Radical Invitation

“Radical Invitation”based on Psalm 18:1, 10-16 and Luke 14:1, 7-14

The Psalm gives us a chance to hear God saying, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it….I would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.“ (18:10b, 16) It is a beautiful and succinct summary of much of the Bible itself. God wishes to give us good and abundant gifts, including making sure we are all fed with “the finest wheat.” God wishes for us to be satisfied and whole. God dreams of people engaging in mutual care and concern so that the whole earth is an expression of God’s abundance and all people are able to open their mouths wide and be filled with good food.

This fits into one of the central themes of the Bible itself – God’s desire for just distribution of resources – rest, land, food, housing, labor, knowledge, wisdom, healthcare, and everything else. Because if resources are distributed justly then the abundance of creation is more than enough to provide for all people – and WELL.

The dreams of God for a just society as laid out in the Torah revolve around just distribution of resources along with a system of justice that allows for fair resolution of disputes. To get there, God bans interest, the capacity to sell ancestral land, bribery, lying in court, and forcing ANYONE to work on the Sabbath. John Dominic Crossan points out that in the Creation narrative itself God starts the distribution of resources by having rest and then distributing it to everyone!

For the first 400 years of Ancient Israelite history, all evidence points to the fact that people lived by God’s dreams and the people were fed and tithes were used to provide for those who fell on hard times (and the priests). Then there were kings, and things got complicated and stayed that way.

By the time of Jesus, God’s dreams of all the people having access to abundant and good food was simply in shambles. The rich ate in ridiculous luxury while large swaths of the population died of malnutrition.

In my investigation of this passage, it came up that the Gospel Luke was written to the elites.1 This was not something I new (or maybe retained), but it fits. I know Luke and Acts to be written in the best Greek of the New Testament, indicating that Luke was exceptionally well educated. I know Luke to be the Gospel most aware of the difference between God’s ways and the world’s ways. Luke is always noticing those living in poverty, women, those who are struggling, widows, orphens and foreigners, and those who others might not even consider part of the community. He is always, always, always focused on vulnerable.

And for me at least, it makes sense that a person who came from the ranks of the elites and became a Jesus follower would have that sort of obsession. He had his world turned upside down by Jesus, and that meant taking his focus from the top of the world’s hierarchies to the bottoms. And, in doing so, he called on others to do the same.

The passage we read today is one that is mostly challenging for the elites. Most of the time in the Roman Empire, people ate within their social classes. Even in Jewish circles, it was pretty common for people to create closed “false kinship groups” that they shared meals with, and the exclusivity of those groups pretended to keep people pious.

There was, further, an expectation of obligation with invitations. If you went to dinner at someone’s house, it was expected you would invite them over for dinner later – to a meal at least as expensive. If you couldn’t do so, then you wouldn’t’ go to dinner.

The early Jesus-following community blew these norms to oblivion. The early Jesus community expected people to show up at shared meals and eat together across every line that society might use to divide people. Not just social class, or marital status, but also those who were slaves and those who were free, those who were Jewish and those who were Greek.

The thing is, while everyone benefited from knowing each other in the Body of Christ – especially across hierarchical lines – the people for whom it is most dangerous was the elite. Because for the elites, especially those in cities where propriety was most carefully protected, engaging with people “below” them in the world’s hierarchies meant they might lose their elite status. Their families might cut them off, their friends might disengage, they had power and status and even wealth to lose by showing up in mixed communities.

My favorite commentary, The Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels points out “Exclusive fellowship required an exclusive table, while inclusive fellowship required an inclusive one.”2 The early Jesus Community was an inclusive fellowship. And it was challenging. We hear a lot in the letters of Paul about people really struggling to let go of the world and it’s hierarchies in order to truly eat together as the Body of Christ.

All of this helps make sense of why the Gospel of Luke teaches the elites to invite people in poverty and people who were disabled to their tables. This is the Jesus way, as Luke has experienced it. And Luke’s audience is most in need of learning it. Instead of being repaid by a similar invitation, Luke tells them they’ll be repaid “at the resurrection of the righteous.”

That is, Luke says they should be more worried about God’s ways than the world’s. I worry Luke’s nuance is a little bit too “afterlife judgment focused” and I’d rather if we just thought about it as “because that’s how we practice the kindom.”

It is interesting to try to think about how we take this passage today. There are a lot of possible lessons in it. I mean, subverting the hierarchies is the Jesus way is the prime one, but you all have heard that before! Another easy option is “it is important to practice the kindom of God” but, again, nothing new there.

Perhaps this passage serves as a simple reminder to invite someone to dinner, particularly someone you don’t know yet and who might be different from you. That’s a good and really practical response to this passage. It is also fabulously good for the faith community when we do invite each other over and get to know each other more deeply.

There is another possible radical invitation in this passage, but its impact varies. Because, like the early church, we are a gathering of people that the world sees as having different “values” or coming from different “classes.” We know that all of us are made in the image of God and beloved exactly as we are, that nothing at all in the world can make one person more important than another. Yet, like the early church, we still have to do the work to dismiss the teachings of the world and practice the kindom of God.

So, for those of us who don’t attend Breakfast already, I think this passage offers us an invitation to attend our Breakfast AS A GUEST and experience it as such. That there is something really hard about accepting help. One of my mentors often quoted Simone Weil who said, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich the bread they feed them.” I have such respect for our breakfast guests who are willing to receive the gifts we give them, and who do so with such grace.

For those whose finances are secure enough that a free breakfast doesn’t make a difference, it feels very Lukan to show up at a free breakfast anyway. It can be hard to be served. It can be hard to accept a free gift. It can be hard to wait in line. It can be hard to see other people struggle. The work that our breakfast guests already do is work that some us may also need to learn how to do.

For those in our community who already come to Breakfast, the invitation looks different. God wants everyone to have access to good and abundant food, delicious food, to fill your bodies and lift up your souls. I think the radical invitation here is to continually shake off the myths of capitalism and sink more deeply into the stories of God. To pay attention to the ways that poverty is a condition created by society, and that it is society’s sin that anyone would struggle to find enough resources in this created world of abundance.

Because, that’s important – God created with abundance. There is enough food for everyone! There is enough rest for everyone! There is enough space for everyone! There is enough!

We just have to distribute resources fairly. We are called to practice the kindom. That probably means we should invert any hierarchies we find. After all, those are the teachings of the God we know. Thanks be to God! Amen

1Footnotes in The Jewish Annotated Bible editted by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler

2Page 382, “Meals”

August 31, 2025

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

 603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers

 http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

As pictured in our photo show by Larry McArthur