We can probably spend the next hour telling humorous and outrageous stories about seating.  From seats at school, seats on airplanes, and stories of being seated at wedding receptions with folks that are, …what can I say?  “Unique” seems like a good word. We even have stories about seats at church.

Did you know that until the early/mid twentieth century, it was common practice in Anglican, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches to rent pews in churches to families or individuals as a means of raising income? This was especially common in the United States where, unlike Europe, churches lacked governmental financial support. So, churches rented pews to families, which of course enforced a sort of social status in church seating within a parish. It led to all kinds of problems. Should the pew rents simply be renegotiated, should they occasionally be subject to auction, can they be included in the will, bequeathed to the next generation?  

You know, as the presiding priest, I really get no choice in where I sit. Pretty much right over there, in the big presider’s chair. I am not sure I really even have a choice where to put the chair. But you… you have lots of choices where to sit.  The funny thing is that you all pretty much sit in the same place every week. Which has its own order and comfort…. At least until someone sits in your place. You can watch people come up the aisle and then there is that moment when you see someone is possibly in your place.  There is the moment of hope: “maybe there are in the row right behind me?” Then the moment of uncertainty: “No…they’re in my seat…. Oh my gosh, where will I sit?” You might accidentally take someone else’s seat and then there is a whole set of dominoes cascading into chaos.  We don’t have pew rent, but as creatures of habit, we have our own unspoken sense of the “way things ought to be.”

This week’s readings recount Jesus’ teaching on an all to common problem with seating: as an accounting of honor. I don’t see evidence of it here at our parish, but I think all of us see evidence of it in our life – in meetings, in some social gatherings, and the like. Jesus has some all-too-direct advice when it comes to negotiating such “places of honor” in one’s life. Yet, it is interesting that Jesus does not immediately denounce the social conventions that occasion the kind of squabbling referred to in the gospel. 

Jesus might have asked, “Why do you have such places of honor at all?” He could have insisted they all sit in a circle as equals in the eyes of God. Rather, he proposes that one should “go and take the lowest place.” That way, when the host insists that you move to a more honored place, “you will enjoy the esteem of your companions at the table.” Jesus concludes with “For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Only then did Jesus move on to challenge the motives of having such dinners in the first place. What is this Sabbath meal really all about? What are you hoping to get out of it? Even (and perhaps especially) our religious observations can descend to the level of ostentatious self-affirmation or self-serving reciprocity. Jesus offers to his audience the best and only way to avoid this sort of entanglement with honor: “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Only when you get to the place where all possibility of self-promotion and leverage has been ruled out of our fellowship can we gain a glimpse of what the kingdom of God is really like.

If this week’s readings contain any one unifying insight, it is that the real tragedy of the human obsession over honor is that it ultimately alienates us from one another, and so takes us ever farther from the interpersonal communion in which our fulfillment rests. “My child, conduct your affairs with humility, and you will be loved more than a giver of gifts,” says Ben Sira in the first reading. Humility is a gateway to love, to communion, to ecstasy. For to be in ecstasy is literally to be “ex-static”—to stand outside one’s self, fully enthralled by what one beholds. In this sense, true ecstasy is the opposite of the lust for honor about which Jesus speaks. After all, ecstasy is impossible when one’s focus remains on one’s self, and to that extent, true love is impossible as well.

We speak of “losing one’s self” in the presence of something eminently lovable. Such moments are a foretaste of the love to which God calls us in the beatific vision. They are decidedly antithetical to the moments in which we find ourselves obsessing about whether we have been given the honor and recognition that is our due. Such obsession slowly teaches us to regard others purely in relation to ourselves, as those which either are or are not “in their proper place” in relation to us. Again, the tragedy of this way of living is that it leads to profound loneliness. The honor-seeker befriends himself at the cost of all other possible friendships, even and especially with the person of Jesus.

If honor-addiction leads in this way to “solitary confinement,” then its opposite leads to a gathering: a festive multitude united in a common ecstasy for what lies beyond themselves, participating in a common activity whose choreography assigns each of them an indispensable role. Such a vision of the eternal liturgy of heaven is what the Sabbath meal was originally intended to reveal, and into which our own celebration of the Eucharist is meant to draw us. For as the Letter to Hebrews reminds us, it is not to a fearful, distanced interaction that God has called us in Christ, but rather to a city: to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,” where countless angels and all the multitudes of the just gather together to “lose themselves” eternally, sharing the love they have themselves received from all the others—a love that reveals itself in Christ, whose blood speaks more eloquently than Abel’s, a love that knows no beginning or end.