Sermon The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 29, 2010

Luke 14:1, 7-14

I want to call you attention to what has happened so far this morning and to what will happen in the next few minutes. Let’s take a look. We arrived. We gathered our intentions for the day in a prayer. We have heard the ancient stories; readings, a psalm. Now you are being encouraged to consider some part of the message of the story or stories of the day. In a few minutes we will remember the tradition of belief that developed after Jesus as we recite the creed shaped by the early community of believers. Then we will pray for the church and for the world. We will confess our sins and receive forgiveness.

All of that can and regularly does happen in the part of the service we call the liturgy of the word. That is everything that takes place before the offertory sentence, you know, the one that says, “walk in love as Christ loved us….. or let us offer our life and labor to the Lord”….something like that. What follows that sentence is the liturgy of the table and we’ll get there in a minute, but for now I want to focus on the first part of the service.

We arrive. We come here from all the different corners of our neighborhoods, from the individual arenas of our homes, our families, our work, all of the parts of our lives that define us, that tell us who we are. We greet each other coming in the door as people arriving to share a part of our individual lives that happen to overlap. We all go to the same church.

We sing and say a prayer or two and then we hear the stories held sacred by those who have been gathering for “church” for three thousand years. That’s how long ago our Hebrew scriptures were written. Maybe as we hear these stories we begin to get the sense that they are our stories too in a way, that they have something to do with us. The liturgy of the word focuses our attention on the fact that we are part of a community. We are people who belong to the stories about Israel, to the stories about Jesus, Paul and the others may even be writing for us.

After the readings the preacher calls us to consider some message that might be taken from what we have heard. The sermon is usually an attempt to help us take the stories very personally. The stories of the faith community are our stories. Something we have just hear has to do with us.

We move on from there usually to the Creed………We are part of a particular community that wrestled in its early years with how to understand and speak about its belief. Some of us may still struggle with some of the ideas in the Creed, but it is the family document going way back and it has helped define the community called Christians since the fourth century.

So far, the liturgy of the word brought us together, reminded us of our common interest in an ancient story and suggested that the tradition has something to say about our lives--about our goals and how to live. Hopefully the liturgy has led us to reflect on who we are and how we want to be in the world.

Having recalled who and whose we are in the sacred stories of the community, we take on a bit of the work of Christ as we look on the world with compassion. We lift up in prayer our neighbors, our leaders and all who are ill or are in any kind of trouble. Just as Christ did for all of us, we ask God to be present in their lives in ways that will transform them, make them whole and serve the good purposes of creation.

So far, we have arrived from our separate little worlds. We have heard the stories of a great community. We have been reminded that their stories are ours also. And then in our prayers we participate in the work of that community.

Having done all of those things we may be aware of some part of the work we still need to do in ourselves to be able to serve and live faithfully in this community. We may be ready to note some of our own failings and ask for healing and forgiveness in our own lives. So we ask in our confession to be made new, to be set right once again. In response, we are told that our sins are indeed forgiven. We then as equals, as common beneficiaries of the grace of God, we greet each other in the name of the Lord as we exchange the peace.

I wanted to highlight what goes on in the liturgy of the word for a couple of reasons. First, in two weeks you will see a few changes in the service designed to help mark the transition from the liturgy of the word to the liturgy of the table. I wanted to speak about the two parts of the service in anticipation of those changes.

The other reason is that as I hear Jesus talking about the liturgy of the table today….surely that is what all that banquet etiquette talk is about. As I hear Jesus talking, I understand better and give thanks for the shape of our worship. I give thanks in particular for the liturgy of the word. I don’t know how I would get near the table without this great liturgy of ours.

I hear Jesus saying that we are to arrive at the banquet--the one that will begin in a few minutes with the offertory sentence--that we are to arrive with a realistic understanding of who we are. And I hear him saying that if we come with a proper sense of who we are that we will not really be thinking much at all about ourselves, about how worthy OR unworthy we might be. We are encouraged to approach the table with humility and gratitude, not focusing on any aspect of ourselves, but on the generosity of our host. The liturgy of the word that locates us in the vast community of humanity and believers and helps us take stock of our lives and sets us to work praying for and caring about others--that liturgy prepares us to approach the liturgy of the table with the kind of attitudes Jesus calls for this morning.

I am particularly glad that we circle the table here at St. Aidan’s. That means that as we arrive at this weekly banquet, any and all of us might well hear our host saying, “Friend move up higher.” and as we look around the circle we might understand every possible place in the circle to be the place of honor. And…..if we can find ourselves hoping that is true for everyone we see, then we will certainly have arrived well prepared for the banquet. JB