SEATING CHART
Colin Bagby did his customary fine job preaching Sunday at First United Methodist in Maumelle. His sermons are in a very literal sense provocative for me: they provoke me to seeing and thinking about things in ways I would not otherwise. The text was Luke 14:7-14, a passage in which Jesus uses the seating chart at a banquet to make a point regarding a customary trope of his about the upside-down nature of life in the kingdom – ‘the first shall be last’ – ‘he who exalts himself…’ – etc.
In other words, where we see ourselves, and place ourselves, among the people and places that make up our lives matters – in fact, it’s a life and death issue for people of faith. A mistake in the seating arrangements will cause us perhaps to miss out on the best the banquet host has to offer. In our false modesty we get pimento cheese on stale bread and soggy Fritos while the authentically humble get the prime rib and baked potatoes with all the fixins’.
Maybe the key to a real world Christian ethos is to be found not in biblical expertise or in the laundry list of narrative phrases that masquerades for evangelicalism. Maybe the key to a real world Christian theology is, as it has always been, geography.
Where in the world are we?
Job can be chastised, and was, for his arrogance and his attitude and the way that these sorts of dispositions distanced him from the God he needed desperately at the moment of his deepest need. But the greatest of Job’s self-imposed afflictions is that the location feature on his GPS was turned off. In his suffering he lost track of where he was.
And if we don’t know where we are we cannot possibly get where we are trying to go.
What we are talking about here is, of course, humility, and most of us who get this practice a fervent kind of false modesty in hopes of correctly orienting ourselves. Or we engage in a condescending outreach to those in need that is anything but genuinely compassionate. Spiritual snobbery is sexy, seductive and largely unconscious – and lethal.
The prosperity theology of Osteen and other shills for unrestrained consumer capitalism. The pathetic braggadocio of Trump and the others in the Republican clown car. The secret guilt we harbor when we suffer setbacks in which we wonder, silently most often, “what did I do to deserve this?’ There is a precariousness to the spiritual and political Zeitgeist in all periods of national history – but this one seems to have a particularly dangerous edge to it. The wreckage left in the wake of narcissistic nationalists and self-promoting, xenophobic EINOs (Evangelicals in Name Only) is unambiguous and stark.
But history has become as irrelevant to us as facts, constitutional integrity, and ... geography.