Do You Know Who I Am?

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? It was the day before Easter last year. A car of grad students was pulled over in New Jersey for a routine traffic stop, and the police found that the registration had expired and the driver did not have insurance. So, they impounded the car, and one of the kids called her mother to come get them. “Do you know who I am?” the mother shouted at the officers multiple times when she arrived. As her arrogant, expletive-laden, 15-minute, abusive rant went viral on the internet, it cost the mother her job as a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—a seven billion dollar agency. She had to resign in shame a few days later.

“Do you know who I am?” We hear Jesus warning us about this attitude of self-centered privilege and self-righteousness in today’s reading from Luke. Jesus is at a banquet, and he has a message for both the guests and the host. “Guests,” he says, “don’t come in and take the seats of honor—you might find yourself saying “Do you know who I am?” to the head waiter, and then being demoted to a table in the back and shamed, because someone more important than you has arrived.” “Hosts,” he says, “Don’t invite people to make yourself look important, or because they’ll return the favor and invite you to one of their smart parties. Invite the people who really need to eat and find joy in God’s bounty—invite the poor, the outcast, the lame, and the blind.”

Of course, Jesus isn’t giving us etiquette lessons—this is a parable. “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus says. We’ve heard these words before, at the beginning of Luke in the Magnificat, Mary’s song: “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51b-53). In this parable, Jesus is saying, “The Kingdom of God is like this…” In the kingdom of God, the most powerful and honored one of all—God’s Son—has taken the most lowly place possible—the Cross—to show that true power, ultimate power, God’s power, is about love, and servanthood, and sacrifice. In the Kingdom of God, it is the humble, the meek, the hungry, the mournful, the merciful, the peacemakers, who will be blessed. Jesus calls us to be so blessed….

“Do you know who I am?” I hear this question with a different inflection in today’s Jeremiah reading. After our lectionary year “C” Old Testament readings all summer, I’m hoping you’re starting to see that, basically, in the prophets, there are only two sins: idolatry (failing to love God), and injustice (failing to love your neighbor). Today, God is saying to Israel, “Do you know who I am? You obviously don’t—you’ve forgotten me—you have traded me for false gods.” And in forgetting who God is, the Israelites have forgotten who they are: God’s people, a light to the world’s darkness. God laments, “My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit…their lives are like cracked cisterns that cannot hold water.” This is a powerful message to us, today. Our heritage, the thing we were created for, it to be blessed by God and be a blessing to others. But the culture around us has a very different idea of what is rewarding and what is powerful and what is empty, and our confusion about what this has become so profound that we have become idolatrous—letting our lives be directed by and ruled by things that are not God or part of God’s blessings to us. Like cracked cisterns, our lives have leaked out the joy that God intended for us. Our search for own solution to this lack of joy, this emptiness—our addiction to endless consumption and consumerism, our addiction to opioids—is killing our planet and killing us. We don’t know who God is, and so we don’t know who we are….

“Do you know who I am?” Yet again, I hear this with another inflection in our reading from Hebrews today. “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” There’s a beautiful symmetry in the original Greek of this sentence: “mutual love” is “philadelphia”—sometimes that’s translated “brotherly love”—it literally means love of someone from the same womb. “hospitality to strangers” is “philoxenia,” love of strangers—the opposite of what we hear a lot of today, which would be “xenophobia,” the fear of strangers. These two, philadephia and philoxenia, become one love—God’s love for all. You remember I said a few minutes ago that injustice was one of the two sins the prophets preached about? God, who creates and loves all…Jesus, who gave his life in love to save all…the Holy Spirit, who comes to all, demand  that we have that same all-encompassing love. Love for our own sisters and brothers, and love for strangers—for those in need even if they are not like us—become the same thing. When we see someone in need, when we see anyone in need, it is really God saying, “Do you know who I am?” “I am this person right in front of you now.” It is really Jesus saying, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me….”

“Do you know who I am?” I am a sinner. I am someone who says with the Apostle Paul: there are so many times that, “What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15b). But, I am also a beloved child of God, who gave his only Son Jesus that I might have eternal life. And you are also beloved, sinful, redeemed children of God, too. And the immigrant at our border, and the homeless person at the corner, and the crack-head in jail—they all are, beloved, sinful, redeemed children of God, too.

The theme that binds today’s readings together is humility. Humility that recognizes all of us as equals before God. Humility that values all human life and tries to see Jesus in all. Humility that never blinds us to the ancient story that we are people delivered through grace out of darkness into light, out of bondage into freedom. Humility that allows us to see that we are not what we possess, that we cannot save ourselves, that we cannot find abundant life by enriching ourselves at the expense of the poor and the environment. Humility that recognizes our own weakness and lack of true power and gives us a profound trust in God’s strength and God’s true power, and, through that trust in God, give us generosity toward neighbor and stranger alike in Jesus’ name.

“Do you know who I am?” asks God…My prayer for us all this week is that each of us will answer, “Yes, Lord. I do know who you are: You are the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sanctifier, who humbles the exalted, and exalts the humble. Bless me…make me humble in your name.”

Proper 17 Year C
Jeremiah 2:4-13, Psalm 81:1, 10-16, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, Luke 14:1, 7-14