August 28, 2016 – Luke 14:1, 7-14
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Mr. Carlson – Revisited
Lectionary 22 – August 28, 2016
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Many years ago I told you about a man I knew in my childhood,
a man known only to me as Mr. Carlson.
I told you then that Mr. Carlson looms large in my imagination,
the way certain people and events in your life do.
I would say I am haunted by Mr. Carlson, though not in a bad way.
And so I need to tell you about him again, because every time I read this Gospel story
I cannot help thinking of him.
And also because there are a lot of you who do not know about Mr. Carlson –
and I want you to know about him.
When I was a child, my family used to have a big dinner after church on Sunday.
My mother and my grandmother would cook up something grand,
the table would be set with a nice table-cloth, the good silver, and the special dishes.
Everything would look nice, smell good, and taste terrific.
Often guests my mother had invited would join us,
very often members of our church or old friends who were visiting.
But once in a while someone else would be invited.
Occasionally a person known only to me as Mr. Carlson would be invited.
Now Mr. Carlson was not a member of our congregation.
He was an older man, I would guess in his seventies when I knew him.
He had thin, stringy hair that hung down on his collar,
hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, bad teeth, and a poor complexion.
He was thin and seemed to have trouble breathing but I guess he was sturdy enough.
He smelled like smoke and had bad breath,
and he always wore a dirty, unseemly overcoat.
I don’t think he bathed very often.
He lived alone in an old hotel in downtown Regina, the Empire, I think,
or maybe the Chaplin, where he rented a single room by the month or by the week.
He always seemed to be hungry and he ate a great deal when he came to our house for lunch.
Mr. Carlson made me extremely uncomfortable –
he was quite different from other guests to our house and members of our church.
And yet, my mother treated him like any other guest to our home.
I’m not sure she always knew when he was about to turn up for lunch –
I have a hunch that my Dad sometimes invited him without consulting her.
Regardless of whether she knew or not, she made preparations the same way she always did.
Mr. Carlson got the good food, the good silver, and the good dishes.
Afterwards he would smile, say thank you Mrs. Kurtz, and be on his way.
Sometimes he would get a ride back to his hotel – a ride I got to go on once or twice.
And then we wouldn’t see Mr. Carlson for a while.
Like Jesus’ parable in the Gospel lesson, this story about Mr. Carlson seems to be about
Treating people better than they really are.
“When you give a luncheon or a dinner,” says Jesus,
“do not invite your friends. . . . But when you give a banquet, invite the poor,
the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”
Invite the ones who cannot repay you.
Treat them as if they were your friends or your relatives or your rich neighbours.
Apparently we are to treat those who are humble as if they were exalted.
Now this is the way Jesus describes God as treating us – as treating everybody.
In Christ, God gives us the royal treatment.
In Christ, God comes to be with us, to care for us, to share our pain and suffering –
even to die for love of us so that we might know how beloved we are in the sight of God.
And week in and week out God puts out the invitation for all of us to come to Jesus’ table,
where the best silver is laid out, the good dishes, the best wine, the best bread.
And we, all of us, are treated to a feast at the host’s invitation.
We, humble though we are, are invited to the Lord’s supper,
where we are fed with heavenly food and heavenly drink.
Apparently, in Holy Communion, God treats us better than we are.
Only, maybe, maybe it’s not treating us better than we are –
maybe it is simply loving us as we are.
Maybe God sees us as wondrous and amazing and full of gifts –
no matter how we think of ourselves.
And maybe God wants to love us into that amazingness and wondrousness – so we can see it too.
There was a ritual that Mr. Carlson and I engaged in at the table.
After dinner, he would pull out his wallet.
And in his wallet was a battered old black and white picture of himself when he was very young.
I am guessing this was taken in his late teens, so probably 60 years before, maybe in the 1920s.
In the photo, Mr. Carlson is unrecognizable:
he is fit, he is handsome, he is wearing boxing shorts.
He is in a boxing ring, and his hands are cocked in a boxing pose.
And then he would say the magic words: “This was me in my prime.”
In my prime.
After seeing that picture I saw Mr. Carlson differently.
There was more to him than I had imagined.
He had a past, he had a story – although it was a different story than mine.
Now I would articulate that by saying that his story was just as sacred as mine,
and that every life’s sacred story is not free from difficulties and burdens.
Mr. Carlson was a whole person – he had youth once, and parents, perhaps he had been married,
perhaps he had had children, perhaps he suffered devastating losses; I don’t know,
but seeing that picture made me realize that no human life is simple,
that we are all a crazy mix of all sorts of stuff –
and that God loves all of us, every single bit of us:
the good and the not so good, as we are in our prime – and as we are not in our prime.
And so God keeps on inviting us back to the table as God’s beloved children –
which is a hard thing to see ourselves as.
But God sees it, and that is how God treats us.
See, I think the story of Mr. Carlson has such a pull on me because I am – and each of us is –
in some strange way . . . Mr. Carlson.
I mean, our stories are all different of course, and there are important differences between
me and Mr. Carlson, and yet . . .
each of us is at the table simply by virtue of God’s invitation,
because God loves us all the same.
God loves all of us just the same.
We are all of us a mixture of the good and the not so good,
each of us sometimes in our prime and sometimes not in our prime.
Perhaps the knowledge that at God’s table of grace each of us is Mr. Carlson,
perhaps that solidarity will make it – I was going to say “simpler” but perhaps
I should say “more imperative” – to invite other Mr. Carlsons of this world to
our dinner tables – and to this table of grace.
I have talked about Mr. Carlson with my sisters many times over the years –
it is a memory you do not forget.
They remind me that I was not the only one was made uncomfortable by Mr. Carlson’s presence.
They assure me that my mother was too.
But I don’t really remember that.
Maybe, I have been thinking lately, maybe it’s because I am so much younger than they are –
by 7 or more years.
Perhaps over the years my mother became more comfortable with Mr. Carlson’s presence.
Perhaps she too came to recognize that there is a certain solidarity we share with Mr. Carlson –
as beloved children of God dependent on God’s grace and care.
I don’t really know.
Jesus just says we will be blessed when we do such things.
And I am thinking now that the blessing comes when we discover our common solidarity,
as God’s beloved children who are sisters and brothers,
as wondrous beloved human beings who all are recipients of God’s free grace,
a grace without limit and without condition.
A blessing that comes when we recognize that we are all in this together.
So come to the table of grace again and together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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