by Lauren F. Winner
Gospel Reading: Luke 14:1, 7-14
For Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013: Year C—Lectionary 22
Ah, etiquette, and the thorny question of the return invitation.
My First Defensive Evasion of this Parable: Monday
Last week, Michael and I went to dinner at the home of one of my colleagues, and now I am wondering: I guess I ‘m supposed to invite them for dinner in a few weeks’ time, right? (But I can’t imagine they really want to come. It was nice, but we’re just colleagues: do we really have anything more to say to each other? Didn’t we use up all possible conversation last week?)
“Parties in private homes, whether lunches, brunches, cocktails or dinner parties, do require a return invitation,” I read in a 1987 edition of Emily Post. Also: even if you decline an invitation, you’re still supposed to reciprocate, though the obligation to do so is “milder” than if you had accepted. And also: if you do offer a “pay-back” invitation and you are declined, you are supposed to issue at least one more, and preferably two more invitations.
Jesus’s interlocutors, of course, wanted the return invitation. They wanted their dinner guests to turn around and invite them over for fondue next week. But I will tell you: I imagine the prospect of dinner guests never extending the “pay-back”’ invitation, and I think “what a relief!” One of the main reasons I so rarely invite anyone over for dinner (in addition to my debilitating introversion, my general sense that I have no time to do anything like tidy the house, et cetera, et cetera) is the fear that dinner at my table will launch an endless cycle of invitations for dinners or drinks or desserts—dinners that all of the principals would really rather skip, but now we’re stuck.
If you throw an annual Christmas party and invite everyone you know, does that repay a year’s worth of dinner invitations in one fell swoop? That may actually be the hardest question.
My Second Defensive Evasion of this Parable: Wednesday
A few days later, I try again: open the Bible back to Luke 14 and see if I might possibly have a thought or a prayer or a reflection that is about something a little more important, and a little more apt, than Monday’s perseverating about my introversion and lack of social skills.
Wednesday’s defensive evasion does not last very long. It is a quick, truncated inner dialogue about how unrealistic Jesus’ words are, anyway. Here is how said dialogue goes:
Me: Of course, in reality no one in real life in the twenty-first-century middle-class here in Durham would really invite the halt and the lame over to dinner, so I probably need to metaphorize this a little.
Me again: Except for my friend S, my nearest and dearest (who lives in an intentional Christian community of hospitality, a sort of New Monastic Catholic worker kind of thing, and invites people who are halt and lame to dinner all the time).
(That is where I shut down, as I usually do when comparing myself to latter-day Dorothy Days. )
Take Three: Thursday, thinking about this Parable while at the Grocery Store
There are a lot of mothers in this grocery store.
These mothers make me think that maybe Jesus’ categories parse a little differently than I first thought; he includes relatives on the list of people who may repay the invitation, but for many of us, it is relatives who may be least likely to repay the invitation.
I imagine that mothers (which I am not) (and fathers, when they are the chief cooks for a family) may hear this text from Luke in a way that is more helpful than my own self-absorbed non-hearings.
For many of us in the grocery store, it is relatives—non-cooking spouses, and most especially children—who do not invite us back. Perhaps our children and spouses are not in the category of the poor or the sick (though of course they might be), but there is a still a reality that day-in, day-out one is cooking for them – cooking for people who may well never host you, for people who may never thank you. You are cooking for them night after night, these relatives who are in fact your nearest neighbors, and who sometimes feel like your most intrusive guests. Those people who are at your table most often, but who are also – maddeningly? blessedly?—exempt from the normal guest-host code that would imply a return invitation.
So I am going home to cook for my husband and my stepdaughter. I do not have any idea when, or if, or how they might invite me back, or not. But suddenly this very ordinary thing may be a bit of discipleship—which leads to the most interesting question, if not the hardest:
The Most Interesting Question
What might actually happen between me and Jesus as I am preparing dinner for these most beloved dinner companions, my family, who may indeed never return the invitation?
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
