Sermon: From Transaction to Feast

Church of the Nativity - Fayetteville, GA

August 31, 2025

12th Sunday After Pentecost

Every time I open the gospels, I love to see how the God who put on flesh lived so immersed in the world around him. I'm struck by how often Jesus uses something as ordinary as a meal to reveal something extraordinary about God’s kingdom. In Luke 14, he takes a Sabbath dinner party, full of rules about honor and social standing, and turns it into a lesson about humility, generosity, and belonging.

This sermon is part reflection, part confession, and part invitation. Pride is something all of us wrestle with, and Jesus has a way of exposing it, not to shame us, but to set us free.

My prayer is that as you listen or read, you’ll sense Jesus inviting you beyond a life of striving, beyond keeping score or managing appearances. This movement to moving beyond trying to earn or prove your worth is the movement to receiving the abundant love already spread before you at his table. It's the invitation to invite others to the table. May you hear his call to move from transaction to feast.

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I have only been with you here at Nativity for a few weeks, but I think I’ve learned some things about this small church with a big heart. One thing that is good for my soul but not so good for my waistline is that you show that love with food. 

This was also true of 1st-century Jewish society, as we see in the Gospel of Luke. Luke’s account contains more meal narratives than any other gospel. Life happened around the table, and we here can relate to that. Sure, we all love food, but these stories about Jesus at meals go much deeper than that. 

It’s important to understand that the world in which Jesus became flesh and lived was an honor-shame culture. Honor-shame culture is a collectivistic society where a person’s identity and self-worth are tied to their group. These cultures prioritize social standing and focus on maintaining your public image. 

We can still see this distinction today in Eastern-influenced societies versus the Western world, which is a guilt-innocence culture. I saw this very clearly living in the Middle East and South Asia. Just think of the Indian caste system. You have a clear place in society, and you do not stray from that place. This was the kind of world Jesus entered into. And in this world, meals were not simply meals.

They were markers of rank and status. There were all kinds of rules and signals based on the seating arrangement. If the host wanted an advantageous marriage match with a certain family for his son, he could seat that father at a higher place at the table to honor him. If a business competitor had displeased him, he could seat him lower at the table to communicate his anger not only to him but to everyone in the room. 

Seating at the table was a kind of currency in which social transactions were negotiated. In this public display of honor and shame, it mattered where you were seated. 

In Luke 14, Jesus took the opportunity at a Sabbath meal of Pharisees to turn this cultural practice on its head and talk about a different kind of culture, a different kind of Kingdom. He saw guests at the table trying to elbow their way into the place of honor and told them to go and take the lowest seat instead. 

Jesus knew these practices weren’t just in play in the culture. They had more to do with people’s hearts, the way they saw themselves, others, and even God. The people had built up all kinds of rules about who was in and out of the society and in their religion. Those who could study Torah and keep all the law were seen as superior, and they wore it like a badge of honor. 

Jesus wasn’t just critiquing table etiquette here. He was naming something much deeper; what was really at stake in the scramble for seats was pride. That constant measuring of worth against others, that desire to be seen, respected, and honored, seeps into our spiritual lives, too. 

We see it in other places in the gospels when Jesus warns people not to give where others can see it, not to pray loudly where others can hear it. You shouldn’t be jostling for position with God, Jesus is saying. And that’s why Jesus shifts the conversation from the arrangement of chairs at a banquet to the arrangement of our hearts before God. Because what’s really at stake here isn’t social climbing. There’s a much greater cost when we live this way.

Jesus says, in the Message version of Luke 14:11, “What I’m saying is, ‘If you walk around all high and mighty, you’re going to end up flat on your face. But if you’re content to simply be yourself, you will become more than yourself.” 

The trouble with pride is that it fools us into thinking we don’t need God. We get caught up in appearances, always managing how others see us, until we lose sight of our true selves. Instead of living from a place of love and generosity, we end up striving to sit in the “right places” in life, to build a reputation, to prove ourselves. 

But a reputation is not the same as character. Pride convinces us that if we can look the part, we’ll be secure. But inside, we are starving. That’s the first cost of pride: it steals our dependence on God and our freedom to live authentically as God’s beloved.

This isn’t something that only first-century Jews in an honor-shame culture struggle with. This is human nature, and it lives inside all of us. Pride isn’t always loud and boastful; sometimes it hides under the pressure to appear competent, faithful, or “put together.” 

If I’m honest, Christian leaders may be some of the most vulnerable to this temptation. We feel like we have to model a faith without cracks, to live in such a way that people can look at us and think, “Now that’s what a good Christian looks like.” People are watching us, after all.

For me, this tendency has played out in my people-pleasing personality. I’ve lived much of my life as a chameleon. I can sense what people want, and I know how to deliver it. On the surface, that looks like success: I can blend in, meet expectations, earn approval. But the cost has been steep. Underneath, I often didn’t know who I really was. 

This was magnified for me, being in a church culture that said there were certain lanes for women, and so I stayed in them. And I focused on looking like the best Christian I could be in that setting.  I lost touch with my true self, the one God actually created me to be. In the process, my gaze shifted from God to appearances, and my soul grew hungry. This is something I’m still untangling and working through, and will probably be an ongoing struggle for me. This is not the feast Christ is inviting us to.

But pride doesn’t just hurt us. It ripples outward. When we’re busy protecting our own image, there’s no room left for others at the table. Pride blinds us to God’s generosity, and in doing so, we end up shutting others out of the feast. 

After Jesus spoke to the guests at the table, he turned to the host and pressed the point even further. When you give a banquet, he said, don’t just invite your friends and relatives or the wealthy neighbors who can pay you back. He tells him to invite the poor, crippled, lame, and blind. These are the very people who had no standing in this society and would never be invited to a banquet. A host typically invited people for one of two reasons. Either he needed to repay someone who had already invited him, or he wanted to obligate the guest for the future. Sharing a meal created a kind of social debt: if I host you today, you’re expected to host me tomorrow.

My family learned this transactional system the hard way when we lived in Bangladesh. Early on, we told some co-workers who had lived in the country for years how excited we were that a family had invited us over for dinner. They smiled and asked, “So, when are you having them over to your house?” We looked puzzled, so they gave us a crash course in cultural dinner etiquette.

And let’s just say, we had already broken all the rules. For one thing, I had the meal ready when our friends arrived, because that’s what good hosting looks like in the U.S. You invite someone to dinner, and they expect dinner soon after they arrive. 

But in Bangladesh, that was far too abrupt. You’re supposed to begin with a long conversation, tea, and snacks, and only much later move to the meal. Finishing the food is actually the signal that the evening is over. So by serving dinner right away, we had accidentally communicated, “Thanks for coming, but we’d like you to leave soon!”

And the worst faux pas of all: when you’re invited to a meal, you must set a date right then and there for the return invitation. If you don’t, it’s considered extremely rude. That’s because in this culture, hospitality isn’t primarily about love or generosity. It’s about maintaining social balance. Meals become transactions: what can you do for me in return?

And we can fall into the same trap of transactional living in our lives and in our faith. Are we guarding our place instead of opening space for others? 

In the time when Luke wrote his gospel account, the early church was growing, and many Gentiles had joined the movement. Jews were eager to keep their place at the head of the table. We see this all throughout the book of Acts, which Luke also pens. 

There are all kinds of early church squabbles about who is in and who is out. Do Gentiles need to be circumcised to join the faith? What about purity laws around food? These are all ways of scrambling for a seat closest to God. As N.T. Wright says in his commentary on this passage, “Pride, notoriously, is the great cloud which blots out the sun of God’s generosity.”

Pride works to keep others out of the feast, but here Jesus is reimagining the meal as a picture of God’s Kingdom, where humility is honored and all are welcome at the table. Continuing on in the message translation, in verse 14, Jesus says: 

“Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You’ll be and experience a blessing. They won’t be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returned-oh, how it will be returned!”

These meals of Jesus represent a new world, a new Kingdom. The table becomes a metaphor for the inclusive nature of God’s kindom, where all are invited to the feast. This Kingdom doesn’t begin one day in heaven when all are invited to the table. 

The Kingdom of God is here and now, and we have the opportunity to keep people out of the banquet or to invite them in. The work of humility, then, is not about groveling or thinking less of ourselves. It is about remembering who we are, and whose we are. Humility grounds us in a healthy dependence on God. Instead of scrambling for a better seat, we can rest secure as God’s beloved, already welcomed and chosen. 

And when we live from that place of humility, something shifts. We no longer see people as competition, or as transactions, or as interruptions to our plans. We begin to see them as God sees them, as guests of honor. Humility frees us to widen the circle, to make room at the table, and to invite those who could never repay us. 

That’s why Jesus insists that the Kingdom looks like a feast filled with the poor, the blind, the lame, the ones who could never buy their way in. Because only when all are welcome do we glimpse the generosity of God. We don’t see our programs or our church buildings as our own anymore. We see them as tools of the Kingdom. 

So let me ask: Is our fellowship like this? Do our meals and our community look like the Kingdom Jesus describes, a place where those at the end of the line discover that, in God’s eyes, they belong at the head of the table?

Every week, at this altar, we are given a glimpse of the Feast that is the Kingdom of God. This is not just bread and wine. This is the meal where pride gives way to grace, where the hungry are fed, the forgotten are remembered, and the lost are welcomed home. Here, we are reminded: there is room for you. There is room for all.

This is our table. And it’s ours to share with others, to show others how good it is to be here. Brothers and sisters, the table is set. The invitation is already yours. The only question is: who will you bring with you?