The Best Seat at the Table

Thank you. My name is Mark, one of the pastors here. So glad that you are here. So glad that you're joining us over in venue or online. I want to welcome all of you. It is such a beautiful day to be in church here in this little corner of Paradise, isn't it?

We started last weekend, if you're with us, a brand-new series called Meals with Jesus. And have you ever, when it comes to food, have you ever noticed that sometimes looks can be deceiving? Like, for instance, you're really just craving, just especially, you know, in the summertime, just a wonderful, juicy, sweet tomato. And you do your very best to pick out just the best one you can find in the store. And then when it comes time to eating it, it just doesn't taste like anything. And it's just kind of disappointing.

Or how many of you as kids discovered that that chocolate bar that your mom keeps in the baking drawer isn't all what you thought it was? I thought that I had discovered my mom's secret stash. Like, "Ah, I'm on to you, mom." Only to find that, apparently, it's poison or something like that. At least that's how it tastes.

The same thing can happen with restaurants. Ever been to a restaurant where it's just beautifully appointed and maybe it's all themed out and it's just gorgeous interior and upholstered chair and everything? And then you got the food and it's kind of like, "I guess I know where all the money goes from this ginormous check, just into the beautiful surroundings. It's not what I thought." And then conversely, ever discovered just like a hole in the wall, a dive, and the food is like the best you've ever had?

I'm thinking of a couple years ago, we were on a mission trip down in Mexico. Our middle schoolers here at Twin Lakes Christian School, we teamed up with the middle schoolers at Beaumont Christian School and we had an opportunity to get a meal in Tecate, Mexico. Steve Patterson, who's been on this trip a million times, found this hole in the wall. It's right next to a tire shop. In fact, you can't really tell if it's not a tire shop. It's the same parking lot and everything and maybe they just decided, "Let's not just sell tires, let's sell food." I don't know, but nothing about it would give you a hint that it's like the best Mexican food on the planet.

And we're in there and all sorts of different, just an array of food like I've never seen before. And so I was drawn to like this big cauldron of pork meat that looked like it was just kind of simmering and cooking for days. And when you're in a hole in a wall in Mexico, you might want to choose a thing that's been simmering and cooking for days. And so I got a bowl of it and all the tables were kind of scrunched together. I said to her, "It was so delicious." I said to our principal, "Meg Immel," I said, "Meg, I'm gonna get you a bowl of this pork stew. It is like out of this world." And so I get her a bowl and she agrees. It's just like, it's sublime.

It was so incredibly delicious and we're about halfway through the bowl of this pork stew and Steve Patterson comes down and he sits down and I said, "Steve, this pork meat in this stew is so good. Don't get ahead of me." He goes, "That's not pork meat. That's pork intestines." And I look across the table at Meg. I've never actually seen the color drain out of someone's face so quickly as she went from ashen white to green. But I stand by it. I mean that was like the best intestinal stew ever. But looks can be deceiving.

And the same can be true when it comes to our faith, our spirituality. There can be a person who on the outside, they seem so passionate on fire, but on the inside they're cold and the joy is gone out of the relationship with the Lord. And conversely, there gonna be the person, they're the most stoic looking person in church, but there is a love for Jesus that is just like a simmering volcano. You just never know if what's going on on the outside is true of what's going on in the inside.

You're gonna see that going on in the meal we look at today in Luke 7:36–50. If you want to look that up in your Bible, on your phone, it's gonna be on the screen in your notes as well. Luke 7:36–50 and you're gonna meet today a guy named Simon. Simon belongs to a group called the Pharisees. You might have heard of them. The goal of the Pharisees was to be untainted by the world, to be faithful to God, and to be as obedient as humanly possible to their scriptures and to their religious tradition.

In other words, their goal was to be good and not just kind of good, really good. They wanted not just to appear good, they wanted to act good. They wanted to be authentically good. We're talking about, you know, so good you're like God's favorite people on the planet. That's how good they wanted to be. One problem. Over and over again in the Gospels, Jesus points out that in fact their hearts are far from God's heart. Simon, the man you'll see today, his heart was far from the Lord's. And here's the scary thing. This is a sobering thing that we ought to keep in mind. He never knew it. He didn't have a clue.

And so from the outset, I want to mention something that applies to many of us here today because if like me, you're a professional Christian, or you are someone like many of you, a respectable churchgoer, and I'm sure you all are very respectable churchgoers, or perhaps you're here today and you're actually brand new to church, but you're here because you want to be a better person. If that applies to you, then there's a danger we all need to recognize, and that danger is this. It is all too easy to confuse good behavior with a changed heart because appearances are one thing. What's going on on the inside can be an entirely different story.

And that's really the rub in today's story. It's a story that at times might comfort you and at other times might afflict you. And I can attest to both because if I've wrestled with this passage in preparing for this message, I have been both afflicted and comforted, and guess what? Now it's your turn. So let's prepare our hearts as we pray. Would you bow with me?

Father in heaven, it is no small thing to ask that you would open our hearts and our minds to your word today. And Lord, I pray that you would help us to see and to think and to respond in the ways that would please you. And more than anything else, Lord, I pray that every single one of us, whether in this room or next door or watching online, wherever we are, Lord, I pray that 30 minutes from now we would be more passionately in love with you. We would be more humbled by your grace. We would be transformed in ways that only you can do. And Lord, I ask this in the name of your Son Jesus. Amen.

Alright, Luke 7 starting at verse 36. Please follow along as I read. "When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who had lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and poured perfume on them. When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, 'If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is, that she is a sinner.'

I want to hit the pause button right there because I want you to be able to visualize the scene in your mind. Jesus has already, in Luke 5, Luke 6, he's already had run-ins with the Pharisee. Some of them have completely written him off. Later in Luke he's going to be invited two more times to the home of a Pharisee, but the motive of those Pharisees is pretty clear. They want him to come so that they can trap him, so that they can trip him up. But Simon, his motives are not entirely clear. At times he seems sincere, at other times he seems quite cold. So maybe, maybe he's just decided, "I want to check this Jesus guy out for myself." I want to see him up close and personal.

Maybe he thinks he's a little bit more open-minded than some of his peers, but whatever the case, Jesus accepts this invitation from Simon. And of course, Jesus accepts it because when it comes to the Pharisees, Jesus wasn't Phariseeical. Jesus actually loved them like he loves all lost people. He loves people who don't even know that they are lost, like Simon. And it was customary in those days to greet your guests in a number of ways. You might offer them water so that they could wash their feet. You might even greet them with a kiss. If you really wanted to honor them, you'd anoint their head with oil or even better with perfume. Simon doesn't do any of that.

And my guess that's, he doesn't do this because again, he's somewhat on the fence. He knows that Jesus' poles with the other Pharisees are, you know, declining and going from bad to worse. So perhaps he just doesn't want to see getting too cozy with the wrong guy because he knows that that meal is going to be not just some private affair, it's going to be quite public. He is going to be seen. In those days, and this is so weird to us, but in those days meals like this were open to anyone who just wanted to come by, drop in and watch what was going on. It was an open thing.

And whether it was inside of his home or in an enclosed courtyard around the perimeter, they couldn't eat the meal unless they got some of the scraps at the end, but they could just stand and listen in. So it's kind of like a talk show we have today, you know, or a cooking show and you see there's an audience. People just want to hear what interesting or famous people have to say. It was same then as it is now. So all the invited guests, they recline around this table like you see on the screen here, laying on their left elbow, keeping the right hand free and then with their feet pointing away from the table. You want to keep the feet as far away from the food as you possibly could, right?

That means if you're one of these onlookers standing, you know, against the wall or something like that, you're actually closer to the feet than you are the food. Which is kind of sad when you think about it because this is like, this is your Friday night entertainment. It's kind of standing there and it's like, "Hey Fred, what do they have for dinner tonight?" I'm not sure. It smells like feet, you know, that's just kind of where it goes. And they're talking around this table when this woman arrives and Luke tells us three things about us.

First of all, that she's lived a sinful life. Many scholars and pastors will assume that she's a prostitute, but Luke doesn't tell us that. There's a word in Greek for prostitute. He doesn't use that and so I think we just accept she could have been any...she could have killed her husband. Who knows? She's lived a sinful life and those sins are known to the people in her community. She wants to see Jesus and she's brought with her an alabaster jar of perfume. Now these alabaster jars were very expensive and you didn't waste an alabaster jar with cheap perfume. It held the best stuff so it's quite possible that this is her most precious possession.

And whatever she knows about Jesus, we can only speculate. Maybe she was there listening to him teach on a number of occasions. Maybe she's seen him heal and now this is her moment. She wants to get as close to him as she possibly can and so when she arrives at this meal, she just makes a beeline. She works her way through the other onlookers until she's right there at his feet and when she finally gets there, she's overwhelmed and the dam just breaks and she starts to cry and cry and she's weeping so heavily that the word that Luke uses here in the original Greek, it's the same word used of rain. She's drenching Jesus with this torrent of tears and now the onlookers, they're starting to like maybe pay a little less attention to what's going on in terms of the discussion and they're like looking at this woman like oh you don't see this every day. This is kind of wild.

And then she does something that just shocks every single person in the room. She lets her hair down. Now you have to understand in her day, a woman would only let her hair down in front of her husband in the bedroom. Now we've gone from a spectacle to a scandal. Bible scholars say that in her culture, even if a woman's hair accidentally fell down like she had some sort of like hairpin malfunction, her husband could divorce her. So this is a big deal and at this point you know the guests have got to be thinking this is like the greatest dinner party ever man. It's like crazy but it gets even better because now she opens up this alabaster jar and she pours it on Jesus' feet and she starts kissing his feet and not just like some polite peck but over and over and over, earnestly kissing his feet.

Now ask yourself if you were there, what do you think your response would be? I mean honestly this notorious sinner, everyone knows her story, she barges in, she violates a number of things that people think are right and proper and not just a little bit, I mean she's over the top and even more puzzling, Jesus doesn't do a thing to stop her. You think he'd be standing there going hmm I discern this woman is showing us something important here. We ought to emulate her behavior. You think he'd be doing that? No way. We don't be thinking what Simon is thinking when he says oh man if Jesus, if that guy was a prophet, yeah he'd know what kind of woman's touching her. You know what kind she is. So how else is he gonna respond?

I mean he has no other categories for this and neither would we so we shouldn't be too hasty to pronounce judgment on Simon. I mean you almost have to feel sorry for him here because you know it's one thing for us to believe that Jesus knows what we're thinking at any particular moment. It's another thing to be sitting across the table and not know that Jesus knows what you're thinking at any particular moment. And there's Simon. In verse 40 Jesus answered him. No he didn't say this that life, Jesus answers him. Simon I have something to tell you. Tell me teacher he said, it was like famous last words he just should have run I think.

Two people owed money to a certain money lender. One owed him 500 denarii, that's like almost two years wages, and the other 50, that's two months. Neither of them had money to pay him back so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more? Simon replied, I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven. You have judged correctly, Jesus said. Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, do you see this woman? Do you see her Simon? Because I don't think you do. Not really. I came into your house, you did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman from the time I entered has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head but she has poured perfume on my feet.

Therefore I tell you her many sins have been forgiven as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little. Then Jesus said to her, your sins are forgiven. The other guests began to say among themselves, who is this who even forgives sins? Jesus said to the woman, your faith has saved you. Go in peace. Wow. You think this dinner turned out just a little bit different than Simon expected? I mean he was gonna check Jesus out. He was gonna size him up. He was gonna see what makes this guy tick. Who ends up on the examination table? Whose heart is exposed? Simon says. And not just Simon's, but this woman as well, right?

I mean she never says a word and yet her actions speak volumes. And that's why this is such a challenging passage for me. Because here's the truth of it. You know after being in ministry, professional ministry, for 30 years, I'm a lot more like Simon than I am this woman. I mean I get Simon. I know how to play the religious role. I know how to do church. I know how to obey the rules. I know how to be respectable, especially in front of you all. And don't get me wrong. I'm not saying behavior doesn't matter. What I am saying is this. I am humbled by the actions of this woman here. Humbled by the boldness and the courage and the abandonment of the love that she demonstrates to the one who has touched her heart so deeply.

Reminds me of a story by a woman named Barbara Brown Taylor. She's a seminary professor, best-selling author, and in one of her books she talks about when she was a pastor at a church in the South. And at this church Monday through Friday they would have the sanctuary open from 9 to 5. So people could drop in anytime they wanted. They could sit quietly. They could pray. Kind of a neat thing this church offered. Unfortunately not everyone would show up to the sanctuary with godly intentions, as you might imagine. So you know sometimes there's couples in there are making out and other people in there they're drinking.

And so eventually they put this video camera in the sanctuary that is monitored by the receptionist over in the main office. So you imagine you know the cameras here over an office. There's a little video camera there showing what's going on. And in one day the receptionist rings Barbara and says, "There's a man laying on his face, face down on the steps right in front of the altar and you know I wouldn't bother you but he's been there for hours. Every so often he stands up he puts his hands up like this and then he lays back down on his face. Do you think he's okay?"

So within minutes Barbara and the other pastors they huddle together they've got another group of staff members there and they're all deliberating you know what should we do? You know how should we respond to this? It's not really causing a disturbance but he's been there for hours and so not surprisingly they elect the church custodian to go check this guy out. Sure we would never do something like it here. And meanwhile the pastors and the staff they'll huddle around this video monitor in the office and they see the custodian he shows up on the screen and they see me bends over he's talking to the guy and then he gets up and he walks right off the screen and back into the office and he says, "He told me he's praying." I'm like, "Okay."

Now the plot thickens because we can't tell him he can't pray right? And so for the next several days right around 11 o'clock receptionist looks over the monitor and there's this guy laying on his face in front of the altar getting up raising his hand goes back on his face. His hairs and knots, his clothes are covered with dust balls from being on the floor. The custodian just has to vacuum around him. The people that set up the altar for communion and set the stage for worship they just kind of quietly tiptoe around. Even the florist has to call into the office and say, "Do you want me to put the flour somewhere else this week?"

So in staff meeting at the end of the week all the pastors are talking this is their collective wisdom they're gonna figure this out and one of them goes, "What do you think we should do? I mean what do you guys think?" And one of the smart alec pastors probably someone like my brother kind of goes, "I think I want to be on that guy's prayer list. I mean who wouldn't want to be?" And it's hilarious until Sunday rolls around. It's a few minutes before the 11 a.m. service and guess who's laying on the floor face down? And so Barbara is apparently their Valerie Webb the one who gets to go in and kind of ultimately deal with this and she's like, "I didn't know. Is he crazy? Is he drunk? What's gonna happen?"

She kind of tiptoes up to him and taps him on the shoulder notices how dirty his clothes are, how skinny he is. He taps him on the shoulders and she says, "I'm really sorry but we're about to have a church service in here and you're gonna have to move." The man just looks up at her and goes, "Okay." He just kind of stands up dust himself off walks out the door. She never sees that man again. Service goes on without a hitch. Everyone sang the way they were supposed to sing. Everyone prayed the way they're supposed to pray. Preacher preached the way he was supposed to preach. And they did the things that they always do week after week but the memory of that man during the service it is haunting Barbara the entire time.

In fact at the end of the service she says she can't even walk on that part of the floor when she leaves. She walks around it because it's like holy ground. She's remembering the undignified but passionate prayer vigil that she witnessed for an entire week and it chastened her. This love that's so excessive, so undignified, so beyond just the call to mere obedience that she concludes this. She says, "That was a long time ago but what has become apparent in the meantime is that I know how to be obedient but I do not know how to love nor does it seem to be an ability I can command."

Can any of you relate to that? Or is it just pastors that worry that they will eventually morph into a Pharisee? I know how to be obedient but do I still know how to love? How about you? So easy to confuse good behavior with a changed heart. Sometimes they're one and the same. Sometimes they're not.

So let me just suggest to you three questions, very simple questions. Give yourself an opportunity to reflect on this passage and they're so simple I hope you'll be able to remember them during the week and that you won't just write them down today but that you'll ponder them. The first question is this, "How do I see myself?" How do you see yourself as the 500 denari person or the 50 denari person? Because this woman in Luke 7, she has no problem seeing herself as a sinner, no problem admitting her need for grace, no problem in fact camping out at the feet of Jesus.

And she reminds me of so many of my friends here at Twin Lakes that are in recovery who have given up on the Sunday morning reputation for something so much better. Because from true humility comes true gratitude and true gratitude expresses itself in true love. You know the sad thing about Simon is it's not even clear whether he even considers himself the 50 denari sinner. Like that's a nice story but does he even see himself in it and ultimately that's the worst kind of sinner of all, the one who is oblivious to their need. The point of the story is not that God grades on the curve, the point is neither of the debtors were able to pay, neither of them.

And you know how people say that religion is a crutch, you've heard that before? Well religion is a crutch. Well the message of Christianity is you don't need a crutch, you need a stretcher. We're all dead in our sins. Dead is dead. There's not kind of dead and mostly dead. We are all equally in need of the life that Jesus offers us and when I see myself as someone who is hopelessly lost and dead in my sins apart from that life it makes me so much more eager to receive it.

How do I see myself? Number two, how do I see others? Jesus says to Simon, and this is such a key line in this story and I think he says this to you and me by extension, "Do you see this woman? Can you see her value to God? Do you know her story or just her reputation?" You see Jesus, he didn't just see where this woman had been, he saw where God's love could take her. How do you see people? Merely who they are or who they can be in Christ?

You see the temptation of the 50 denari person, the one who's been by their own estimation for giving little so they love little. The temptation is to look around and compare yourself with someone else and go, "Well hey, at least I'm not as bad as that guy." But again, not to belabor the point, whether you're drowning in 50 feet of water or 500 feet of water makes no difference. And when I realize this, when I actually embrace this, God gives me lenses of humility and grace and charity for other people.

Finally, how I see myself, how I see my others, ultimately hinges on how I see Jesus. How do you see Jesus? Back at Simon's house, Jesus completely stunned the room when he told this woman that she was forgiven. I mean this was a shocker and by the way, she wasn't forgiven for this lavish display of love. As beautiful as it was, Jesus makes it very clear in verse 50, he says, "Your faith has saved you." She didn't earn it. She loves him because she's already received his forgiveness and so her love is an outflow of this, a response to this.

But hearing all this, the other guests around the table, they say, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" Because they know that only God can forgive sins and so Jesus is making a very bold statement about himself. And they have to conclude that either he's totally delusional or they have to believe that he may actually be God incarnate, Immanuel, God with us who came to seek and save the lost, people like you and me.

Now ultimately, only you can settle this issue in your mind in terms of how you see Jesus. But if you do see him as the God who loves us, the God who pursues us and redeems us, then he is worthy of all of our love, of our total devotion, of our most generous worship. In fact, just to wrap up, I want to show you something that I've never seen this until this week. This kind of floored me. Between verses 36 and 46 in this passage, I invite you to check this out for yourself. You will count 10 references to Jesus' feet. 10 references in 10 verses. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the Bible. You think that Luke is trying to make a point here.

In fact, this whole episode with the woman, it's told twice. Luke tells it through the voice of the narrator and then Jesus tells it with no small amount of emphasis when he responds to Simon, "This is no accident. This is an invitation, an invitation to take refuge at the feet of Jesus, to dwell there, to linger there." What does that look like in your imagination? Imagine yourself not just stretched out in front of an altar of Jesus, but stretched out in front of the feet of Jesus. Does it feel awkward? Undignified? But if you linger there, you will notice something about these feet.

You will notice these feet were willing to become dirty and sore, trucking around Palestine, bringing the message of God's transforming grace. You will notice that these feet were willing to take Jesus to Jerusalem. That these feet would carry across. That these feet would be pierced for you and for me. You see there's something about those feet that if you're willing to dwell there will soften your heart and remind you in humble awareness of all that He's done for you.

Bottom line is this. I know this to be true, that on the day that Simon hosted that dinner, the best seat at the table wasn't at the table. The best seat was at the feet of Jesus. Amen? Amen. Would you pray with me?

Precious Heavenly Father, we thank You. We adore You because of all that Your Son has done for us. And Lord, Your Word says to us that You oppose the proud but You give grace to the humble. And so Lord, I pray that if we see ourself in Simon today that we would be afflicted by that in a good way, that it would bring us to an appropriate level of humility where we would be receptive to Your grace and Your love in our lives. Receptive to our need, forgiveness and everything we need that comes from You. And Lord, if we see ourselves in this woman and sometimes maybe even in church, someone's looked down at you or cast a disapproving look because you were just so overwhelmed by Jesus. I pray that you would be comforted. You would be encouraged. Wherever we are today, I thank You for meeting us. I thank You for Your Son Jesus. I pray that You would bless us. Jesus' name. Amen.