Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Place name

Luke 14:10
But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that when he who invited you comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher.’ Then you will have glory in the presence of those who sit at the table with you.

A young man on my team at work is getting married soon. I keep telling him that weddings are always full of drama and that to avoid the drama one has to manage the event tightly. He is not listening to me, he thinks that this is all a wonderful family and friends event, leave it alone and all will be well. I think that he is wrong.

Weddings have never been like that. For crying out loud, we Christians and Bible students know that it was at a wedding that Jesus performed His first miracle. We know the story, the wine had run out, there were more guests there than wine supply, after all, Jesus and His disciples were also invited. In was in the face of this embarrassment that His mother came to Him and asked that He bail out the couple and their families by solving the problem. He responded by turning 180 gallons of water into the finest wine ever consumed on the planet.

I am not Jesus and so I have never worked up an instant winery, but I have been in too many weddings where I have had to intervene in arguments, disputes, and some small skirmishes all taking place during weddings. I have had to rescue cake from one side of the family, I once turned a bedroom in my house into a storage room for gifts to avoid pilfering by relatives while the couple left for the honeymoon, and I have been involved in trying to figure out how to get food distribution going before there was a riot.

My favourite story though is rescuing a bride and groom at one in the morning when they had no transportation arrangement to take them home after the reception was done and all relatives were quite drunk, or angry, or too happy to care. I drove them for miles out of the city and to his father’s country home where they were going to honeymoon and start living at the same time. To my great distress, after this long drive in the wee small hours of the morning, the bride refused to get out of my car insisting that she was not going into that house. Now, close to 20 years later I still don’t know what the problem was, but I had to book them into a hotel back in the city and pay for it!

This week I got an invitation to a very big wedding coming up in Georgetown, it will be the talk of the town and has the potential of being Georgetown’s biggest wedding of the year so far. I was asked to RSVP and I was assured, in the elaborate invitation that, “2 seats have been reserved in [my] honour.” Given my knowledge of the bridegroom’s family and of his own expertise, I expect that when I arrive there would be place names on the table, a seating plan, and ushers to get us to our seats.

Professional event management is a standard part of weddings now for those who could afford it and many of the embarrassments and conflicts of other weddings are avoided by the skills and experience of the wedding planner. We will sit at the wedding in our designated seats, with those whom our hosts have predetermined are at the same level in the guest hierarchy and distribution.

If, peradventure, when we arrive my expectations are not met, I have sound biblical advice as to what I should do. In our text today, Jesus used another wedding as an example of what to do when you arrive at a wedding and there are no place names on the tables. “When you are invited by anyone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the best place, lest one more honorable than you be invited by him; and he who invited you and him come and say to you, ‘Give place to this man,’ and then you begin with shame to take the lowest place.” Luke 14:8,9.

This wedding to which I refer will have many very honourable guests and so the advice of Jesus will be heeded by me if necessary.

Somehow, in our churches and Christian community today, many have been taken by there own sense of importance and prominence and are offended when they are not afforded certain levels of protocol they believe to be in keeping with their ministerial status. Ministers and others walk in with certain VIP expectations.

I do believe that there is a place for proper protocol in the household of faith but those responsible for planning should be the ones to pay attention to this and we, guests, should gracefully receive it rather than come expecting it. The basic principles laid down by Jesus get forgotten too often.

It sometimes takes a trip outside of the church to remind us that we are servants of God and our crowns are in heaven not here at a wedding or crusade. “For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” Luke 14:11.

Think on these things:

1. How do you think of yourself in terms of your status in the community?
2. How do you respond if you are not treated in a way that you believe you deserve based on your status in the church or community of faith?
3. Are there people in your church who are shown more respect than others?
4. What systems of protocol exist in your church and do you think that the systems are appropriate for people in the kingdom of God here?

Prayer focus:

Let us pray today that we would not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think but in lowliness of heart show each other respect and be willing to serve one another.

In His Grace
Pastor Alex