Table Manners

First Presbyterian Church of Metuchen 

Written and delivered by: Rev. Ashley Bair 

August 28, 2022 

Scripture: Luke 14:1, 7-14 

Title: Table Manners 

Prayer - Spirit of God fall afresh on us this morning through this Word as it moves in us as you will it. Amen.  
 

I watched a cockroach crawl out of my cousin’s salad when I was around 10 years old. All of us around the table went shock still, waiting for any cue to react. With a shush from my grandmother, we knew to keep quiet as we watched my cousin dispose of her salad and come back to the table. Composure was a value at my grandparents' dinner table.  
 

My grandparents had an oak dining table in their kitchen that came with a few leaves, so it regularly sat 8 of us. There were always people in the house for meals. Dinner time was never just us, there were always aunts and uncles and cousins around. If we needed more space, we’d get out a card table and put four chairs around it and pretend it was connected to us. With her magic my grandmother could stretch a dinner for 3 into a dinner for 10, no problem. 

My grandmother was the cook of the family, it seemed like she was always in the kitchen. Most memories I have of my grandmother are of her in the kitchen peeling something, boiling something, hovering over the sink or the stove with her sleeves up and her glasses on.  

When she cooked, other women would gather around her. I by no means whatsoever carry the belief that women should be the only ones in the kitchen, but it was a part of my childhood and as a girl, stepping into the kitchen with the other women was thrilling. That’s where the gossip took place, where the women stirred the pots both literally and figuratively. And that space held a spicy and mysterious solidarity that my grandmother had with her women kin. But the chatter and the solidarity stayed there in the kitchen.  

Once we sat at the table together, there were rules. We had table manners. You sat full bottom on the seat, no elbows on the table, no going for seconds until you were told you could, no loud chewing. You had to ask for anything you wanted. You had to ask to be dismissed. There was no loud talking, no disruptive conversations or debate, no inappropriate laughter, no singing. It was very strict and though not explicitly said, the undertone was about respect; respect for the meal and respect for my grandparents who paid for it and prepared it.  

I think that the table manners of my grandparents' home not only offered them some way of maintaining discipline with a bunch of rowdy children, but also offered them some sense of honor when we all felt really vulnerable. I certainly did. We didn’t have much to eat, let alone much to share. A lot of our food came from cans and boxes, we didn’t have access to special meats or vegetables and fruits. Because we didn’t have a lot, what we did have needed to be valued.  

The table manners offered discipline around the table when all other things seemed chaotic. It was very serious; any disobedience or lack of manners was met with a harsh word and removal from the table. The cost of that, for me, was that the rules and the food often felt more valued than my participation. If I laughed or spoke out of turn, I’d get a glare. We were expected to conduct ourselves at all mealtimes.  

You can imagine how hard it was to keep still and stoic on the evening I watched a cockroach crawl out of my cousin's salad. But we were told to be still at that moment. Because that salad didn’t just happen. We didn’t eat salads often, really at all. So, now for me that memory is tied to the irony of the one time we ate a salad, a bug crawled out of it. But it wasn’t funny at the time. I can’t imagine how my grandmother must have felt. And after my cousin got rid of the roach, we sat there and continued eating, not saying a word about it. Today, I would likely scream, smash the cockroach and toss everything in the trash and then order tacos. But the ten-year-old me and my family practiced our table manners.  

I remember being invited to a friend's house for dinner around that same age and watching my friend's two brothers spar at dinner over who was going to go to the freezer and grab ice cream for dessert. Neither wanted to do it, so they were making bets, calling each other out for missed chores and increasing rounds of rock, paper, scissors to infinity, delaying the task. The back and forth got louder and louder and my eyes got bigger and bigger, waiting for something to happen or for them to get in trouble. I was an anxious mess waiting with bated breath for someone to get the dang ice cream.  

Not all dinner tables are the same. And honestly, they all can be quite a vulnerable place. In our own homes, like my childhood one, and especially when we go to someone else’s table. We are sharing space and food and pieces of ourselves with each other. Tables can be places of incredible intimacy and joy and they can be incredibly intimidating and awkward and hard.  

Jesus certainly knew this; he went to a lot of dinner tables. The Gospels record him receiving and accepting many dinner invitations during his years of ministry. How did those dinners go? Most of them encountered provocation, insult, or scandal. Jesus would come with dirty hands, he would interrupt the people who invited him, sometimes he would get up from the table and heal people, once an uninvited woman caressed his feet under the dinner table…Jesus would dine with the poor before dining with anyone else and sometimes drink a fair bit more than others liked.  

I don’t think my family would call him a polite dinner guest - but he wasn’t after politeness, he wanted to expose the dinner table vulnerabilities.  

And, here in today’s passage from Luke, we find him again at a dinner table, one that goes a little awry. When he arrives, he notices the guests scrambling to find the most honorable places to sit. Distraught and likely a little annoyed, Jesus tells the guests a parable.  

"When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor," he tells his fellow guests.  "Go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher.'"  "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." If that isn't counter-cultural enough for this crowd that was just fighting over seats, Jesus then turns to his host and continues: "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor and the disabled***. Then you will be blessed, because they cannot easily repay you." 

Jesus exposes the vulnerabilities of this dinner party, one where people are trying to use the status of the seat to exalt themselves, make themselves feel worthy and important and turns that social practice on its head. This is certainly relatable; whether we grew up at strict and quiet dinner tables trying to follow the rules or at tables that shout and debate trying to make ourselves heard, we are all approaching a table with our own self-doubts and self-interests, trying to prove ourselves worthy of a spot there. Jesus says, notice this and do the opposite. That will humble yourself at the table.  

With this parable Jesus is again using the table to bring our vulnerabilities to light and make the connection between the Kingdom of God eternal and the earthly present. “Though we have such a hard time believing it, Jesus insists that God's kingdom is not a kingdom of scarcity; it is one of abundance, where we don’t have to prove ourselves, where all are already welcome, already loved, already known, and already cherished.   

The currency of that kingdom is humility, not arrogance; generosity, not stinginess; hospitality, not fear. The table at the center of that kingdom has so many seats — all of them honorable seats — that we don’t have to scramble and exhaust ourselves to secure a good spot anymore.” To be exalted, we must take the most humble places now, in order to move past ourselves and truly see each other at the table.  

Where we sometimes equate humility with complicity and self-effacement, Roberta Bondi points out in her book To Love as God Loves that “humility does not mean … a continuous cringing, cultivating a low self-image, and taking a strange pleasure in being always forgotten, unnoticed, or taken for granted. Instead, humility means a way of seeing other people as being as valuable in God’s eyes as ourselves. It’s a relational term having to do precisely with learning to value others, whoever they are. It’s developing the kind of empathy with the weaknesses of others that makes it impossible to judge others out of our own self-righteousness.” 

“When it comes to living together,” Bondi writes, “humility is the opposite of perfectionism. It gives up unrealistic expectations of how things ought to be for a clear vision of what human life is really like. In turn, this enables its possessors to see and love the people they deeply desire to love.” 

Humility is about us shifting ourselves out of our own way to love each other. And there is nothing easy about humility. Even when we can define it, it eludes us. For me, it seems easier to be faced with my vulnerability toward superiority, like those at this dinner with Jesus, and think to humble myself to be open to dining with others where I might not get an invitation back. That’s a challenge I can acknowledge and can accept to work on. It is harder for me to face my vulnerability toward self-suppression, back to when I was 10 years old and told to keep quiet while a cockroach crossed the table. Because that kind of humility requires me to acknowledge that other people are as valuable in God’s eyes as myself and to be humble requires me to acknowledge my worth and that my voice is worthy at the table at all. That’s my vulnerability at the table. What’s your vulnerability at the table? 

Today, we don’t always know who we are dining with because the markers of society look different. We aren’t always aware of who is using food stamps or the food pantry. Who feels guilty because they used to have more and now feel they don’t have enough, who feels righteous at the table, who fights at the table, who fights to get to the table, who can’t wait for the dinner to be over.  

Not all dinner tables are the same. That’s what's both so moving and so challenging about Jesus’ disruptions at dinner tables.  

Whatever is holding the table back from including someone else, or someone from including themselves, is hindering them from really seeing each other as guests at the table of Christ. Whenever we are at table, we share space and food and pieces of ourselves with each other. Those are the things of a holy, sacred space. There is a reason Jesus’ last night with his disciples were at the table.  

Here, Jesus invites his hearers to rethink their places at the table and to imagine new ways of being in relationship to those with whom they share a meal. He doesn’t offer any divine way for us to all get what we need, but instead reminds us to humble ourselves in the face of whatever vulnerability is in our way. When he came with dirty hands, interrupted the people who invited him, got up from the table mid meal to help someone, or let the uninvited woman caress his feet under someone else’s dinner table, Jesus was exposing the vulnerabilities that got in the way of people seeing each other at the table.  

“When we dare to gather at Jesus's table, we are actively protesting the culture of perfection, of competitiveness, of meekness or superiority that surrounds us. There's nothing easy or straightforward about this; it requires hard work over a long time. To eat and drink with God is to live in tension with the social orders that define our homes, our classrooms, our committees, our politics, and that can be tiring.”  But it's what we're called to do — to humble ourselves and place our hope in the radically different kingdom that is God’s.  

Jesus asks us to believe that our behavior at the table matters — because it does.  Our conduct is important, where we sit speaks volumes, and the people whom we choose to welcome reveal the stuff of our souls.  

So, consider your own vulnerabilities at the table and disrupt what needs to be disrupted so we can see each other as the welcome, loved, known, cherished guests that we are.  

Get loud. Favor the ones who cannot repay you. Choose the low seat. This is God's world we live in, and in the house of God, these are the table manners. Amen. 

Works Cited: 

Places of Honor by Debie Thomas, August 25, 2019.  

The Humble Seat by Jan L. Richardson, August 10, 2010. 

Connections Commentary, Year C.