Proverbs 25:6-7
Luke 14:1,7-14

In Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon,
Harold is a baldheaded little kid in footy pajamas
with a great, big, purple crayon that he uses
to draw his world.

And he decides that he wants to go for a walk in the moonlight,
so he draws a moon,
and a little path,
and he has various adventures, and then he gets hungry,
so he decides to draw an apple tree
and a dragon to guard the apples,
but then he gets frightened of the dragon,
and as he’s backing away, his crayon hand
wobbles and shakes, and
the ground he’s drawing becomes
waves, and now it’s
the ocean, and now he’s
sinking, but then he comes up
thinking, and he draws a trim little
sailboat. The story kind of goes on
like that.

He uses his purple crayon
to draw his world.

We use our imaginations
in very much the same way.
What we imagine
has a lot to do with what
happens in the world.

Whether you go to Moe’s for lunch
or whether you go to the refrigerator
has a lot to do with what kind of food you imagine
when you realize you’re hungry
and also what kind of cost-benefit analysis you imagine
as you realize you’ve only got six dollars left
and it’s got to last you to the end of the month.

Our imagination helps us envision possibilities, make choices.

It also can be a great time saver.

Imagine that you’re
at the table in the common room, and
a friend throws you her car keys.
You don’t get out a piece of paper and start calculating the parabola
to know where the car keys are going to land.
You see the arc starting to develop, and you remember
other arcs that you’ve seen,
you imagine where the keys are going to land,
and you put your hand there.
If you’re off by a little,
you adjust.
So imagination
can be handy.

It also
can be detrimental.

Have you ever been walking down the street
and seen somebody who made you uncomfortable
so you crossed the street to avoid them?
Or wanted to?
What did they look like?
Male? Female?
Big? Little?
Did they look rich? or poor?
Any other descriptors you can think of?

Now imagine
what it’s like to be somebody, just as nice as you,
who matches that description,
what it’s like to be walking down the street
and to see someone look at you
and avert their eyes
and cross the street
to avoid you.

Imagination is necessary.
It’s part of how we get along in the world,
it’s part of how we protect ourselves.
It can also open our hearts and minds
to other people’s pain.
But our imagination is limited.

Sometimes we imagine that our imagination is not limited.
Have you ever known somebody who
imagined that their idea of God actually was God?
That had such a strong and clear image
of who God is and what God expects that they were certain
that they were right?
In Biblical terms, that’s idolatry.
Any time that you accept an image of God as God,
any time you imagine that your image of God is God,
you’ve just committed idolatry,
worshiping that which is not God.

And it’s a breach of the First Commandment,
“Hear O Israel, the Lord Your God is one.
You shall worship no other gods.”

Somehow, if we’re going to think about God,
we have to include within our understanding the fact
that God is always beyond
our understanding, that there is
no crayon big enough to draw a circle around God,
that no matter how big a window you make,
and no matter how much God may actually be revealed within
the image you understand, God is always
more than we imagine.

The same
is also true of people.
Like God, people
are always more than we imagine.
If you’ve ever been a teenager with a parent
or a parent with a teenager, then you know
that a person, like God,
is always more than you understand.

And there’s something very beautiful in this,
because that is what enables relationships to grow.
It’s what enables people to stay married for 20, 30, 60 years.
A person, no matter how well you know her,
no matter how well you know him,
is always capable of surprise.
A person, like God,
is always more
than you imagine.

In our Gospel,
the Pharisees seem to have forgotten this.
And I feel for them,
because Pharisees were not monsters,
no matter how much we might,
at times, like to imagine that.

The Pharisees were
a religious group, a group of reformers, who wanted to see
their experience of worship extend
to every day life. They wanted
the ritual practices of the Temple,
where they experienced the presence of God,
to extend to every day life.
They wanted to experience the presence of God
in every day life.
The great irony in our text,
is that they are in the presence of God
in this person
that they should have welcomed, Jesus,
but they miss it.

As they try to extend these ritual practices,
as they try to be holy in every day life,
they make the mistake of imagining that their idea of holiness
actually is holiness. They make
the mistake of imagining that their understanding
is more than it is.

This has real consequences
in what happens in the world, as they go into this party,
and they take all the best seats,
and as they scrutinize this Jesus
to see whether he’s actually somebody they’d want to have dinner with
or whether he’s really somebody they’d rather cross the street
to avoid.

Only God’s imagination is limitless.
Only God’s image of God
is God.
Only God’s understanding of a person
is actually that person, and
only God is rightfully in a position
to judge
a person.
So in placing themselves, in their imagination,
in the position of judging Jesus,
they place themselves in the position
that rightfully belongs to God.

So not only are they coming into this party
and taking seats that belong to other people.
They’ve come into this party
and taken the seat, in their imagination,
that belongs to God.

And I think if they knew
that the seat of God is actually a cross,
that they would probably
scoot to another seat
as quickly as possible, but
they seem to be
blind to that.

So how does Jesus respond
in our Gospel?
What is Jesus’s response?

He meets them where they are.
He refers them back to scripture,
the very scripture that they were
trying so hard to live out,
even as they were failing.

He refers them back to Proverbs,
which we read a moment ago,
“Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence
or stand in the place of the great.”

But in Jesus’s version, he tweaks it.
In Jesus’s version, there’s no obvious king.
The important person could be anyone.

“When you are invited by someone
to a wedding banquet, do not sit down in the place of honor.
But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place
so that when your host comes, he may
say to you, “Friend, move up higher.”

In Jesus’s version,
the important person could be anyone.
And that’s because to Jesus,
and to God revealed in Jesus,
the important person
is everyone.
God loves everyone infinitely,
regardless of anything.

And this is offensive,
and I think the Pharisees knew it,
and I think this is part of what led to their cru…
well, they and everybody else,
crucifying Jesus.

It’s offensive, because it means…
if God loves everyone infinitely, always,
then it means
that the one
who held Jesus’s hand to the cross
and swung the hammer and drove the nail
is just as loved, is just as loved
as the one who cradled Jesus as an infant
and counted his every finger and toe.

It is, it’s offensive, but it doesn’t change the fact
that it’s true.

And it’s the very fact that God does love us infinitely, regardless,
that makes it so that the violence we do to each other is so
wrong.
It’s the very fact of God’s infinite love
that makes the love we show for each other
so right.
And it’s on the cross
that these two things,
the violence of the world
and the unendable love of God,
meet.

I can’t actually draw… I can’t connect all the dots from here.
I can only say
that God does.
That every time
God gathers us in this place and brings us together,
with nothing but who we are
and whatever we might have some influence over in the world,
God brings us together and it’s always
enough. Somehow,
God moves within the things we do in this place
again and again,
in the singing and the silence,
at the table,
and proves, again and again, just how right
Jesus was and is and always will be
that the important person
is everyone.

Have you ever seen a baptism?
How beautiful that moment is?
As God claims a human being
as God’s own child,
as the whole community makes promises to support that person
in the faith.

And I don’t know if…
I don’t want to make you self-conscious, but in communion,
everyone comes forward
differently,
and everyone
is beautiful, absolutely beautiful in coming forward
for communion.

So at lunch
I was still really struggling with how
how to deal with this text tonight.
So I’m having lunch, we’re having
veggie burgers around our kitchen table,
we’ve got Misty, my spouse, the kids…

and Trevor, our eight year old, has his friend Ethan over,
who’s also eight, and I’m just about ready to start
beating my head against the table, trying to figure out how to… anyway…
at one point, Misty says to Ethan,
“So Ethan, you want to preach the sermon tonight?”
And Ethan’s eyes kind of bulge.
And Misty’s like,
“You would just do the sermon.
Pastor John would still do communion.”
And Trevor’s like,
“Well, I could do communion.
All you do is hold the plate and say some words.”

I don’t know how either of the bishops would feel about this.

So I kind of knew, coming in, that I had backup.

But at a real level, they’re right.
I mean, all we do is we stand in this place, and we say a few words,
and we hold a plate with some bread,
and a cup with some wine,
and a bowl with some water,
and again and again in the midst of these things,
God raises us to new life.
God makes so evident
that it is
not necessary to be
or to imagine that you are
anything more than you are.
It is only necessary to be
who you are,
loved, absolutely and infinitely,
unendingly,
by God.