Sermon: Invitation to the Banquet

I’ve heard that some of us in this room, if we’re invited to something that we don’t want to go to, have been known to get out of it by making an excuse. I personally have never done that but I’ve heard of it being done. Kids are a great, all-purpose excuse. If you don’t have a kid yet, you might want to get one just for this. “Oh, sorry, going out to the karaoke bar with everyone from the office sounds so fun, but there’s a thing at the kids’ school that I have to go to. Otherwise I would totally be there.” The fact is that the excuse is usually true — we don’t make it up — but it’s either convenient if we don’t want to do the thing or inconvenient if we really do want to do it. And it’s either justifiable, if it really is more important than the thing you’re being invited to, or not if it isn’t.

This sermon today is part of a series I’m doing this year on the parables of Jesus. Jesus often conveyed his spiritual teachings in the form of parables — stories that can be read on at least two levels — the literal level and the allegorical level. And sometimes there was a third layer to Jesus’ parables — a political message. Jesus was a poor Jew living and teaching at a time when all of what is now Israel was under the control of the Roman Empire. He was one of many Jewish revolutionaries of his day working to liberate his people from the occupation. He didn’t want to get crucified any sooner than was absolutely necessary, although that was the fate that Jewish rebels met so he probably expected that that would be his fate too. But he didn’t want it any sooner than necessary so he often wrapped his most radical teachings in the obfuscating garb of a parable.

Those teachings have influenced our tradition by way of Christianity and so in this series, we’re going to try to unwrap some of the obfuscating garb and explore the wisdom within. So, the parable for today. Here’s the scene: at this point in the narrative of the book of Luke, Jesus is having a Sabbath meal with some of his followers and other guests and someone refers to “eating bread in the kingdom of God.” Eating bread in the kingdom of God was a way of talking about entering heaven, finding salvation. In today’s language, we could say that it’s that state of enlightened consciousness where we are all our best, most loving selves, and all the world is finally at peace. The image of a great dinner or banquet is the metaphor.

Here’s the text from Luke:

Then Jesus said to him, “Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ And the slave said, ‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’”

All the wealthy distinguished guests who were first invited made excuses. And, as with us, the excuses were probably technically true… the one probably did just buy a piece of land, one probably did just buy five oxen, and the other one probably did just get married. But did these rise to the level of justifiable excuses for not coming to the banquet? If, as we’re to assume, the banquet represents coming into God’s presence? If, as we’re to assume, the banquet is the state of enlightened, loving, communal consciousness that on some level we all dream about? How could anything be more important than that?

You would think that anyone who really got an invitation to the enlightenment would run, not walk, to accept it and join the party. But they don’t. And why not? What are they really doing? One thing that’s clear is that they are not doing things that absolutely have to be done. They’re not working. They’re not taking care of their children or saving the world. They’re not sick and needing to rest. What are they doing that they are choosing over bliss?

The first one says, “I have bought a piece of land and must go out and see it.” But presumably he had seen the land before he bought it. The word “must” is not quite right. He’s driven to just go and hang out on his real estate — to just marinate in that nice afterglow of his shiny new purchase. Same thing with the next one. He says, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out.” Guaranteed that he tried out the oxen before he bought them, but he just wants to go be with them and bask in that yummy feeling of pride and imagining the future success he will have because of these oxen to plow his fields.

We’ve all experienced that right? You buy a new smartphone and you have it all set up, but you just want to play with it. You want to set the background colors — should I go for the green or the yellow or maybe this photo of a sky-scape with clouds and sunlight streaming through? We all do it. It’s not really work but it’s dwelling in the orbit of work, the penumbra of work. And then of course we check our phones obsessively, even on vacations, even on weekends, even when we’ve just checked five minutes ago. The gravitational pull of consumer and social culture is so strong and apparently it was even back then. It just feels so good to hang out in the glow of productivity.

The third guest says, “I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.” Unlike the other two, he doesn’t specify what exactly he wants to do with his new wife. But we can imagine, and to our modern ears this excuse may sound a little less frivolous than the other two. But I think in the culture of the time, these were supposed to be three of the same principle. When a man got married in those days, there was a sense that he was acquiring something, just like the new land or the oxen. In all three cases, the guests had acquired something new that gave them a certain social standing, a leg up in the world, and a very worldly, understandable pleasure.

Jesus was doing something pretty brilliant by listing these three excuses. He was making a reference that his audience would have understood. It was a reference to a passage in the Torah where roughly the same excuses are ruled legitimate justifications for not going to war when called. (I hope you enjoy geeking out on this as much as I do.) Did you get that? These were acceptable reasons for not going off to fight in a war that would otherwise have been obligatory. In mentioning these three excuses, Jesus was making a pointed observation that while these kinds of pleasures and concerns are completely appropriate and acceptable in the context of normal reality, the invitation that he’s talking about is in an entirely different category. It’s a category that intersects and interrupts and supersedes the ordinary world.

So, as understandable as the guests’ excuses would normally be in that culture, the host of this banquet gets angry when they refuse his invitation. “You are so addicted to your stuff and your accomplishments and your status and your shiny new everything that you can’t even take a momentary break to gather around my table for this fabulous, completely other kind of meal that I’ve prepared. You’re so mired in this reality, you can’t even taste another.

So he invites “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” and they accept his invitation immediately. The poor can’t buy land or oxen and in those days the blind and the disabled were not likely to get married. They are never invited to the feasts of this world. Life is hard. And in the context of this parable, this is a huge advantage to them. They are less attached to stuff because they have less stuff to be attached to. They’re already suspecting that there must be more to life than this struggling and scraping for success and recognition and, says Jesus, there is. Come on in.

But for the wealthy and successful, inviting them to enter into a space of existential freedom and divine love when life is already pretty damn good is a much harder sell. The fact is that our blessings can sometimes be obstacles in the spiritual path. When life is good, when we have stuff – material and social capital –we can spend a huge percentage of our lives defending it, working it, being in it and with it, playing with it, obsessing over it, and acquiring more. Emerson says that we will worship something and we do. We keep gripping our stuff even when we don’t have to to make a living, even when there’s an invitation to something much larger because sometimes we just can’t let go. Sometimes it’s more than an excuse, it’s a compulsion.

They say that if you want to catch a monkey, there’s an old tried and true technique developed in India. You take a coconut, cut a hole in it and empty it out. You make the hole big enough for a monkey to fit its hand through when it’s flat, but not when it makes a fist. You put a banana inside the coconut and attach the coconut to a tree. Then you hide and wait. When the monkey comes along it will want that banana. It will reach in for it and find that once it’s holding on to the banana, it’s stuck. All it has to do is let go of the banana and it will be free. But apparently most monkeys can’t let go.

I think that Jesus would say that we are like that monkey. So attached to the things and people that we have and so hungry for the things and people that we want that we can’t let go, even when it costs us our own freedom. People in 12-step programs know this very well, but it can be equally true for the rest of us too. It’s no coincidence that Jesus told this parable on the Sabbath at a Sabbath meal. In the Jewish tradition that he was teaching, the Sabbath was the practice of letting go of the banana. The Sabbath meal was a taste of that heavenly banquet. It was a rehearsal for the state of oneness where we are full of love and joy and what we have and what we are is enough. But to get there, to get that little taste of heaven, in the words of one of our Dharma statements, “to have experiences that bring [us] closer to others and God,” to do that, we have to let go.

What exactly we have to let go of differs from person to person. Maybe we can spend a little time today reflecting on what it is for each of us. Today we are trying an experiment in Sabbath practice. We’ll do it a few times this year. Garnett talked about it during her welcome – we’ll have a number of different activities and what I like to call “passivities–” ways to let go and enter into Sabbath consciousness. The idea is to be together in community, feeling the abundance of all that we have, connecting to our deepest selves. Then we’ll come back together at the end to try to carry some little wisps of that consciousness with us back into the week. It’s basically an extended worship and community time – a multi-faceted, multi-course banquet that will last into the afternoon. You are all cordially invited.

But whether or not you can stay this particular afternoon doesn’t ultimately matter. I want to leave you with a piece of wisdom from the end of the parable. The servant goes out and invites all the additional people, the poor and the disabled. Then he comes back and says to the host, “Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.” The message here is that the invitation is still wide open. The invitation is always open. The table is never full, the door is never closed. Every moment of every day, we have the opportunity to step into a space of greater consciousness, greater love, and greater connection with what we consider most holy. Every moment we have the opportunity to let go of the banana and get free. I invite all of you to come to that table in whatever ways and whatever times you can. And someday we will all sit at that table together. And we will eat and never be hungry again.