Sept. 2, 2007

By Harry T. Cook
Luke 14: 1, 7-14
I began my career as an Episcopal minister in a large and venerable downtown Detroit congregation in which there then remained a number of Old Money families whose members had long since decamped for the Grosse Pointes. They still, however, came to services in the city church rather than to the chapels of ease that had been erected for them in the leafy suburbs.
Thus was I introduced to an environment about which I only knew from scanning the society pages of the newspapers and from taking in such movies as “The Philadelphia Story.” It’s amazing what getting a clerical collar around one’s neck affords its wearer: instant entrée to country clubs, city luncheon clubs and to the dining salons of the rich and famous.

Quickly did I learn to become a sipper of the dry martini, then in vogue as the preprandial beverage of choice – a rather awful habit that it took me years to break. Less quickly did I catch on to the correct selection of cutlery for this course and that. Yet, I was one of those often invited to tables at which, considering my origins and upbringing, I had no business being.

As my views about social and racial equality, frequently enunciated in sermons, became known (and resented), I noted that such invitations came fewer and farther between until they ceased altogether. Evidently I had become, in the eyes of my one-time hosts, like the people whose injured dignity I was, Sisyphus-like, in the process of upbuilding. It would not be until many years later when I had become a presence on the editorial pages of the Detroit Free Press that I was once again welcomed to the high table.

On one memorable occasion, I preached a sermon in that old church upon the same text as today’s: Luke’s daring mandate to invite to one’s table neither friends, nor relatives nor yet rich neighbors but the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Such were the outcasts and the ostracized of their day as were African Americans in the1960s and other minorities in our own time.

If ever there was a sermon that got “heard,” it was that one. They got it, and they didn’t like it.

And on my next trip into the pulpit, I took up the idiotic notion put forth by my boss, the rector, that opening housing was unnecessary on Earth as there was open housing in heaven. I said in response that the kingdom of heaven was, according to that crazy Jew from Nazareth, within us, and therefore if there was no open housing here we could hardly expect to find it there.

Not only had the dinner invitations dried up, but I was “invited” to leave that church’s employ forthwith. Thus for the next decade did I disappear into an inner-city neighborhood and there found my purpose in life – which was not to be invited to luncheon or dinner by those who could afford it but to find ways to feed and shelter those who could afford neither, and eventually to help found a community house project to welcome and assist Middle Eastern immigrants.

I have been out of the newspaper limelight for going on 15 years now, and my visibility in the community is the lesser for it. As, however, I persist in identifying with society’s present-day outcasts, I can still hear the doors of great houses close against me and leaf through a day’s mail knowing in advance that the dinner-party invitations of old will not appear among the advertising circulars and utility bills.

I wonder what they drink these days, understanding that the dry martini is now out of fashion along with Manhattans and Chablis.

Oh, I forgot to mention the five verses from the beginning of Luke chapter 14 that are omitted from the gospel reading assigned by the lectionary to this day. Those verses concern a Sabbath Day meal at the house of one depicted as a detractor of Jesus. Luke imagined the host and his cohort keeping a close eye on Jesus, curious to know, you might say, whether or not he knew enough to use the proper fork for the proper course.

Then Luke resorts to a blunt instrument. He invents the presence of a person with dropsy – an outcast, of course. Any physician or historian of medicine will know immediately that dropsy is worse than it sounds. It is an affliction that causes large and horrific swellings to appear on one’s body.

What transpires next in Luke’s narrative is that blunt instrument. After Jesus’ highly rhetorical question of his Pharisaic host – Is lawful to cure people on the Sabbath or not? – Luke says Jesus healed him. But Luke does not say how. The point I think we’re supposed to get is not so much that the giant sores miraculously went away. The “miracle” was that Jesus, in the midst of a formal dinner, put the needs of a poor, suffering person ahead of the soup course and didn’t care what anybody thought about it.

I remember driving out to those Grosse Pointe dinners through the post-riot ruination of Detroit, emerging as if from a fetid cave into the glorious company of the saints in light. The dinner conversation, changing with the courses, eventually got round to what I’d been up to. At just about that juncture a black man in waiter’s livery or a black woman in a maid’s uniform would set some delicacy or another before me. And if I had not arrived in time to anesthetize myself with a couple of martinis, my stomach would turn.

The likes of a dropsy victim never appeared, so I was never challenged to reach out and heal him by my mere attention and concern.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.