Luke 14:1-14
Susie was a college acquaintance, around whom I always felt uncomfortable. Susie had cerebral palsy. When she walked to classes, her body weaved and pitched because of her spasmodic muscle control. When she didn’t walk, she rode a three-wheel bike that had a large basket in the back between the rear wheels. Her bike moved the same way she did if she were walking. At the end of the day she was exhausted because of the great effort it took to get from here to there.
One of the things that was the most discomforting to me, when I was around her was trying to talk with her. Each word she spoke took so much effort and seemed to take eons to come out. When her words did come out, it was hard for me to know what she was saying. I kept having to ask, “I’m sorry; what was that again?”
Whitworth College where I attended was a small one (1200 students). So I would see Susie often in her comings and goings. I found myself falling into the same kind of patronizing behavior toward Susie as others did who felt uncomfortable being around her. Yet it aggravated me to see others being so condescendingly polite with her, just because of her condition. But as I looked back, most of that aggravation was self-aimed because of my own frustrating attempts at relating to her authentically, person-to-person, rather than person-to-nonperson. Or worse, person-to-it.
It wasn’t that she was an outcast. She was really nice, and often funny in her own quirky way. She was definitely an intelligent person who made it through high school, eventually graduated from college, and went on to some job or career. It was just that she was hard for me to communicate with, so I would just say, “Hi,” and avoid her when I could.
Why did I react that way? Why do we? There are all kinds of people we would rather not be around. Not because they’re bad people, criminals, or aggressively antisocial. They’re just different from us “normal” people in enough of a way to make us feel uncomfortable. Like the crippled, the lame, and the blind.
They aren’t outcasts. Instead they’re the one’s most of us choose to simply leave to themselves. And if a majority of the people felt the same way about Susie that I did, imagine the implications for Susie. Imagine what she can do about it. But on the other hand, imagine what I/we could do about it.
What we can do about it, according to Jesus’ idea, is to invite the Susie’s that we know over for dinner. At the time I knew Susie, this kind of idea would have been the last option I would have entertained. The idea of sitting down at a table, would mean having to help her eat since she didn’t have the muscle control to bring a fork or spoon to her mouth. When she tried it, she usually hit her nose or the side of her cheek, or her chin. On top of that, trying to carry on a conversation with Susie at the same time would have been extremely difficult for my prudish personality to take.
That’s the stickler of Jesus’ comment. Notice it’s not some cute little parable about inviting the isolated people for a meal. Rather, it’s a barbed comment, flicked out at the host of the house where Jesus was dining. It was spoken right to the face of the host. There was no time given, like with parables, to set up study groups and sit around the grass talking hypothetically about what Jesus meant.
In my discomfort with Susie, I was the host. I only choose to have around me those with whom I am most comfortable. I usually don’t want to put myself in the position of dis-ease. But if I hear Jesus right, that’s exactly the position He wants me to get myself in. And tell the truth. Are there any other host-types out there like me?
The host to whom Jesus spoke was no slouch, either. Back at the first verse of this chapter, it says that Jesus had gone to the house of one of the “leading Pharisees.” If Jesus can stand up, and face this prominent man and his friends, and not pull any punches, then you can be sure He won’t with you or I either.
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes that will help us gain the full impact of Jesus’ statement to the host.
First, as I mentioned, Jesus was at the home of one of the leading Pharisees. We can well imagine most of the people there were also notables of one kind or another.
What Jesus noticed was all the jockeying for position that was going on around the table. At a meal such as this, the guests were set around the table according to importance. When you have a room full of important people, who gets to be number one? Or even number two or three? That’s what was happening. Imagine Jesus sitting off to the side of the room, watching petty arguments, and men posturing over who got to sit in which seat, especially the seat next to the host.
Having had his fill of it, Jesus arose and told the parable about how a person should choose their place at a wedding feast. Take the seat of lowest honor, and be moved up in the sight of all, rather than take the seat of highest honor and be moved down in the sight of all.
In His statement to the host, Jesus appears to be saying that the poor, the lame, the crippled, the Susie‘s, aren’t going to be concerned with or care about “who’s on first,” as much as just being overjoyed they got an invitation in the first place. These kinds of guests would be so happy someone thought of them, and included them in, they’re not going to care where they sit at the table--they’re just happy to be there. When you’ve been avoided and excluded for so long, being included becomes a gala affair.
At some point we have to face our fears and ask ourselves what would really happen if we had the people we avoid over for dinner. What would have happened if I went over and sat next to Susie in the college cafeteria, initiated conversation and helped her with her dinner? Certainly Jesus has something up his sleeve here. It appears we are only going to find out what it is by doing what he says.
We who are the host-types can certainly feel like we’re doing our good deed for the day. That’s the tone that Jesus uses in trying to motivate that particular Pharisee into compassionate action. We’ll feel good about ourselves, we hosts. We’ve done someone else a favor. Jesus acts upon our hostly mentality of acting as a benevolent superior to a needful inferior.
When Carol Stull and I went to Wichita to talk to some people at Youth Horizons about their Christian mentoring ministry, that was one of the pieces of advice they gave us. If the mentors we are training for our Eagle Wings ministry come at the kids they are mentoring with a superiority complex, the match will fail. And they had a fairly large number of matches fail at the beginning of their ministry, for that very reason.
So I can’t help but get the feeling that Jesus has an ulterior motive. Just maybe the inviter, the host, will surprisingly discover that the blind, lame, poor, crippled, Susie-type person, sitting across from the table from him really is a person. That they have a sense of humor. They’re full of personality. That though they are dealing with something hard, they are still no less of a person.
What happens is that we--the host types--will get resurrected out of our own deadly bias’. We realizes that we’ve been making a terrible misjudgment based on our fears and uncomfortability. And at the same time, we realize that just maybe we are making the same kinds of misjudgments about others--like about Jesus. We find out that we’ve been missing a great deal by carefully avoiding those people that make us feel uncomfortable.
I want to tell you the story of another person. She was a junior high girl in the church I served in Saratoga, California. When she was an infant she had spinal meningitis. When the fever subsided, she had lost about 3/4ths of her hearing. But then, as a junior high kid, one morning she woke up and discovered that her world had gone totally silent. That’s when I was there as Youth Pastor.
At the next meeting of youth group she walked up to me, handed me a piece of paper and walked away. It was a poem about her loss, and how she felt about herself now. It was one of the most crushing poems I’ve ever read. One of the lines had to do with how no one was “willing to be a friend and help.”
Most everyone was telling her what she couldn’t do because she was deaf. She was a tremendous athlete, full of natural talent, and a hard worker. But her softball coach wouldn’t let her play. Her soccer coach wouldn’t let her play. And her parents, in her eyes, backed up all those who were telling her “no.” She quickly became isolated and lonely.
I was determined I wasn’t going to let her become another Susie in my life. I would find some way to say “Yes!” to her. Shortly after she became totally deaf, Ryan was born. Which meant we would be, at some time, needing a babysitter. I had a whole youth group full of girls that were ready and willing to do so--including this deaf girl.
She had done a little bit of babysitting before, but now that she was totally deaf, no one trusted their children with her. But I told my wife I wanted to give her a try. Many other parents told us directly and indirectly that we were crazy. How could she hear Ryan cry? What if the phone rang and it was an important message? How would we check in with her while we were out, to see how things were going? How would she call if there was an emergency?
They were all legitimate questions. But they were all taken care of. First we had her over for dinner, and just spent the evening with us to get an idea of our routine. She told us about, and had brought with her, a mechanism called a TDD or TDY. It was a little laptop computer that hooked up to the phone. She could call her parents (who always stayed home when she babysat for us) and type out messages to them on their TDD. These days, with smart phones, she could have just texted us, or emailed. But nothing existed like that 30 years ago.
She would check on Ryan about every five minutes, and we never had any problems. She was, without a doubt, the best babysitter we ever had. And what’s more, Ryan was a clingy infant. He wouldn’t let anyone hold him except his mother or me. No one, that is, except for this deaf girl. She was able, in her silent way, to communicate with our infant son that was uncanny. She became like a daughter to us--so much so, that we named our daughter, Kristin, after her. Kristin, our babysitter, is now a confident mother with two children of her own--both hearing.
I don’t know who the Susie’s and Kristin’s are in your life. Again, they aren’t bad people, or psychopaths, or whatever. They’re the blind, the lame, the poor, the crippled, the deaf, the strangers. All those people are in some condition, by no fault of their own, and are avoided because of it, simply because us “normal” people are uncomfortable around them. Invite them over for dinner, and find out what an eye-opening and rewarding experience it can be.
It’s what our Eagle Wings Ministry is all about. But you don’t have to be a mentor to include someone at your table. There are so many Susies and Kristins out there.
I want to close with a poem by Ann Weems called, “The Colorless Child.”
I watched her go uncelebrated into the second grade,
a colorless child,
gray among the orange and yellow,
attached too much to corners
and to other people’s sunshine.
She colors the rainbow brown
and leaves balloons unopened
in their packages.
Oh, who will touch this colorless child?
Who will plant alleluias in her heart
and send her dancing
into all the colors of God?
Or will she be like an unwrapped Christmas gift
left under the tree—
too unimpressive for anyone to take the trouble? - Ann Weems
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