St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Port Royal, VA
We are a small Episcopal Church on the banks of the Rappahannock in Port Royal, Virginia. We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the first people of Port Royal, the Nandtaughtacund, and we respect and honor with gratitude the land itself, the legacy of the ancestors, and the life of the Rappahannock Tribe. Our mission statement is to do God’s Will in all that we do.
Pentecost 12 – Compassion and a warning against pride.
Newsletter Aug. 22, 2025
The readings for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17, are unified by the themes of humility and self-giving love as the foundation of a life that honors God. Sirach warns that pride leads to ruin, emphasizing that true power and honor come from the Lord, not from human arrogance. Psalm 112 describes the righteous as generous, just, and fearless, grounded in humility and trust in God. Hebrews exhorts believers to live lives of hospitality, compassion, and praise, reminding them to honor Christ through loving deeds and shared sacrifices. In the Gospel, Jesus teaches a parable about choosing the lowly place at a banquet, underscoring that those who humble themselves will be exalted. Together, these passages call the faithful to embody humility, generosity, and hospitality as expressions of true discipleship.
I. Theme – Our lives should exhibit humility and love
Feast of Simon the Pharisee” – Peter Paul Rubens (1618-1620)
The lectionary readings are here or individually:
First Reading – Sirach 10:12-18 or Proverbs 25:6-7
Psalm – Psalm 112
Epistle – Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Gospel – Luke 14:1, 7-14
Today’s readings remind us that our Christian way of life is characterized by humility and love. The wisdom teacher Sirach warns his readers to avoid arrogance, violence and pride. The author of Proverbs counsels about having a humble attitude and being content with one’s own social status. The author of Hebrews urges readers to make Christian love a practical reality in their lives.
At a banquet, Jesus teaches the meaning of true humility.Jesus’ teachings on humility challenge us, and cause us to go deeper—it is not enough to humble ourselves in the presence of others, but to actively reach out and invite those who would not be invited to join in. We are called to live out our witness, especially when it is hard and goes against the grain of the world. How does the invitation of Jesus challenge us at the table as we celebrate?
Some of us may know the honor of sitting at the head table at some social or business function. Because recognition of our importance is a coveted honor, the scene in Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast is familiar to us. Who has not looked for his or her place card near the host and been disappointed to find other names at the seats of honor?
The twinge we feel when we do not make the head table at important meetings reveals the fact that we still have a trace of the old nature in us. We want to look rich before people; we forget how rich Christ has made us before God.
Our earthly status is always insecure; it waxes and wanes, and the retirement party inevitably comes. Newcomers take our place, and we are expected to go fishing–or at least stay out of the way of our successors. Not so in God’s service. Once a saint, always a saint here. We are never retired from work in the kingdom. Our future is to be more glorious than is our present in God’s service.
God continues to give freely to us who are poor in what matters most. Our attempts to emulate God’s generosity and hospitality are received and honored when done in the spirit of humility that befits God’s image in us. Then, like God, we too can enjoy the company of those who can never repay us.
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"Feast of Simon the Phrarisee" – Peter Paul Rubens (1618-1620)
I love David Lose’s comment on this passage -“If there was ever a gospel reading that invited a polite yawn, this might be it. I mean, goodness, but Jesus comes off in this scene as a sort of a progressive Miss Manners.” He later backs off of it.
Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. And so this, and all reported encounters with religious authorities, are going to clarify and sharpen the division between Jesus’ vision of right now, right here, being the time and the place for the realization of God’s Kingdom, and the authorities’ anxiety to keep social peace as defined and enforced by the Roman occupiers.
He is invited to dinner by the big cheese – “house of a leader of the Pharisees”. Jesus does not seem to be invited for the hospitality of it, but for the hostility of it. The setting seems hostile. Sabbath controversy stories in chapters 6 and 13 had both ended with pharisees on the defensive (6:7; 13:17). Chapter 11 had ended with the pharisees "lying in wait for him, to catch him in something he might say." (11:54).
Thus Jesus is not being watched closely to see what they might learn from him. He is being watched closely to assess just how much of a threat he really might be. He is being tested outside of the admiring crowds. Jesus is watching them very closely in order to make observations about human conduct. He wanted to contrast their kingdom of ritual with the kingdom of God emphasizing mercy and radical inclusion.
The word pharisee can mean "to separate". The Pharisees were a group of people who separated themselves from the riffraff of society. They sought to live holy and pure lives, keeping all of the written and oral Jewish laws. Often in the gospels, Pharisees are pictured as being holier-than-thou types, the religious elite. They felt that they had earned the right to sit at the table with God. They criticize Jesus because he doesn’t separate himself from the "sinners and tax collectors."
The Gospel is sandwiched between two other situations. Just before the Gospel Jesus heals a man with dropsy and defended that Sabbath healing. He may have been the bait
There are two main scenes here with advice:
1. Going to banquet sit at the lowest place so you can move up rather than forced down
In Israel, the meal table played a very important role, not only in the family, but in society as well. When an Israelite provided a meal for a guest, even a stranger, it assured him not only of the host’s hospitality, but of his protection Also in Israel (as elsewhere), the meal table was closely tied to one’s social standing. “Pecking order” was reflected in the position one held at the table
Jesus knows that most people would want to take the place of honor. What is interesting is that those who put themselves forward to take the highest or most dignified place might be removed not to the second place but to the lowest place.
And, Jesus takes pains to show that this "demotion" is really an experience of humiliation. Rather than seeking to put ourselves forward, we are to wait until we are invited up to the honored position.
When the guests jockeyed for position at the table, Jesus spoke to this evil as well (vv. 7-11). While they believed that “getting ahead” socially required self-assertion and status-seeking, Jesus told them that the way to get ahead was to take the place of less honor and status. Status was gained by giving it up. One is exalted by humbling himself, Jesus said.
Note that Jesus is not criticizing the system but how people operate within it.
His exhortation is to pursue humility, a concept with significant status connotations. Humility was very rarely considered a virtue in Greco-Roman moral discourse.
Humility doesn’t mean being passive. Letting others walk all over us Jesus shows by his life that being humble didn’t mean being passive, but, when necessary, it meant taking out the whip and driving the self-centered bullies out of the temple.
There is a balance between being humble without self-degradation or shame of letting others "walk all over" us vs. deliberately putting ourselves above others through self-exaltation or arrogance.
Exaltation depends too if you are doing the exalting or God raising up and exaltation belong to God; recognition of one’s lowliness is the proper stance for human beings. The act of humbling oneself is not something for its own sake, but for the sake either of God or of Christ .Jesus advises a strategy of deliberately and consciously living beneath one’s presumed status in order to receive even greater honoring later.
Some scholars speculate that this teaching would particularly apply to Luke and his first readers as they were higher status Gentiles, and the mixed-status Christian communities would require them to live beneath their comfort zone. God would later recognize and honor their accepting of lower social standing.
Here is a paradox indeed. The way up is down. To try to “work up” is to risk being “put down.” Those who wish to be honored must be humble and seek the lowly place. Those who strive to attain the place of honor will be humiliated
2. If you are the host, don’t invite who can in turn invite you and be repaid but invite “ the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” and be repaid by God
Shift in emphasis here. Now Jesus is not working within the system but challenging it.
The host had apparently invited all the prominent people to his table on this occasion.
Jesus assumes that you are putting on the feast, rather than attending a marriage banquet, and that you have to put together your guest list. Guest lists are put together based on a philosophy or on some kind of principle. Two popular ways to do it are because you "owe" someone who has invited you to their event or you want to "get in good" with some people and so you extend an invitation to them
First century middle-eastern dinner parties were political, social, and class affairs. One would invite those considered one’s social equals or superiors. Accepting an invitation to a such a dinner carried with it the expectation that the one invited would return the favor.
Obviously, in the unlikely event they would get an invite, poor people would not accept since they would not be able to repay.
The central principle of this advice is that we are to give things to people without expecting any kind of return.
Jesus told him that while men might seem to get more in return from inviting their friends, family, and prominent people to a meal, in heaven’s currency men were rewarded by God when they invited those who could not give anything in return—the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.
Jesus calls for “kingdom behavior”: inviting those with neither property nor place in society. God is our ultimate host, and we, as hosts are really behaving as guests, making no claims, setting no conditions, expecting no return.
We are to do good to people regardless of their ability to repay. In fact, we might delight even more in extending ourselves to people if they can’t repay because, in this case, we will have a reward at the "resurrection of the righteous."
Notice here that the listing: the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind – reflect those listed in Jesus’ initial declaration for his ministry way back in Luke 4:18. Your "blessing" is the total removal of social rank in the reign of God. In God’s eyes, this is justice, and you will be rewarded at the "resurrection of the just."
Helping the needy is more than just sending money, but getting involved with the people — perhaps sitting down together with them as equals at a supper table.
What the "helpers" frequently discover is that Christ serves them through the needy. Jesus says we need to start inviting new people to dinner and it may challenge our comfort zones.
We are disciples on the road – disciple on the road with Jesus is to share with those who have nothing and who can give nothing in return.
Back to David Lose on inviting the “the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind”:
“And while that sounds at first blush like it ought to be good news, it throws us into radical dependence on God’s grace and God’s grace alone. We can’t stand, that is, on our accomplishments, or our wealth, or positive attributes, or good looks, or strengths, or IQ, or our movement up or down the reigning pecking order. There is, suddenly, nothing we can do to establish ourselves before God and the world except rely upon God’s desire to be in relationship with us and with all people. Which means that we have no claim on God; rather, we have been claimed by God and invited to love others as we’ve been loved.
“As we see in today’s reading, precisely because we have been invited into relationship by God — because, that is, God has conferred upon us freely a dignity and worth we could never secure for ourselves — we are free to do the same for others. We are free to put them before ourselves, to lead them to seats of honor, to invite them to be our dinner guests, not because of what they can do for us, but because of what has already been done for all of us.
“It’s a new humanity Jesus is establishing, a new humanity that has no place for our insecurities and craving for order. Which is why it’s frightening and why those invested in the pecking order — which, of course, includes all of us — will put him to death.&qu
In this passage (Luke 14:1, 7-14), Jesus’ teaching is set in the context of a Sabbath meal at the home of a prominent Pharisee. The key themes are criticism of the Pharisees for their pride and hypocrisy and affirmation of God’s love for the lowly and outcast. Humility and love should characterize the people of the kingdom.
Cultural & Historical Background
Matthew has told us of the beheading of John the Baptist – killed because John denounced Herod Antipas’ marriage to his brother Philip’s wife when Philip was still alive (a violation of Jewish law). Jesus is reeling over this.
His reaction is to withdraw privately to a desert-like, remote place. So Jesus withdraws to be alone with his thoughts and his sorrows – in a “deserted place” to regroup, to recharge. But it doesn’t work, of course. The eager crowds are on him – there is no rest for the weary – and he can’t let them down since he is compassionate. Out of his own heartache, he bring riches.
This is the story of the feeing of the 5000. It is the only one of Jesus’ miracles that gets recorded in all four gospels.
The question has surfaced over the years as to why Mark reports it at all. Later evangelists must have asked the same question, as Matthew shortens it markedly and Luke omits it altogether.
The majority opinion is that it serves two key purposes in Mark: it foreshadows Jesus’ own grisly death and it serves as an interlude between Jesus’ sending of the disciples and their return some unknown number of days or weeks later.
Another reason is simply to draw a contrast between the two kinds of kingdoms available to Jesus disciples, both then and ever since. Consider: Mark, tells this story as a flashback, out of its narrative sequence, which means he could have put this scene anywhere. But he puts it here, not simply between the sending and receiving of the disciples but, more specifically, just after Jesus has commissioned his disciples to take up the work of the kingdom of God and when he then joins them in making that kingdom three-dimensional, tangible, and in these ways seriously imaginable.
“Herod’s Kingdom – the kingdom of the world and, for that matter, Game of Thrones and all the other dramas we watch because they mirror and amplify the values of our world – is dominated by the will to power, the will to gain influence over others. This is the world where competition, fear and envy are the coins of the realm, the world of not just late night dramas and reality television but also the evening news, where we have paraded before us the triumphs and tragedies of the day as if they are simply givens, as if there is no other way of being in the world and relating to each other.
Augustine was born in Thageste, North Africa, in 354. His mother, Monnica, was a committed Christian and tried to raise Augustine in the faith.
In Augustine’s time, Christians were not baptized until later in life for fear that they would stain their souls with their post-baptismal sins. Augustine took this as a license to sin, and sin boldly. Although brilliant, he had a passionate and tempestuous personality and was infamous for his profligate lifestyle, complete with a scandalous mistress, creative cursing, and drunken debauchery.
Augustine had a quick and insatiable mind. He studied philosophy, rhetoric, and law and was an accomplished professor. Drawn to Neoplatonism and Manichaeism, Augustine remained restless, unable to find a system of thought that both engaged his mind and soothed his soul.
While Augustine was serving as professor of rhetoric at the Court of Milan, his mother Monnica’s pleas and prayers for her son to return to Jesus finally reached their climax.
In the summer of 386, Augustine heard the story of Placianus’s and his friends’ conversion after reading of the life of Saint Anthony of the Desert. He was jealous of the revelation given to them and was pacing his garden, wishing for some clarity in his faith, when he heard a child’s voice telling him to “take up and read.” Augustine believed this was the sign he sought and took it as a divine command to open the Bible and read the first thing he saw.
His Bible turned to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (13:13-14). Augustine felt the words were speaking directly to him. He was deeply convicted about his life of sin and felt called to dedicate his life to God. Shortly thereafter Augustine made the acquaintance of Bishop Ambrose, and, under his influence, came to view Christianity as both intellectually respectable and morally desirable. Augustine was baptized on Easter Eve 387.
His baptism and conversion to Christianity transformed Augustine completely from a prominent debaucher to a powerful defender of the faith. Upon returning to Africa, he gave away all of his possessions to the poor, with the exception of the family home—which he converted into a monastery. He was ordained a priest in 391 and consecrated as bishop of Hippo in 395, a position he held until his death thirty-five years later. He was described by his friend and fellow bishop, Possidius, as a man who “ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned the temptations of the flesh, and exercised prudence in the financial stewardship of his See.”
Augustine’s writing provides his greatest legacy to the Church and the world. After his conversion, the quick, insatiable intellect he had applied to rhetoric and philosophy turned to theology and ethics. Augustine answered God’s call to “love the Lord your God with all your mind,” and fulfilled it well. Yet Augustine’s writing and thought were not dry and detached but passionate and evocative, engaging the heart as well as the mind.
Augustine’s Confessions is one of the earliest and most well-known examples of spiritual autobiography. In Confessions, Augustine tells the story of his life and faith: the good, the bad, and the ugly. 350 sermons and 100 works also survive Augustine did not hide his past sins and early debauchery but confessed them freely. In Confessions, he admitted that, as a young man he prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” And in a letter to some bishops, he once wrote, “I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I’m telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit.”
Augustine of Hippo is commemorated in The Episcopal Church’s calendar on August 28.