - "Wheelchairs Where?"

Saint Luke 13:10–17

The cover of our bulletin is a painting called “Christina's World” by Andrew Wyeth and depicts a woman crawling through a field to a farmhouse in the distance.  

The woman in the painting depicts a real person Anna Christina Olson who whose parents had befriended Wyeth and allowed him to use one of the spare bedrooms to paint.  

On this particular day Wyeth saw Christina crawling across a large field toward home.  She was on her hands and knees because she was afflicted with some condition, perhaps polio, that left her unable to walk.  Christina, art historians tell us, was firmly against the use of a wheelchair so she crawled everywhere she went.

  

The painting is iconic and evocative especially for those who are physically able, because it leaves us to wonder just how difficult it must have been for Christina to get anywhere -- from room to room in her home but even more so to cover such a long distance that she would have to cover in the painting to reach her home.

As great art is known to do, it draws us in, just as does today's gospel.

The characters are all well cast. There is the bent-over woman in desperate straits.   There is Jesus the Rabbi and healer.  And appearing as the villain is the leader of the synagogue.

As I have continually pointed out in our Bible Studies, and here in sermons, we must be careful with this.  In light of Anti-Semitism, and how we might feel about the occupation of Gaza and the calamity it has brought, broad generalizations about any group can get us into very deep and turbulent water.

To make matters a little more difficult (And more fun!) what if this story about Jesus is one of those things that aren’t what they seem at first glance?

I was pretty much on the glide path to an easy, breezy sermon until I came across the Wyatt painting of Christina and an article by Ben Mattlin who graduated cum laude from Harvard at 21, is the author of several books and, as a freelance financial journalist, has had articles published in numerous newspapers and magazines.  Mattlin is a husband, father of two daughters and a quadriplegic from birth.

His article, “A Disabled Life Is a Life Worth Living,” along with the painting may give us new insights into the woman and the best gift Jesus gave her in today’s Gospel.

Mattlin writes:

Growing up with a disability, I often became isolated. Feeling devalued by my peers, with no confidence in my future, I experienced intermittent but profound depression. One can take only so many surgeries, so many bodily betrayals, so much rejection, before wanting to give up. Even today, I can pivot from utter terror over an itch I can’t scratch or a bite of food I can’t quite swallow, to almost unbelievable joy if I manage to clear my throat unassisted or zoom my motorized wheelchair through a crowded street. As disabled people, we are endlessly buffeted by circumstances beyond our control.1

The article and the painting give us a real glimpse of the frustration the the disabled woman in the synagogue was feeling and it wasn’t good.

The words we heard to describe her today were that she was plagued by “a spirit that crippled her for eighteen years.”2 Other translations of this passage try to diagnose from a distance saying (and I am not making these up) she was bothered by: “arthritis”3 or, as J. B. Phillips suggested in his paraphrase: “some psychological cause.”4

We all know what it’s like when we are suffering with anything.  It doesn’t matter if what is bothering us is physical or psychosomatic.  When something is wrong, it can bend us low in body and spirit.  And most of all, as Mattlin points out it can leave us feeling isolated.  We can feel this way in the midst of a crowd or even when we are surrounded by friends and family.

The point is that Jesus sees her.  He interrupts his preaching and gets to healing.  Jesus not only sees her but calls her forward - which she probably hated because it drew attention to her infirmity.

When she has made her way through the crowd straining to look up but mostly seeing only ground, feet, and sandals she comes to Jesus.   I don’t think he was towering over her as the others were but rather, he stooped low and became as bent over as she was so that he could look her in the eye and see her face. 

Maybe for the first time in what seemed like forever she was eye to eye with another person and then this person touched her.

“‘Woman, you’re free!’” he said and then.  “He laid hands on her and suddenly she was standing straight and tall, giving glory to God.”5

The place goes wild and so does the religious leader. Religious leaders then and now have a tendency to be set off by the smallest things.  His complaint is that this could have waited.  This is the Sabbath!  The woman’s disease was not life threatening.  Neither she nor Jesus would be heading out of town before sundown because travel was forbidden and after dark it was dangerous.  They would both be  around tomorrow.  Couldn’t this have waited?

Of course it could have! 

They all could have reconvened at the same time the next day when the leader put the keys in the synagogue doors to open the place up but there were too many variables.

What if the woman went home and thought about how her life would change if she was healed and somehow decided for the status quo?  What if her family had become so used to her the way she was that they talked her out of going back?  What if her friends told her she had taken up enough of the rabbis’ time and wasn’t worthy of any more attention?

No!  There were too many other options and all of them were bad! For Jesus there was no time like the present!

Besides, he points out that if could lead their ox or donkey to water on the Sabbath.  “So, ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound—- think of it -—for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath?”6

Here is what I think embarrassed the people the most. 

Jesus knew that the wealthy among them could keep from disobeying the rules by being able to hire someone. They could afford to employ some outsider to do their work for them.  Light a candle.  Make a hot dinner.  Take care of all their chores.  They could pay someone to do it.

While the poor - which were most of the people present that day - could not.  If they needed a hot dinner, or a candle lit, or one of their animals fed and watered they had to do it themselves. 

They may have tried their best but more often than they wished necessity trumped legality.  They probably disobeyed strict Sabbath rules every week, not because they wanted to but because they had no other choice.

So, why not do this good work now?  Why not restore this woman to her rightful place in her community at this very moment?  Why wait?  Act!

That is how it is with Jesus who is always acting on our behalf, but it may not be in ways that we think.

Ben Mattlin continued in his article:

Indeed, some people find life after disability more intense, more deeply appreciated than it was before. My lifelong experience, with disability, has made me a creative problem-solver, and, ironically, perhaps, a diehard optimist, if only because I've had to be. It's taught me a great deal about patience, tolerance and flexibility. My disability is part of who I am.7

 Just as it was a part of who Christina in the painting and the woman with Jesus was. But Jesus tells us that our shortcomings do not have to define us which is what people do all the time. 

Good, well-meaning people have read this story and preached this story and come away with the conclusion that only a touch from Jesus will do the trick.  Let Jesus touch you and you will be healed. 

But what if this isn’t about Jesus’ healing? What if this is about Jesus’ acceptance and restoration to being a part of the community from which you have been separated?

In an interview with NPR Mattlin tells of attended a funeral for another quadriplegic friend where the young minister (It could have been an old minister too) said that his friend was "a free spirit, trapped in an unresponsive body. Now that spirit is truly free." 

We were told he'd gone to a place where he could walk again. His dad added "Walk? He's probably playing basketball in the nude.” The words stung. Mourners need to believe their loved one has gone to a better place. Yet what was the message here? Death sets you free and cures disability? Was he better off dead than disabled? I realize I'm biased. I have never ridden a motorcycle or done half the other physical things my friend used to love, but I do know one can live a pretty full life with a disability.

How limited is this vision of life, and of the afterlife? Are there no wheelchairs in heaven? I'm not buying it. For me, if there is a heaven, it's not a place where I'll be able to walk. It's a place where it doesn't matter if you can't.8

How about that for a liberating idea for Christina, for Mattlin, and for all of us?

How about that for an idea?  What if this isn’t about keeping the Sabbath laws but rather Jesus telling us that there is a place where we all are welcomed no matter what?  Wheelchair or no wheelchair, infirmity or no infirmity, we will be welcomed.   In the Kingdom of Heaven and in our community on earth it doesn’t matter what you can or can’t do Jesus wants all to be welcomed.

Wheelchairs in heaven?  Crawl into that idea for a moment. Mull that one over for a while.  Believe me when I tell you — I still am.

________________

1.  Ben Mattlin, “A Disabled Life Is a Life Worth Living.” The New York Times, October 5, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/opinion/a-disabled-life-is-a-life-worth-living.html.

2. St.  Luke 13:11. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

3. St.  Luke 13:11. (MSG) [MSG=The Message]

4. St.  Luke 13:11.  (PHILLIPS) [PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English. (London: HarperCollins, 2000. )

5. St.  Luke 13:13.  (MSG)

6. St.  Luke 13:16.  (NKJV) [NKJV= The New King James Version]

7. Mattlin, loc.cit. 

8. Ben  Mattlin. “Valuing Life, Whether Disabled or Not.” NPR Morning Edition. NPR, December 7, 2005. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5042181.