Welcome to St Laurence Church, Appleton with Besselsleigh
A welcoming and inclusive church serving the whole community
St Laurence church is in the middle of Appleton village, down at the bottom of Church Lane, past the school.
Church Lane turns off Eaton Rd, on the right on the way in from the A420, after the road bends round the Manor.
Week beginning Sunday 31 August 2025
Church Sunday: Year C, Proper 17
Readings: Ecclesiasticus 10.12-18; Hebrews 13.1-8, 15-16; Luke 14.1, 7-14 (15-24)
The dinner party described in Luke 14 is certainly tense: the host and guests eye up Jesus to see what he’ll do; the guests eye up each other as they jockey for the best positions, keen to cement important friendships and increase their social influence. Meanwhile, Jesus himself is observing all of them. Seeing their behaviour, he decides to give them a piece of his mind!
The parable he tells is set at a wedding, where the wise guests sit themselves in the least important places and are honoured when the host calls them to better ones. The foolish guests (like his present audience) put themselves in pole position and are then publicly shamed as the host relegates them into the cheaper seats to make way for guests of greater consequence. ‘Those who exalt themselves will be humbled,’ Jesus warns; while ‘those who humble themselves will be exalted.’
This is not advice about how to be the perfect dinner guest. It is rather a lesson in how to participate in the Kingdom of God. This isn’t just about behaving humbly yourself: it also means associating with the humble, inviting them to your feasts, instead of the rich and influential. The powerful may polish your public image and join your network of important pals. But reliance on them would banish your less prestigious neighbours and, even worse, would leave no room for God. So, when you throw a party, don’t invite the exclusive and self-serving cliques that want to dominate. Invite, rather, those people God will invite to his Great Supper at the end of time: the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind. These are people who’ll never be able to repay you, so God will reward you instead, with the gift of eternal life.
Like all Jesus’ teaching, this parable requires us to dismantle our brains and reassemble them in a new way, enabling us to live according to Christ’s commands, to enjoy the abundant life that he proposes, in which ‘the mighty are cast from their thrones, and the humble lifted high’. Such ‘divine reversal’ runs through the whole Bible like stripes through cloth, and reflects the very nature of Jesus, who, although he is ‘in the form of God, empties and humbles himself to the point of accepting death on a cross. … Wherefore God has highly exalted him!’ (Philippians 2)
Today’s other reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews, develops the idea of living humbly, depending on God and leaving room for our neighbours. We are to love each other, show hospitality to strangers and care for those in trouble through exercising empathy and an ability to imagine that what is happening to others is actually happening to us. Such imagination is not a creative act, like little children drawing an unlikely picture. It really means having faith-filled eyes to see the world as it truly is, unarguably fallen and wounded, but nonetheless infinitely loved by God, who creates and sustains all things, and who is entirely revealed to us in Jesus Christ. This in turn will teach us to love our neighbour, and to learn true humility: contentment with what we have; and boundless confidence that God will never forsake us.
The Reverend Wealands Bell, Rector
