The Way of Jesus: A Journey Through Luke Part 16: Who’s At YOUR Table?

The Way of Jesus: A Journey Through Luke
Part 16: Who’s At YOUR Table?

Countryside Community Church
Rev. Eric Elnes, Ph.D.
January 31, 2015

Scripture: Luke 14:1-11

I. What are you thinking?

Have ever discovered that the words of a song you’ve been singing in your head for years are actually the wrong words? When I first started singing along to Jimi Hendrix’ “Purple Haze,” I felt a little strange singing “`scuse me, while I kiss this guy,” but then, most of the lyrics seemed a bit abstract anyway. The actual words were “`scuse me while I kiss the sky.” Still abstract but very different picture in the head!

The same thing can happen with church hymns. One Sunday a child reported to her mother that she had learned a new song about a cross-eyed bear named Gladly in Sunday School. The song she’d really learned to sing was “Gladly the Cross I’d Bear.”

Sometimes we make similar gaffs when it comes to our beliefs about God. There can be glaring differences between who God is, and who we think God is; and between the song God invites us to sing with our lives and the one we’re actually singing. And those differences aren’t always so funny.

Case in point: Jesus’s dinner with a group of religious leaders.

“If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a Sabbath day?” asks Jesus. There’s an easy answer here, of course. Yet according to Luke, these religious leaders “could not reply to this.”

The religious leaders weren’t stupid. Nor were they cold-hearted. They knew that anyone in their right mind would pull a child or ox out of a well even on the Sabbath. They don’t answer because Jesus is baiting them. He’s trying to force them to admit that they’ve been teaching the wrong lyrics to God’s song. Everyone could agree on the “chorus.” It came from the Ten Commandments: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” (Ex 20:8-11 // Dt 5:12-15) But other “lyrics” – or the rules about what it means to keep the Sabbath holy – had been badly garbled over the centuries.

For instance, one concrete implication of keeping the Sabbath holy was refraining from work. On the Sabbath, we focus on rest, recreation, and worship – or “playing and praying” as some of us think of it. Over time, though, what constituted the “work” that people were to refrain from became more and more expansive. You couldn’t cook, clean dishes, draw water, or walk more than 1000 feet from your home. You couldn’t pick an apple from a tree or pluck heads of wheat from a field if your stomach was grumbling in the middle of the afternoon. Eventually, it took as much or more effort to refrain from work as doing the work itself.

According to Jesus, the problem with Sabbath observance as it was practiced in his day was that the religious authorities had made one small mistake about the Sabbath that had huge implications. The “lyric” they were teaching essentially was “the Sabbath was created for God’s sake,” as a way of honoring God. Jesus taught that the “lyric” was actually “the Sabbath was made for humanity’s sake,” as a way of giving people a break.

Jesus was trying to get the religious leaders to admit that they had learned the song wrong. The responded by not singing at all – remaining silent. Before we start scoffing at them, let’s bear in mind that silence about the same response one gets in modern times if you ask a Christian about “lyrics” to certain other songs Jesus sang. If you ask most people, “Who would Jesus bomb?” you tend to hear as much silence as Jesus heard from the Pharisees. Somewhere along the line we garbled the song. We no longer sing “love your enemies and do good to those who hate you” but “love your friends and make war on your enemies.” We changed the lyrics to “Thou shalt not kill,” as well.

Truth is, every one of the Ten Commandments works were created for our sake, not God’s. Breaking them makes us miserable, not God. When you start learning to “sing” them the way, you start to realize these commandments were created out of compassion, not caprice. They were meant to protect us, not enslave us. They were meant to bring us joy, not create one more reason for God to smite us.

Yes, a slight change of one word makes a big difference when you’re singing God’s song. It kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how many other lyrics we’ve garbled over time, turning God from the source of our greatest joy to the source of our deepest guilt and shame?

II. What are you hearing?

When was the last time you got a song stuck in your head that you couldn’t make go away no matter what you did? I don’t know about you, but as often as not, the songs that get stuck in my head are not the ones I like. There was “The Barney Song” when my girls were little for instance. Talk about a song created in the Ninth Circle of Hell! It tormented me all the way through their Barney phase. Most recently, there has been that song “Frozen” – which actually wasn’t that bad a song, even the twentieth time it went through the head. But after the thousandth, didn’t you just want with everything in you to do exactly what the song said, “Let it go, let it gooooo”?!

Famous mountaineer, Joe Simpson, once lay dying on a glacier in Peru. In what he thought were some of his last moments, a song he hated playing on a continuous loop in his head (“Brown Girl in the Ring” by Boney M). Simpson was so mortified that this song would be the last thing he heard that it actually reinvigorated his will to survive. And he did!

People call these songs “ear worms.” If you want to rid yourself of an earworm, you can’t just clear your mind and think of nothing. It comes right back. One way to get rid of an earworm is to push it aside with a song that’s completely different – preferably one that’s not too difficult that you haven’t heard in awhile. Some people say “Three Blind Mice” or “Johnny Row Your Boat” work well.

Sometimes it’s not songs playing on infinite loops in our heads that are the problem. It’s thoughts. Particularly thoughts that play so continuously that we hardly even notice them anymore. Thoughts that have to do with our internal evaluation of ourselves like these:

“You’re not good enough.”
“You’re a failure.”
“You’ll never amount to anything.”

Or thoughts that have to do with your evaluation of others like:

“Women are inferior to men.”
“Black lives don’t matter as much as white ones.”
“Muslim fundamentalists represent all Muslims” whose “tune” is the same as “Christian fundamentalists represent all Christians.”

Then there are the thoughts that play in our head about God, like:

“God is just a figment of our imagination.”
“God wants to burn you (or others) in hell.”
Or the incredibly popular: “If God were loving, God would have created a very different world.” (The actual song goes, “If we were loving, we would create a very different world.”)

III. Who’s at YOUR table?

After Jesus finished baiting the religious leaders about the “Sabbath song” they’d garbled the lyrics to, he suddenly started talking about table etiquette. This seems like a drastic change of subject, but it isn’t. He has merely shifted from the theological equivalent of mistaken lyrics, to these horrible earworm thoughts – and how to get them to stop playing in our head.

But in order to get where he’s coming from, you have to first understand that he’s using an external situation to speak of an internal one. On the surface, he’s talking about the seating order around a 1st Century table. In his day, the host was seated at the head of the table with the guests arranged in proximity to the host according to the level of honor they had in the community. Of course, those who had the most honor were those that the host paid most attention to.

In other words, the ancient table was like the original version of Facebook. On Facebook, it’s super easy to hear only from two kinds of people: those who already agree with everything you say, and those who constantly post messages – the loudmouths. Our friends, and the loudmouths, become the voices we hear from most on Facebook, and they’re the same ones you could expect to hear at a 1st Century feast.

So it is with our internal tables as well. All of us are like moveable feasts. The voices that constantly play in our heads offering us opinions and advice about seemingly everything under the sun are like our dinner guests. We tend to hear most from the voices that already confirm our opinion of the way the world works – that, or the bully voices, that constantly try to muscle their way into conversations they were never invited into.

Jesus said that if you find yourself invited to a feast, sit yourself at the lowest end of the table and stay there unless the host invites you to sit higher. So where do you think Jesus chose to sit when he was invited? At the lowest end of the table. And there he would stay, perfectly content to sit silently at the end of the table while everyone except him vied for the host’s ear. I’m guessing that he only opened his mouth when the host was actually sick enough of hearing the same old conversations, or gutsy enough to hear a contrary point-of-view, that Jesus was invited to sit higher.

So it is with the moveable feast that is us. If you find yourself complaining that God seems absent in your life (confirming that old song, “God is just a figment of our imagination,” or “God wants to burn you in hell”), then it’s helpful to ask yourself, “When have I honestly asked God to take a higher seat at my internal table? When have I asked the voice of my Culture to quiet down so I can actually hear from the Holy Spirit? When have I honestly wanted to hear from the Spirit instead of my peers, or my parents, or my economic agenda, or my political one?”

Most of us are so used to inviting all these other voices to sit closest to us that the chatter completely drowns out that of the Spirit. And chances are, the Spirit has very different advice to offer than what you’ve surrounded yourself with. What voices do you pay most attention to? Sometimes the voice of the Spirit sounds a lot like that childhood song you used to sing before that song was drowned out by all the more “adult” songs. Do you remember those childhood voices that were most excited to ask you if you’re still having fun? Or what kind of good you would do for the world? Or saying, “Why are you working so hard?” or “Let’s go for a walk in the woods!”

Sometimes the way to clear away all the earworms and invite the Spirit to sing Her song is to simply remember the songs the Spirit taught you when you were young. When you can hear the child’s song, you can often hear the Spirit singing in harmony to it.

IV. Disrupting the Voices

If you’ve got a head full of earworms – voices that keep insistently playing in your head until you can’t stand it anymore – you may want to try the following strategies that disrupt these voices and allow you to hear from the Holy Spirit.

ERIC’S TOP TEN WAYS TO HEAR THE SPIRIT’S SONG IN YOUR LIFE

1) Bear in mind that the Spirit wants to be heard and has created channels within you for hearing the Spirit’s voice if you’re willing. So start by setting aside some time each day to “invite the Spirit forward”, just as you might clear aside time to talk to your best friend. Being willing to hear from the Spirit is 80% of the work. Be so willing to hear from that the Spirit’s quiet voice within you that you actually tell the other voices to move down in the pecking order so you can actually hear what the Spirit has to say.

2) Avoid, as much as humanly possible, being in a rush to decide whether some thought is from the Spirit or not. Also, avoid like the plague, any notion that one must be in a hurry to make a decision based on what one has “heard” in prayer. This is one of the easiest ways to get tripped up (“You must decide right this moment or all is lost …”). Remember: very small errors can have very large consequences when we are in a rush. God rarely desires or needs us to rush.

3) When the Spirit is trying to move us in a particular direction, that direction is ALWAYS marked by a sense of joy and/or deep peace, however slight, even if the direction involves extreme difficulty, pain, or even death.

4) The Spirit never asks us to do anything that is against our true self-interest; never asks us to do anything that runs counter to fulfilling the desires of our highest Self – even if we are asked to do what the world calls a “selfless act.”

5) The Spirit normally asks us to move in small steps which cumulatively may be quite large but individually may seem so small as to be insignificant. She rarely asks us to take a giant leap of faith without moving us to the edge of the precipice in very small steps (The only exception I can think of is when we stumble into a situation that endangers us and the Spirit works to “get us out quick”).

6) Our intuition is generally sharper than we give it credit for. Provided we’re staying open to the Spirit’s voice (rather than fixating on our fears and prejudices), if we’ve “got a bad feeling” about something, generally it’s accurate. Similarly, if our gut fills with peace and joy – a deep sense of “ah ha!” – we are often on the right track.

7) Once you’ve taken a step forward believing it’s where the Spirit is calling you, don’t keep second-guessing yourself. Tell God, “I’m going to move with confidence in this direction until or unless you start sending signals to change course.” Then, stay open to those signals in case they come. The Spirit normally starts throwing us confirming signals when we’ve made a good decision, though they may not come in the forms we expect.

8) The Spirit does not use “strange coincidences” as signs nearly as often as She uses gut hunches, “ah ha” moments, deep intuitions, mental images, and just plain old logic (be careful with this one, though, as frequently the Spirit’s bidding defies logic, at least until one has the benefit of hindsight).

9) Asking “What would Jesus do?” doesn’t get us very far. God is concerned about what you should be doing, not Jesus. While the Spirit will never call you into un-Christ-like action, the mere fact that Christ did something long ago does not mean you are necessarily being called to do the same thing. (e.g., Don’t feed the poor just because Christ did. Do something if you sense the Spirit calling you to do it and if it does not contradict Christ-like behavior).

10) The fact that you have accurately discerned where the Spirit is leading you to go does not guarantee the success of whatever it is you are being invited to achieve. Because God respects human freewill, God’s purposes can be thwarted by others, in the short-run anyway. Sometimes even the Spirit has to switch to “Plan B” (and “C” and …). Also, be aware that the Spirit may have a different end result in mind than you do.