Etiquette Schmetiquette

Luke 14:1,7-14

August 29, 2004

¹On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

Humility and Hospitality

⁷When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. ⁸“When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; ⁹and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. ¹⁰But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. ¹¹For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

¹²He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Etiquette for a Casual At Home Dinner

1.     If you are invited to a dinner that is going to be a casual affair at a private home, always ask the hostess if you may bring some food or wine when you accept the invitation.

2.     If the hostess accepts your offer, ask her what you would like you to bring.  If she says that you may decide, tell her immediately what you will bring.

3.     If you are bringing food, bring something special and always bring it on a serving plate with the proper utensils to serve it.

4.     If you are bringing wine, again, select a nice wine that will be appropriate for the food that will be served.

5.     A guest should never sit down and expect to be waited on at this type of party!  Usually at a casual home party, all the women and men take part in the meal preparation, clean up or both.

6.     Most casual dinners are served buffet style, but even at this type of an affair, the buffet table should look attractive.  The catsup, mustard, pickles, etc. should not be served from their containers but rather put into pretty dishes!

7.     Everyone should go around the buffet table taking only a small amount of each food.  Anyone who is still hungry after he has finished the food he has taken, may go back to the buffet table after everyone else has been served and get a second helping.

8.     After you have filled your plate, find a place to sit down.  If you are at a table, wait until a few other people have been seated at your table before you wrap your silverware from you napkin and put your napkin in your lap.  Place your knife to the right of your plate with the blade facing the plate and place your fork to the left of the plate with the tines up. put your

9.     If you are going to be eating your meal on a sofa or a chair without a table in front of you, unwrap your silverware from your napkin just as you would do if you were seated at a table.  This time however, put your knife on the right side of your plate with the blade facing in and the fork on the left side of your plate with the tines up.  Put your napkin on your lap and slightly under your plate….

10. If you are eating American Style cut only one or at the most two bite sized pieces of food at a time and eat them before cutting more. 

11. If you are eating European Style cut only one bite sized piece of food eat it.[1] 

There are many occasions in life where etiquette can be a useful tool.  From Emily Post in 1922 to Letitia Baldrige and Judith Martin also known as “Miss Manners” many people have grown rich and famous over the years telling the rest of us what to do at some of the most formal and informal of occasions.  Did you know there was a certain etiquette around what to do at a fast food restaurant!?!  Listen to this:

Fast Food Restaurant Dining

1. While Standing in line at any fast food restaurant, decide what you want to order and have your money out and ready to pay immediately after giving your order.

2. Move away from the counter as soon as you get your food so you do not delay others behind you.

3. Get your napkin, straw or whatever else you may need from the accessory counter taking only what you need and no more

4. After taking a seat, put your napkin on your lap just as you would at a fine restaurant

5. Eat your meal slowly so you can savor all the delicious flavors of your favorite fast foods and don’t ever talk with your mouth full of food.

6. Engage in polite conversation if you are dining with someone else.

7. When your meal is over, blot your mouth with your napkin. Check your table to make sure that it is clean.  Wipe it off with your napkin if necessary.

8. Put your napkin back on your tray and take your tray to the nearest garbage can.  Put all the disposable items in the can.

9. If you choose to eat in your car, remember that your car has windows and people can see what you are doing, so put your napkin on your lap and don’t gobble![2]

Fast food restaurants truly are unexpected place to consider what Miss Manners or Emily Post would have to say.  However, at banquets, weddings and other such extraordinary events, discussions of manners and etiquette are much more common.  Here’s one person that probably could have used such guidance.

Wedding Guest Bites Off Man's Finger

Tuesday August 26, 2003

Corunna, Mich. (AP) - A wedding guest bit off part of a man's finger during a reception at a banquet hall, police said.

A 31 year old man was arraigned Monday on two counts of assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder, one count of aggravated assault and one count of simple assault following the weekend incident.

The Owosso man also smeared cake on a 9-year-old boy and knocked out a 49-year-old woman, Corunna Police Sgt. Kevin Clark told The Flint Journal.

This man, an invited guest of the Owosso-area couple, "was causing altercations and arguments with other guests" at the Friday night reception, Clark said. "He was asked to leave a couple times, and he'd leave and come back in."

After witnesses said the man, who is 6-foot-2 and weighs 260 pounds, smeared cake on the boy's face, Clark said "the father came to the son's rescue, struggling with the suspect, and he apparently had his finger bit off at that time."

The bridegroom, 21, then intervened, Clark said. Police said this man later elbowed the 49-year-old woman in the head during the scuffle, knocking her unconscious temporarily.

State troopers and local officers eventually subdued the wios wl;early Saturday.

He remained in custody after Shiawassee County District Judge Ward Clarkson set bond at $25,000.[3]

I don’t know if Miss Manners or Emily Post could have helped this guy, but he certainly needed some sort of help.

⁸“When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host…¹⁰But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.”  says Jesus to his disciples in Luke 14

Do these passages prove that Emily Post was in fact not the first and most famous purveyor of etiquette advice in North America, but that person is none other than Jesus.  Certainly, Jesus’ readership through the bible, the most often printed book in history far outstrips Ms. Post’s famous book entitled Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home.

Did Jesus really care about etiquette and proper rules of social engagement?  I don’t know.  Probably not.  Probably not Jesus, the guy who often broke the popular rules of social engagement by socializing with lepers and tax collectors, with women and with children.  Jesus probably did a lot to upset the social police of his day by doing all manner of forbidden things on the Sabbath like healing the sick and picking grain to feed his hungry disciples.

Listen to these verses that immediately precede those from chapter 14 which I just read…you may find them familiar as they are verses I read from the pulpit last Sunday:

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day.”

The etiquette-keeper in this community seem more likely the indignant leader of the congregation than Jesus.

Do you remember Jesus’ response to them?  He called them hypocrites and lectured them angrily about his ideas regarding their rule keeping and etiquette.  No, I don’t think Jesus’ words here in chapter fourteen of the Gospel of Luke have anything to do with the proper social guidelines of dinner parties and other “important” occasions.

These verses are not about Etiquette.  They are about humility.  Jesus is counseling against thinking too highly of oneself, so highly that one may be tempted to take a much more prominent seat at the banquet than is expected of him.  Jesus gives counsel on having the proper perspective about oneself and one’s true place in the world, about considering oneself no better or now worse than anyone else and realizing that all people stumble and fall, all people are sinful and that God accepts all people equally and sees no differences in station, hierarchy or rank.

Michael Hammer holds a PHD from MIT and once was a professor of Computer Science there as well.[4]  Toward the end of the last decade he was named by Business Week as one of the pre-eminent management thinkers of the 90s and by Time magazine as one of America's 25 most influential individuals. He was asked recently, “What advice would you give to the leader of the 21st-century corporation?”  He responded as follows:

“I have a very simple observation which is based on something I have seen in many companies: If you think you're good, you're dead.

The essence of successfully going forward is humility -- a recognition that success in business the past has no implication for success in the future. And that the world has changed so much that the formulas for yesterday's success are almost guaranteed to be formulas for failure tomorrow.”[5]

One Christian author, and pastor says this about humility:

Humility is not just gentleness or meekness. It demands vulnerability, the willingness to be hurt. It is readiness to go unnoticed, to be last, to receive the least. Humility offers nothing in the way of peace as the world gives -- and plenty that destroys it. Yet it describes the way of Christ better than any other word. It is the way of Christ. And as such it brings the deepest and most lasting peace.[6]

In contrast to the example of Jesus, one American billionaire, Ted Turner says this about himself, “If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect.”[7]

¹⁰But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. ¹¹For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

These verses are about humility and about who’s invited to the party!  If you remember, the end of the passage reads like this:

¹²He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Again, these words have nothing to do with etiquette, despite the instructions which begin, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not…”

One theologian instructs about these passages:

We are called to look around the edges of our feasts, to see those who have been forgotten, excluded, pushed away from the table. Jesus speaks of “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” Who are the people [Jesus might include] today alongside these folks – the racially or ethnically different, the homosexual, the homeless, the criminal, and the poor? How often do we gather without being mindful of those who may not even be able to get into our celebrations and observances? How often do we neglect those who cannot hear what we are saying, or read the words we are saying? Are “the poor” those we “send” things to (food, clothing, etc.), or do we invite them into the very heart of our gatherings?[8]

You see, this is not just about our church banquets, our etiquette governed social events, our fundraisers, our youth group pizza parties or any other of our food events.  When Jesus speaks about banquets, he refers to the feast that is Christian life.  The social event that he is referring to is any event that includes Christian fellowship, from coffee time, to bible study, to worship and even to who’s invited to help out in the kitchen at the special church dinner.  And it is not limited to just events either.  Jesus’ talk of the banquet, has a two fold meaning.  He is also making an allusion to the heavenly banquet, the Kingdom of Heaven, Christian life and discipleship.  In other words he’s challenging his disciples to step out beyond their families, their friends and their comfortable companions in their outreach to gather people to a particular banquet – that’s why Luke calls this passage a parable, but to God himself.  He is challenging them to go out and find people who really need God and bring them the Gospel, the “banquet feast” that is Christ, whether those people are the obvious ill and home-bound of any church family prevented from joining the church family because of health and physical reasons or, whether they are those who are for other reasons only sometimes in these pews - to whom we reach out with words of healing and care in response to needs, or they are those whom we have never met, living on the streets where we travel blindly and quietly along our quiet way, and those we pass in the supermarket aisles and those whom we speed past in the hospital lobby as we go to visit a friend or loved one in need.

In these passages in Luke chapter fourteen, Jesus challenges his disciples both to hold back, to pull back and be less flamboyant and less self promoting while at the same time challenging them to not hold back but to reach out and to jump out beyond regular fences, barriers and boundaries to bring the gospel and the invitation which is the Good News of God to new and unexpected folks beyond the familiar community.

May God give us courage and wisdom as we look for ways to be obedient to his commandments, to his teachings and to his calling for each of us.

Amen.

Children's Sermon

Fill a basket with dinner rolls, and cover them with a napkin. Place the basket in front of the children, and ask them if they have ever attended a fancy feast. Find out what kind of food they ate, and whether there was a basket of dinner rolls. Then ask who attended the fancy dinner along with them: Friends? Family members? See if they know who is on the guest list recommended by Jesus. Reveal to them that Jesus wants us to invite to dinner "the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind" (Luke 14:13). See if they know why Jesus recommends such a guest list. Explain that Jesus wants us to be friends with the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind, and to include them in our dinners. Let them know that if we want to have a meal with the family of God, then we have to include EVERYONE - not just our own relatives and neighbors. Close by passing the basket of dinner rolls to all the children, letting them know that no one can be left out of God's family feast.

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Amen.