Sermon for Sunday, August 31, 2025

August 31, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott





Luke 14:1, 7-14



When I was young with an even younger sister, my parents tried very hard to teach us good manners. For example, part of our holiday tradition was the Christmas afternoon writing of the write thank you notes. Much of their training, however, came at the dinner table as we discussed good manners. My parents insisted that we be on our best behavior, elbows off the table, chewing with our mouths closed, cutting our food into bites, and eating that one bite before cutting further. I always wanted to cut up all my food all at once, to get it done with. When I would whine about not being able to do it my way, my parents would say, “When you’re invited to eat dinner at the White House, you’ll be glad you know the proper way to eat dinner.”


I have yet to be invited to the White House, but I am grateful that should an invite arrive, I will not embarrass my parents. I may be a grown up, but I still remember how to be on my best behavior. In some ways, today’s Gospel is similar. Jesus gives the disciples good advice for how to navigate a social setting in a time before namecards tell us where to sit, and we can judge our social status for ourselves, as we see how far away we are from the guests of honor. In the time of Jesus, people would be left to figure out the best approach. Some people would march right up to the head of the u-shaped table and sit next to the host, hoping for the best. As Jesus points out, far better to be asked to move up to a better seat than ejected from the banquet because you chose the wrong seat.


But of course, Jesus is not only teaching an etiquette lesson, at least not the kind of etiquette my parents focused on—and to be clear, my parents, also, were teaching more than just good table manners. Like people who raise the next generation in many settings, Jesus was training his disciples in ways to be good humans in all sorts of communities.


The community that Jesus describes in the last part of this passage is a radically different community from any that his disciples might have imagined. And I am guessing that it’s radically different from anything that you or I have experienced.


We might protest: “It’s not that radically different! We live in that inclusive society envisioned by Jesus.” In some ways, we’d be right. I teach English classes at Spartanburg Methodist College, and when I teach some pieces of literature, like Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” I want to demonstrate how far we’ve come as a society. I have them look around the classroom. I ask, “If it was a hundred years ago, how many of us would be in this classroom together?” In my current Brit Lit class, none of us would be in that classroom; my ten students are female and non-white males.


We might say we’ve learned what Jesus proclaims throughout his ministry by pointing to our churches or our larger denomination to show how we have learned the lessons of inclusivity that Jesus tried to teach us. We have a social statement—in fact, a long history of social statements—that show that we are committed to the inclusivity modelled by Jesus. But many Lutheran activists point out that our denomination overall still looks much like it did a hundred years ago, even though we’ve overhauled our hymnal and some of our worship practices to be more inclusive.


The more I think about today’s reading, the more I think that we minimize this teaching of Jesus by reducing it down to inclusivity. Jesus did always challenge humans to think about who is being included and who is being left out when the guest list is prepared—but he’s not nearly as concerned about our dinner parties, our classrooms, or our congregations as we might think. Jesus’ focus is far more broad. Jesus wants us to change our hearts—and these changes will be made visible in our behavior.


Jesus shows that he understands how transactional humans can be, how transactional we are: I’ll do this for that person and then they’ll do something for me. Or I need to do something for that person because they did something for me. I think of high school graduation invitations, which I sent to every friend my mother ever had. She had spent years sending gifts to their children, and now it was her turn. We didn’t really expect them to come many miles to watch me walk across the stage. We did not invite people whom we did not know.


Jesus asks us, as he always does, to look into our deepest selves, the self that we might not even realize is in control, the self that is deeply transactional, the way so many of us have been trained to be in ways that we don’t even remember being trained. Jesus knew that much of our society sets us up to be transactional souls, striving to be invited to the guest of honor spot at the head of the table. Jesus understands how much of our motivation comes from the idea of what people can do for us, not what we can do for them.

Even those of us in helping professions might have these motivations, in a slightly different shade of transactional striving. When I did my chaplaincy training this summer, I was aware that it was much easier for me to go to the hospital rooms of people who were open to a visit. The ones who were grumpy or angry were the ones I wanted to avoid, even though they may have been the ones who needed a pastoral visit more than the ones who welcomed me warmly.


I wish I could tell you that I am the highly evolved human that Jesus calls us to be. I wish I could tell you that I bravely marched to the ward and went right to the rooms of the grumpy and angry and stayed there until my pastoral presence transformed them into kind and gentle patients—and look, here I am, being transactional AGAIN!!! Here, in front of you, in real time, wanting to be able to tell you of a pastoral visit that was a success, not about the pastoral visits that seemed to go nowhere and left me feeling inadequate.

The point is not to be of service so that people will change or come to our churches or become better versions of themselves. When my parents gave us etiquette training, they did not really expect that we would be invited to the White House. They wanted us to be better humans regardless of which dining room we were in.


Jesus wants us to be better humans, the kind of human who can issue an invitation without any ulterior motive at all, to make a visit without any expectation. Jesus calls on us to expand our circles to include everyone—not because of what they can do for us, not because we can then feel good when they accept our invitations. It doesn’t come naturally to us.


For similar reasons, we often have a difficult time believing any gift can be fully given. We look at an invitation thinking, “Hmm, I can’t return the favor, so what is the catch? Will this dinner turn into a sales pitch?” We think about the potential cost of accepting the invitation, and many of us give our apologies as we explain that we’re just too busy. We may do the same when God issues invitations. We may view these invitations with suspicion: who are we that Jesus would come and live with us, immerse himself in our lives even to the point of death? Surely there’s a catch. And in some ways there is a catch—the command to live lives not based in fear and transactions, but in generosity and love.



Say yes to this invitation. Give up the transactional life and be free to live boldly and without fear. Be free and be generous. Say with confidence, the words that end our second reading from Hebrews:


 “The Lord is our helper;
  We will not be afraid.
 What can anyone do to us?”