Readings :  Jeremiah 2 :4-13         Luke 14:1 , 7-14

Where will you sit?

Forget the Jesus story for a moment and remember the different ways you have had this dilemma.  Was it at a lecture theatre?  A wedding?  A theatre when you arrived late?  On the school coach outing?  I remember my little heart going pitter patter to try sit next to a heart-throb for biology lessons and playing footsie.

A romantic interest in where you sit is much more normal but in Jesus’ day this was a serious affair that he knew was far too important.  In fact, where you sit was part of the problem of the failure of Jewish faith.  The story we heard blows away convention, to be humble rather than daring.  Luke adds to it with a second story which Jesus tells to the host, the most honorable person, challenging the guest list, the whole game of social exchange is questionable.  We didn’t read it today, but the Jesus make a third banquet comment that concludes‘none of those who were invited will taste my dinner’.  This is ferocious stuff.Changing where you sit to question the systems of society, a paradigm shift.

It does not come just from Jesus or Luke, but the history of the Jewish people, like we heard with the first reading from Jeremiah.  Last week was his call, as a young man, hesitant but compelled, now we have the main plank of Jeremiah’s lifetime message.  Faithfulness to the One God, Yahweh, and not other gods such as Baal.   This is the contrast between a god who is visible, directly involved in the yearly questions of a good harvest so sacrifices are effective in keeping crops, animals and people fertile….The Hebrew people met this when they arrived at the promised land and at first there was a tolerance to acknowledge Baal but when Jezebel insisted on her gods primacy the conflict was set.  By the time of Jeremiah, Baal represented the corruption of foreign powers threatening the Hebrew way of life.

It came with military consequences.   Were the Hebrews willing to die for their God? The invisible God of all that is? God above all gods? What use is Yahweh when Babylonian armies mass at the gates of Jerusalem?  Jeremiah complains the answer is they were not willing to risk death:  The priests did not say, “Where is the LORD?”

 Those who handle the law did not know me; the rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and went after things that do not profit.

Sadly, the history of Israel in Jeremiah’s time is of defeat, death, suffering and exile. The faith that comes after this, has to deal with the failure of prophecy, the apparent failure of Yahweh to be greater than Baal.

Jesus has wrestled with these things.  He is not an easy guest at a banquet because he is faithful to being a prophet like Jeremiah.  It is clearer that God of Abraham and Isaac, Exodus and the promised land, is not found at the surface of things but deep within.  Jesus criticizes the careful choice of people to sit in their conventional place at a banquet according to their social status.   But it is not simple humility he is seeking.  The whole basis of valuing people as more or less important is corrupt.  So the host is invited to break out of it with a banquet for the poor, in the sense of victims of circumstances the crippled, lame and blind.  Those unable to participate in the system of social honour, those excluded from accessGod.

So where will you sit?  Forget piety, the humility Jesus is describing is political.

Jesus disturbed because he spoke from depth to the systems of exclusion of many, for the few.  I wonder what he would say today about victims of human impacts on naturewithhabitat destruction and climate change,including millions of people who lose home and family, in flood, fire or drought.

I had an experience of exclusion and of being told where to sit this week.  I failed to get into the free ballet performance in Parc La Fontaine, because so many people, over 2000, queued ahead of me, but I also went to City Hall for the Green Coalition and the lands next to the airport Technoparc.    The Airport of Montreal (ADM) has 150 hectares of land on a lease from the Ministry of Transport.  In July they cut down milkweed in an area they had tried and failed to secure as a mask factory.  It was a form of eco-vandalism or eco-phobia.   Happily, the seat I was given became a tribune to ask questions and the response was positive. The City Council passed a unanimous resolution for the Federal Govt. to protect these lands, and Mayor Plante pledged to do all she can to protect the other existing areas in Municipal control.  These are the wetlands from which we have cared for two crayfish, Moses and Aaron.

In nature we see hierarchies, little fish get eaten by bigger ones: wolf packs have a leader, but human beings have choices and ethics because we are conscious of our mortality and search for meaning.  Just as in the Bible we make the same mistakes generation to generation of taking as absolute what is not.  Jeremiah had Baal, Jesus had social honour.  In our time, we truly idolize money.  The price of something is taken to be its true value.  How much are you worth?  Even those begging on the streets, take dollars to be the answer they need.  Whereas I say the best things in life are free.  I support the social wage. Free public transport, so all can go see the birds at Technoparc.  Instead, our culture prizes things like growth of Gross Domestic Products, GDP, but this is as ridiculous as valuing people by the seating arrangement of a banquet because it is based on false assumptions.  GDP measures ‘grossly’, the total of activities indiscriminate of whether they have positive outcome or not ‘So that the most ‘economically productive’ citizen is a cancer patient who totals her car on his way to meet with her divorce lawyer.’ (gender adapted from Bill McKibben, Deep Economy, the wealth of communities and the durable future – 2007 St Martins Griffin, p28).  The ADM is attempting to balance its budget, treating nature as capital, disregarding its true value.  We have swapped angst about seating for angst about the dollar.

What about you and me in daily life? What gods do we chase after? We all tend towards idolatry, making some thing ultimately important when nothing is ultimately important. Go deeper. It isonly God. Only God the ground of our being.  I want to finish with words from Paul Tillich (New Being and Courage to be), that I think are helpful, contemporary ways of talking about God, that Jeremiah and Jesus would find true today.  They demand and disturb but they come out of what Jeremiah and Jesus went through;neither soldiers nor angels nor cash can save us from the truth of existing.

Absolute faith says yes to being, without seeing solutions.  It is the state of being grasped by the God beyond God.  The God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

I cannot say pray to God in Ukraine and know things will be OK.  It is not how things are, or how God works.   Look again at Jesus his life, and death.I find this is to see the cross as unifying not dividing, science and religion, to see how it unites, creates and above all goes beyond itself, beyond death.  The first Christians discovered this.Look at the failure of Jesus in the eyes of the world, the surface, and reject it for the depth he brought by his courage to be and belong to God.

That is the true seat we each have:so that through this you cannot lose yourself and through this you receive the world.

Amen.