Who to invite?

 This week's verses are on Luke 14:12-14:

He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you host a dinner or a banquet, don’t invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors so you can be invited by them in return and get repaid. But when you host an elaborate meal, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Then you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Nobody asks Jesus who to invite to their wedding. It's always the same people. Friends. Family. Close coworkers. The guy who knows how to take pictures. Never the quiet kid from class, or the guy who works at the gas station, or the lady at the end of the block who has four cats and no friends. Usually the prostitutes aren't invited either.

Same with the neighborhood barbecue. Nobody invites the guy who sits drunk all day on his collapsing porch, or the homeless guy who you spotted in your driveway digging through the trash for cans. No, for a barbecue you invite your close neighbors, your boss, the guy who works at the company you want to join, friends from church, the guy who plays guitar, the cousins, and so on.

It's common sense. You want to have a good time. You want easy topics of conversation. You want to network a bit with people who can help you. You want all of the forks and spoons to still be there when everything is cleaned up. What you don't want is discomfort.

It's the same in our daily lives. When the Smiths want to have pleasant evening company for their Saturday night, who are they going to cook their celebrity chef cookbook meals and watch that Netflix movie with? Lonely Jack? Or the Jones family? Unless Lonely Jack has a fair chance of offering to fix their car for free, that honor is going to go to the Joneses, who will probably return the favor in a month's time.

Or what about your graduation party? Are you going to invite every classmate? Your lab partner whose paper you copied most of the year? The girl with the coke bottle glasses? Or are you going to invite the cheerleaders, the football team, and the guy who is over 21 who you can count on for some beers?

But it's not just during personal time that this happens. Having been to several professional events, I've noticed that we make the same choices there. The women all rush to sit together at a table. The black people all head off to sit to one side of the room. It's natural to want to be around people who are familiar to you, people who have the same struggles, people who look like you or dress like you. How many people are brave enough to welcome the outsider, or to be one?

People were the same way in Jesus' time. People had people over for dinner for the same reasons we do now. When arguing over who to invite to dinner or to the wedding, they made the same selfish choices. "Let's invite ourselves! The people who are like us! The people who are related to us! The people who have money that may someday be ours!"

When people chose their company or organized an event, they weren't thinking about others. They were thinking about themselves. Every church wants to reach out to "the young people" because "the young people" in their community are them, just younger. And as a bonus, those young people will likely stay when they have kids and start their careers, which translates to attendance numbers and a healthy tithe budget you can spend on big speakers and a branding consultant.

Nobody wants to reach out to "the young people" who live in a refugee camp because those "young people" have needs. The young refugees take a lot of work to get to know, because they're different. Often they're scarred, broken and frightened. They have uncomfortable conversations. They can't buy your books, and won't probably tithe anything for a long time, if ever.

There are a thousand reasons to reach out to "the young people" in your community, but the only reason to reach out to the young refugees is love. And that's kind of what Jesus was getting at with his social circle advice to his host.

Are you reaching out to people because of what they can bring in, and how little work is involved, and how much they are you? Or are you reaching out because you love them and love compels you to meet their needs? If you're just choosing to spend time with people who are you, or who have something to give in return, you've got your short term reward in the moment.

The expense and discomfort of sharing God's love with others, on the other hand, will be repaid at the resurrection. The resurrection is God's party for us: we're the strangers, the poor who can't afford to get in on their own, the people with issues, the people with nothing to offer that could pay him back.

When you reach out to people who are not like you, people who are hurting, or poor, or who are difficult and don't have anything immediate to offer you in return, you are really doing God's work. You are loving someone who is not you. You're bridging the gap to form a relationship and absorbing the cost of their failures to offer them something they might never otherwise have known: God's love.