"For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." Luke 14:1, 7-14

If you are new here you have been subjected to what is called Freshman Orientation. That's when PISCES, ASDU, DCM, CAPS, and every other campus acronym tries to orient you to life at Duke, tries to put you in your place, so to speak. If you are a Freshman, you have already been subjected to long hours of sitting in auditoriums, listening to speeches, and standing in lines at receptions. I also know that there is a good chance that you've had just about as much advice as you can take. Upperclassmen have told you which professors to meet and which to avoid. Fraternities and Sororities have given you their opinion on social life here. Every campus organization has made its pitch, and just in case you forget what you are supposed to be here for, administrators and faculty have advised you about courses and majors. I suppose that you have had just about all the information you need to be a success at Duke. I reckon that orientation has covered just about every conceivable subject.

Then yesterday I got this letter from Dean Wasiolek:

Dear Dr. Willimon,

Since this is the first Sunday of the school year and possibly the last Sunday that you will see many of our Freshmen in the Chapel until their graduation, would you be so kind as to speak to them about a subject of great concern to me and the rest of the members of the Student Life Staff? I know that you have many personal concerns which you think are important and that you enjoy using the pulpit in the Chapel to propagate your opinions on those subjects. But could you make an exception on this Orientation Sunday and speak to a pressing problem which could cause great harm to our students? The problem? Have you noticed the way that they eat? I am sure that their mothers have already advised them on the necessity for good manners when they are dining here at Duke, but you know how young people are -- they are more likely to take advice from a stranger than from their parents, even a stranger who is a preacher. Dr. Willimon, I know that I don't have to tell you how important good table manners are for success in life. Many people judge us by the way we eat. Wasn't it Feuerbach who said, "You are what you eat1" or was it Julia Child who said that? Anyway, President Brodie will back me up when I say that a good sermon on table etiquette could be one of the best things you could do for our students. You weren't here when we had the threat of "food fights" on our hands a few years ago, but let me assure you t at it wasn't a pretty picture. We of the Student Life Staff know that, no matter how smart these Freshmen may be, when it comes to their behavior in the cafeteria, we are always one step away from the horrors of "Animal House." I know that you want them to get off to the right start so, how about some advice on how to eat?

Your friend, Dean S. Wasiolek

Well, as a preacher, I didn't know what to do. I'm supposed to be an expert on the Bible, theology, things like that, not good manners. My models are Martin Luther, John Wesley, Billy Graham, not Emily Post Or Amy Vanderbilt. What was I to do?

Can you imagine my delighted surprise when I found that the Gospel lesson for this Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost happened to be Luke 14? While I may have never preached a sermon on how to eat, fortunately Jesus has. All I have to do is to turn to Luke 14 and read you what he says about how you are to behave in the cafeteria. One day, when Jesus himself was at a dinner party, he had this to say about table manners:

When you are invited by anyone to a feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest a more eminent person than you be invited; and the one who invited you both will come and say, "Give place to this person," and then you will be embarrassed as you move down to the lowest place at the table. But when you are invited, go sit at the lowest place, so that your host may say to you, "Friend, come up to the head table and sit with us." For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted."

"When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends and cronies, your rich neighbors, lest they try to repay you. But when you feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the blind, and the lame, and you will be blessed, because they can't repay you."

Does it surprise you that Jesus took the time to talk about table manners? With all the other pressing concerns in the world -- war and peace, justice and inequity, sexism, materialism -- talk of meals and manners seems trivial. On the contrary, meals are of great significance in the gospels, particularly the Gospel of Luke. For Israel believed that when Messiah came, Messiah would spread a great banquet table where everyone, especially the poor, could eat their fill (Isa. 40). Sometime, go through Luke's Gospel and note all of the stories of meals. Jesus moves from one dinner party to the next with the gospel reading like a newspaper's social column. Some of Jesus' most profound -- and controversial -

- teaching occurred around the dinner table. Bread was important to Jesus. In fact, where some eat and some starve, Jesus says, God is mocked (Luke 16:19-31). In Luke's church, the real test of whether the church was faithful was the church's ability to break bread with all people (Acts 11:1-3). After the resurrection, the disciples did not recognize the Risen Christ until he "was known to them in the breaking of bread" (24:35). What happens at the table is at the very heart of the Christian faith. So we had better pay attention to what goes on when we eat together. We had best mind our manners.

What happens at the table? The table is where we find our place. One can learn a great deal about people by observing the way they eat. More than one Eliza Doolittle has been transformed into a queen by teaching her how to hold a fork, how to sit, how to make dinner table conversation. Of course, one set of manners may be suitable for a picnic or cookout, but quite another set is needed for a banquet or a formal dinner. A cousin of mine was a Duke undergraduate.

Here she met a young man from Connecticut, I think it was. She went home to meet his parents on Thanksgiving holiday. The first night they entered the formal dinning room at his home for dinner. She was a nervous wreck. Everyone was so stiff and proper. She made it through the first course -- French onion soup -­ without a hitch. But then, the butler presented her with something rather green, spikes sticking out of it, something glaring at her from the center of her plate, something impervious to her attempts to enter it with knife or fork. Her hosts were understanding, but she was mortified. That night, her how to eat like people from Connecticut. "People in North Carolina don't eat artichokes," her Mother said in defense.

A major White House position is the "Chief of Protocol," a fancy name for someone who determines where people sit at state dinners. More than one international crisis has been precipitated by putting some dignitary in the wrong place. People from various classes may mix freely in the classroom, on the playing field, in the laundromat. But at a banquet, when the table is spread, the social barriers start to rise, and the position of place cards, the seating order at tables makes all the difference in the world.

Jesus, watching folk scramble for places of honor, advised choosing the lowest place, way down from the head table. Perhaps you will have the delightful surprise of being invited up to sit with the dignitaries. It's a bit of practical advice, useful, but of no great consequence. But Luke doesn't call it advice. He calls it "a parable" told "when he marked how they chose the places of honor." It's more than manners, it's a parable, like other parables, meant to reveal something about the way God looks at things. How does God look at our table-time etiquette? "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted." It's a thought found throughout the Gospels.

Matthew: "Whoever humbles himself like a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 18:4), "whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted (Matt. 23:12).

And where would be at this table? Many of us are here, at a place like Duke, a church like Duke Chapel, because we have so successfully scrambled for the places of honor. The University Admissions Office presides over the an annual scramble for places at this head table. And let me assure you, from the telephone calls which even I had last Spring from deeply disappointed high school seniors and their parents who were not so fortunate as some of you, that many would give their right arm to eat with you -- even in the "Black and Blue Room."

After playing "get the guests," Jesus turns to his host. "When you give a dinner, don't invite your friends and cronies who may repay you, but invite those who are so far down that they can never repay." Again, Jesus is not merely giving little Miss Manners lessons on social graces. Jesus' point is of greater import. There is no limit to our attempts to make ourselves big and powerful.

Even our generosity can be a shrewd way of making others feel in our debt so that they will reciprocate when preparing their guest lists. Many a table is filled with little more than the self-interest of the host.

But what do you do when the invitation you crave the most, an invitation to the table where food is given that could fill your deepest hungers, is an invitation that you could never repay because it is an invitation to a table where God is the host? Who can repay God? Only the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind sit at that table because only they know for sure that nothing they have makes them worthy to be there. The last word on banquets comes from God, and God has determined that outcasts shall sit at his table, a table where all of our conventional standards, social rules, and manners are turned upside down as those who are high up are brought low and those who are on the bottom are exalted to the head table.

Just before Jesus was born, Mary, his mother-to-be, sang a song -- but it wasn't a lullaby: "My soul magnifies the Lord,••••he has scattered the proud•••, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away" (Luke 1:46-53). Jesus' Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied" -- "But woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger" (Luke 6:21,25).

Jesus advises that, when we give parties, we ought to invite "the poor and the maimed" but the fact is, outcasts would feel uncomfortable in most of our homes, even in our cafeterias, as uncomfortable as we would feel in welcoming them. So most of us throw parties for friends, or, if we are on our way up the social ladder, people whom we would like to count as friends. We send invitations because we would like to receive invitations.

But then, look at Jesus' friends. Look at the people around the table with him. According to the New Testament, he was a friend of the social dregs -­ publicans and sinners, whores and theologians. "This man receives sinners, and eats with them," they said of Jesus. When he wasn't slumming with the poor, he was slumming with the rich.

But have you thrown a wedding lately? Do you know what caterers are charging these days? Most of us prune our invitation list with care. But here is Jesus who sends out invitations indiscriminately, despite the cost.

Orientation is a time for you to find your place. And manners are a means of keeping in your place. So here is Jesus eating with social discards and here are we, exclusive and excluding, at the university, scrambling for seats of honor at Commencement. Will we feel out of place showing up in a tux or evening gown at one of God's parties only to find the place crammed with a crowd that we've always shunned? If we stick with our own kind, where will we be at his table?

Not far from here, a group of college students turned the world upside down by going in and taking their places at a Woolworth's lunch counter. Those students invented the "sit-in" -- one of the most potent weapons in the Civil Rights Movement. We sometimes forget that, just twenty years ago, people of one color could not sit at a lunch counter in Durham with people of another color.

White segregationists were right: to admit someone to sit with you at your table is to risk seeing that person as a fellow human being, full of the same hurt, the same aspiration, the same humanity as yours. Be careful where you eat, how you eat.

Well, I can't remember when I have eaten at a dime store lunch counter and I suppose it’s been even longer since I have put my feet under the table with people who do eat at such places. I take most of my lunches in the Faculty Commons. A university does that to people.

Perhaps there is still time for us to find our place, to go sit at some lunch counter or soup kitchen -- where we might bump into Jesus.