No A-Listers Needed: A Homily for the Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (Yr C)

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and St Luke's, Creemore, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on Sunday, August 31, 2025, the Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost.   Readings for this Sunday:  Jeremiah 2:4-13, Psalm 81:1,10-16; Hebrews 13:1-8, Luke 14:1,7-14.

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable (Lk 14.7)

Among all the dire headlines, one of the big news stories of this summer has been the engagement of pop diva Taylor Swift to NFL player Travis Kelce.  

People are already obsessing about it.  The New Zealand tourism board has announced its “official petition for Pop’s next Royal Wedding to be hosted right here in Aotearoa New Zealand”.    There’s already speculation about the guest list.  US Vice President JD Vance is worried that Kelce’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, will get invited because somehow the Super Bowl will be rigged so it can be the backdrop for the wedding.

Wherever the wedding happens, we can be sure that it will a lavish affair, with lots of celebrity A-listers as the guests of honour. It will certainly cost a lot of money, though I think many of us will give Swift a pass on account of her philanthropy, but still, the famous superrich person wedding (see the Bezos-Sanchez wedding this June) seems to be a sign of our times.

‘A Listers” are celebrities whose name is everywhere and who get big paycheques for acting.  Jesus wouldn’t have known the term “A Lister”, but he would certainly have understood the concept.  In today’s gospel reading  we find him at a social gathering, a fancy meal at the house of a Pharisee, where, as usual, he is a keen student of human nature.

We shouldn’t be surprised to find Jesus at a Pharisee’ dinner party.  We know from the gospels that Jesus liked a good time, and we know that the Pharisees shared Jesus’ concern with the law and with living a holy life, though they differed on interpretation.   Pharisees were highly religious but they weren’t immune to the human desire to be someone important!

So just as we have our own concepts of how to seat the head table and the guests of honour, so it was in Jesus’ day.   A dinner or banquet would be arranged in a U-shape, and those with the highest social status, the A-listers, would be closest to the top of the U.   In this case, we are told that the party is hosted by a leader of the Pharisees, so we can imagine that the guests are fairly important people in the religious community.  If you’ve ever been to a big Diocesan dinner like the Bishop’s Company, you can imagine the type of crowd.    We can also assume that there was some competition to get one of the better seats.

I think the parable that follows is one of the easier ones to interpret.   Clearly, I think, Jesus is not saying “sit in the humblest spot so you can get invited to sit with the A Listers”.   Jesus’ isn’t offering advice about how to get ahead in society.   Rather, Jesus is saying that there shouldn't be any A, B, or C listers.     There should just be guests.

After the parable, Jesus speaks directly to his host, and it’s a rather breathtaking piece of chutzpah because he is critiquing the motives of everyone present, about how they invite one another in order to get favours and prestige in return.  Jesus wants nothing to do with that system.  Instead, he says, “when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” and that way you will be blessed and gain God’s favour for your care to those who cannot repay you.

This teaching is totally consistent with Jesus’ message throughout the gospels, and it goes right back to his mother’s words before he was born, that 

“he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
    and exalted those of humble estate;

he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and the rich he has sent away empty.”

(Luke 1:52-53)

As our second reading suggests, the first Christians picked up on this message.    The letter to the Hebrews tells the first churches, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it" (Heb 13.2).  That’s a reference to the story in Genesis of how Abraham and Sarah were visited by three strangers who promised the elderly couple that they would have a child, thus fulfilling God’s promise (Gen 18-19).

Again, this is not a message about giving to get ahead.   It’s not about being kind to strangers just in case they can reward you, rather, as Hebrews says, hospitality is rooted in the idea that we are bound together in “mutual affection”.   “Mutual affection” or “love” comes from the Greek word philadelphia, meaning love among siblings. 

As Christians, we believe that all people are created by God, all people are loved by God, and all people carry the image of God, If we accept that we are bound together in mutual affection, then we, we accept that all people are our siblings and all people are entitled to whatever hospitality, care, and attention we can offer.   

Jesus taught us that the Kingdom of God makes no distinction between A listers and losers, it does not prefer the native born to the immigrant.  The Kingdom of God welcomes the stranger and the refugee.   The Kingdom of God does not guard its borders, but rather throws its doors open, because Jesus loves a banquet and he loves a wedding (with good wine, of course), and Jesus doesn’t believe in guest lists.

I hope that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have a lovely wedding and years of happiness.  I wish the same for a young couple that come to our Friendship Dinners.  They’d like to be married, if they can ever find the money for a license.   I see them sometimes, with a few bags of Giant Tiger groceries, waiting for the bus on Ontario Street, and pray that they do get their wedding.   If it does happen, it will go unremarked in the press, and there will be no A listers there, but Jesus will be a wedding guest, because he wants the same flourishing and happiness for them as he wants for all of us, because, I the Kingdom of God, we are all A listers.

The Freedom to Stand Straight: A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

 A Sermon Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and Good Shepherd, Stayner, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 24 August, 2025.   Readings: Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

Note: Full disclosure, this sermon was originally preached at St Margaret's, Barrie, in August 2020, but I think it's worth recycling.  Truth be told, this month has been challenging as Joy and I get ready to move house, so going back to some old material is hopefully forgivable. MP+

And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. (Luke 13:10)

Today’s gospel reading, combines a healing miracle with one of those frequent debates between Jesus and his adversaries over the appropriate use of the Sabbath.   As preachers try to fill out the context behind these debates, it's easy to come away with the impression that Jesus’ opponents were all small-minded, pettifogging legalists, and that there was something a little ridiculous (to us, at least), about the restrictions of Jewish law.   In fact, my Jewish friends have taught me that there is nothing more revered and life-giving than the law, the way of life, that God gave to his people.    The debate in the gospels isn’t about whether the law is good and life-giving, but whether Jesus has the authority to interpret it, to change it, and ultimately to fulfil it as the Son of God.   Specifically, the Sabbath is there to remind us that God wants to free us from our earthly burdens, and Jesus is the one who gives us that freedom.

We’ll come back to the law and the Sabbath in a moment, but as we’re getting to grips with this story,  let’s also look at the woman who is the recipient of Jesus’ healing.    You’ve all heard that people in the ancient world often understood illness as being caused by demonic possession, but for a moment let’s set aside the fact that we’re told she has “a spirit”.    The other concrete detail Luke gives us about her condition is that she’s been bent over, “unable to stand straight”.   That might be a description of acute osteoarthritis, or some other condition like spondylitis, which can leave a person in a wheelchair.   Whatever the cause of her condition, we’re told that she’s been crippled for eighteen years.   Imagine her daily life, in constant pain, unable to draw enough breath to fill her lungs, unable to care for her family, unable to properly see the world around her because her head is forced down, and imagine that, day in, day out, for eighteen years!

Eighteen years is such a specific amount of time, a detaiil that conveys an almost unimaginable amount of suffering.   Some of you, I know, have been on waiting lists for surgery and relief for pain for many months, and you, I am sure, can imagine this woman’s life better than some.

Would any of us notice her, this nameless woman, hunched over at the foot of a wall, or perhaps tottering on a cane, in the crowd either inside or outside the synagogue.   She’s the kind of figure most of us might see without registering, like the woman in the mobility scooter waiting at the crosswalk, or the man with the little carboard sign on a sidewalk.  How easy for the eye to just pass over such a person, to barely register their trouble, let alone imagine what such a life might be like or how long they’ve been in such a condition.    But Jesus sees her, speaks to her, heals her.

It's noteworthy that in this miracle, there is no dialogue between them.  Unlike some other miracle stories, the woman does not call out to Jesus, she does not ask for healing, there is no display of her great faith.  Was she there that day to see Jesus?   Did she have any hope that he might help here?  Luke does not say one way or another.   Perhaps, as seems likely to me, after eighteen long years of suffering, she had very little reason to believe in miracles.  I suspect her life had become nothing but one long day after another, trying to find a way to position her body so it did not hurt too much, trying to get one good breath, hoping for a scrap of bread and a few hours of sleep without any pain.

If you’ve known times like this, when you’re at the end of your rope and you can’t go on, you just want the hurting to stop.    You just want someone to take it away from you and set you free.  Or, at the very least, you want a short rest.  A period of rest and respite can make a difference to a parent of a severely autistic child, or to the caregiver of someone far gone in dementia.  Interestingly, rest was one meaning of the Sabbath.    

There are two accounts of God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses which are relevant here, and two different stories about the Fourth Commandment.   In Exodus, the Sabbath is explicitly described as a day of rest.  Just as God made all things in six days and rested on the seventh, so should God’s people observe a day of rest on the seventh day, when “you shall not do any work” (Ex 20:8-11).   This understanding of the Sabbath seems to explain the objection of the leader of the synagogue to Jesus’ healing the woman.  It’s not that he denies Jesus’ power of healing, it’s just the timing that he objects to.

We can imagine that while this man is listing his objections to Jesus, the woman in question isn’t listening too carefully.  She’s busy rediscovering how good it is to fill her lungs with air, she’s looking around and seeing people’s faces where she used to see their feet, and she’s realizing that, for the first time in years, things don’t hurt.   Is she laughing?  Crying?  Both at once?  We don’t know, but we can be sure that after eighteen years, this woman is as free as if she has been released from a dark prison cell.

The woman is experiencing freedom and freedom is the greater meaning of the Sabbath.  There are two accounts of God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses.   I’ve already mentioned one, from Exodus, which centres around the idea of rest.   However, the other account, from Deuteronomy, goes further.   After specifying that the Sabbath is to be a day of rest for everyone, no matter how humble or lowly they may be, Deuteronomy adds this:

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day (Dt 5.15).

In other words, the rest of the sabbath is not just a day’s respite from wearisome toil, it’s also a reminder that God wants to set his people free.  Just as the Jews were freed from their slavery in Egypt, so does God want his people to be free from the things that burden and oppress them.     Jesus declared this goal at the very beginning of his ministry, when he told his home synagogue in Nazareth that he had been sent “to proclaim release to the captives … and to let the oppressed go free” (Lk 4.18-19).

Who are the ones that Jesus sees today?   We can think of many.  Perhaps a woman in acute pain, who had been on a surgical waiting list for many months.  An indigenous person who has lived for decades with addiction and shame from their time at a residential school.   Parents on an endless waiting list for proper treatment and therapy of their severely autistic child.   A single mother and her children, waiting for a safe subsidized housing spot to open for them.  Wherever the resources of care and attention are short, wherever dignity is neglected, wherever people are regarded as expendable, we can be sure that Jesus is there, his keen eyes seeing everything.  And if Jesus sees them, we need to ask ourselves, do we see them? Do we care for such people?   Do we act to help them?  Do we advocate on their behalf?

Whatever we do for others who suffer is a way of honouring the Sabbath, and, as scripture tells us, the Sabbath is about rest and is about freedom.   Now, rest is good.    Ask the exhausted care-giver if they want a few hour’s respite from a spouse with dementia or a special needs child, and they’ll gladly take it.   Yes, rest, is good, but freedom from such burdens is better.  

Sabbath-time, Sunday time, is about rest AND freedom.    The seventh day is God’s time, it is God’s presence in the transition from week to week, reminding us that all time, like all creation, belongs to God.  Sabbath time, Sunday time, is a taste of freedom, a reminder that the God who brought his people out of slavery hates all things that oppress his people.  

The sabbath scandal of the gospels wasn’t just Jesus doing stuff on the Sabbath, it was Jesus saying, in word and deed, that he is freedom – freedom from pain, freedom from guilt, freedom from loneliness, freedom from death.    We, God’s beloved people, always need to remember this and always need to look to Jesus when our burdens seem intolerable.

A woman I knew once told me about her father, whose name was Bob.   He was a good and faithful man, but as he aged, he became crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, which bent his spine to the point where he lived in a perpetual hunch.   Perhaps he had the same condition as the woman in today’s gospel.   His daughter had a favourite story of how Bob showed up for a work party to paint the church hall.   The men protested that he didn’t need to do this, but Bob said that he could stand well enough to paint a strip a few feet wide, and by golly that’s what he was going to do.    

Bob died, far too young, from the disease that bent his spine.   I wish I could say that he had been miraculously cured.   I like to think that he took that paint brush to serve his church and his lord, because he knew that in Jesus he would find peace and freedom.   I believe that Jesus certainly saw Bob as he worked, and in time welcomed him to a place where he could stand straight and free from pain.   My prayer for us is that in our times of affliction we have the faith to see Jesus as the one who gives us freedom, and the faith to remember that Jesus, in his great power and compassion, surely sees us. 

 

How Much to Live Forever? A Homily for the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

A Homily for the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost.  Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto.

Readings:  Hosea 11:1-11; Psalm 107:1-9, 43; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

’So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:21)

The healthiest body on earth belongs to a man called Bryan Johnson, or at least, that’s what he says, because he has spent millions of dollars making it that way.   If you haven’t heard of him, Johnson is one of the those people who made a fortune in technology and who is now pursuing his passion project, which is longevity.   

Johnson has a single minded focus on his body, with a daily regimen that includes nutritional supplements, plasma transfers, and light therapy - but his real goal is to live forever.  If Johnson has a philosophy, it seems to be “Don’t Die”, and his ultimate hope is that ultimately he can cheat death through a kind of digital consciousness, where artificial intelligence will allow Bryan Johnson -  all his thoughts, ideas, and words - to have some sort of post-biological, potentially unlimited lifespan.   If Johnson has any kind of religion, it could be described as a religion of permanent existence.

Some immediate critiques of Johnson’s longevity project come to mind, and not necessarily theological ones (though they can easily be made as well).   What makes this particular man’s existence significant or worthy of preservation, when children are dying of famine in Gaza?   Why should this man be able to spend millions on his health and wellness when countless people lack basic health care?    While the ultra rich of previous generations donated money to build libraries and hospitals, the ultra rich of today seem to focus on vanity projects that benefit themselves and the people like them (though we might say a charitable word about the Gates Foundation and it’s anti-malaria campaign).

I can’t resist comparing Bryan Johnson to the rich man in Jesus’ story from today’s gospel because there are some obvious parallels.    The man in the story is also quite wealthy and his goal is a comfortable longevity where he will have “ample goods laid up for many years” so that he may “relax, eat, drink, be merry” (Lk 12.19).  Jesus frames the story as a caution against greed (“covetousness” in the KJV) which could be summed up colloquially, as I heard someone say recently, as “no one takes a U-Haul to their funeral”.   But behind this obvious conclusion is a more subtle caution about misplaced trust in self-sufficiency.

Jesus has a lot to say in the gospels, particularly in Luke, about rich people, and not much of it is complimentary.   Usually Jesus portrays wealth and the pursuit of wealth as being contradictory to the values that Jesus associates with the Kingdom of God:  faith, humility, charity, and above all a dependence on God.  In fact, the story about the man who dies suddenly with full barns  is a springboard for a series of teachings that follows in Luke 12, and those teachings focus mostly on the assurance that God will provide for our very existence.

The rest of Luke 12 has some well known phrases, such as Jesus’ “consider teachings:  ^“”Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap … and yet God feeds them” (12.24) or “Consider the lilies,  how they grow: they neither toil  nor spin;  yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these” (12.27).  As Jesus explains, if God will do this for birds and flowers, how much more will God do for you? Both examples support Jesus’ promise that the Father will give us what we need.      

Then Jesus circles back to our gospel story, and explains what he meant when he said that you can’t gather treasure on earth and also be rich toward God.  What did he mean by this?  Well, Jesus goes further when he tells his friends not to put their trust in earthly wealth, which can vanish.  Instead he tells his friends to “strive for [the kingdom of God” by selling their stuff, giving it away, thus earning “an unfailing treasure in heaven” (12.31-34).

I think Jesus is saying more than just go earn heavenly merit points by doing good things on earth.    I think it’s much more profound and much more interesting.   By telling us to “strive for the kingdom”, Jesus is encouraging us to fully participate in God’s economy.    In other words, if the God who created us provides for us by giving us the essentials of life, then our role in this economy is to share in this provision by attending to the needs of others.

The word “kingdom” is communal, it implies a society that is ultimately created by God and which is dependent upon God for its continued existence.    And because the kingdom of God is communal, that means that we can and must speak of a common good.    As followers of Jesus, we accept that we can’t just pursue our welfare for others.   When Jesus commands us to care for the least among us (see Mt 25), he is reminding us of  how striving for the kingdom of God means striving for the common good of those around us.

The rich man in Jesus’ story strives only for his own good.  We hear nothing about his desire to share his crops and wealth with those around him.  And so he dies, materially wealthy but spiritually bankrupt.   He assumed that he could provide for his own existence, and discovered that his self-sufficiency was an illusion.

As Christians, we believe that our existence comes from God.   There’s a wonderful passage from the Book of Acts, where Paul tells the Athenian philosophers that God made the whole earth and gave us our existence, and so, in his lovely phrase, he says that it is in God that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17.28).   

I realize that there are many, many people today who would disagree with this claim.   Our self-proclaimed technology visionaries, like Bryan Johnson who I mentioned earlier, believe that we can create and recreate ourselves, and that we can attain an existence in which we aren’t beholden to God and have no obligations to anyone else.   Like the man in Jesus’ story, and like so many of his fellow tech overlords, he seems to think that his enormous wealth should be focused on his own needs.

As followers of Jesus, we are challenged to let God provide for our needs, and in return for God’s providing for us, we are challenged to provide for the needs of others.  That’s the social contract of the kingdom of heaven.    And in return, we are promised something that people like Bryan Johnson long for, the complete and perfect life and joy that God offers us, both in this world and the next.  That existence, full of joy and and beauty and eternal light, can’t be purchased by billionaires, but it is there for the asking.