Today in Hebrews Paul talks about being hospitable to folk that you don’t know and about putting yourself in the shoes, no the body, of one that is in prison. Then in Luke Jesus talks about where we are to sit at dinner parties and about whom we should invite to sit down at our table. Paul and Jesus both make us uncomfortable, or they should. They make me uncomfortable. The world in which Jesus and Paul lived was one of honor/shame. The folk were all about having honor, status, and avoiding shame at all costs. Somewhat like the Oriental idea of “losing face” And, I am becoming more and more convinced, not unlike our society in America today. Their world also revolved around who was “ritually clean” or not. If you were, “ritually clean”, then all was good and if you were not…well let’s just say that you were not invited to the polite dinner parties. The lame, crippled, blind, and poor were all “ritually unclean”. And the folk locked up? Well they were probably “unclean” as well, yet Paul says that we are to put ourselves in their bodies. That’s a really hard thing to do and so is putting ourselves at the far end of the dinner table and sitting down to “eat” with the outcast of society. I think that it’s all about perspective. It’s all about how we choose to see the world. Do we look through God’s eyes or do we look through the eyes of an honor/shame society. The hard thing is that the honor/shame society thought that they were looking through God’s eyes. They understood the blind and lame and so forth as having sinned and therefore they were “unclean” and not loved by God. Jesus turned that way upside down. When was the last time that you looked, really looked, at a homeless person on the street and told them that God loved them? When was the last time that you sat as far away from the “in” group as possible at a dinner party, or any kind of gathering? If you are still in school, when was the last time that you sat down to eat with that awkward kid that nobody likes or with the new kid in school who just doesn’t seem to fit in? When was the last time that you took up for somebody who couldn’t do that for themselves? Are you uncomfortable? I am.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 12:16:40 +0000
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