October 11, 2020 | Worship

Many are called, but few are chosen.

Harsh words on a Sunday morning. When we talk about a loving God, a God who has endless stores of grace, a God who forgives, who loves, who includes rather than excludes, that sort of talk seems to come easy. But today we have an unsettling parable dropped in our laps, and we have to wrestle with it. I mean, I suppose we don’t haaaave to. Our epistle is really nice. Like, extra nice. So nice it was really tempting to crawl into a blanket fort with this beautifully comforting and, to be honest, kind of edifying blurb from Paul’s letter to the Phillippians and avoid the Gospel text for the day. I mean, wouldn’t you agree? To do a poor job of paraphrasing this chunk from Philippians, Rejoice in the lord, do the good things, keep doing the good things, God’s got you and will give you such Peace, don’t worry, be happy. :::hum bobby mcferrin tune::: I mean, after the last several months, this is a really sweet happy place to go to. Go ahead, try it.

The fact that I wanted to escape the Gospel, however, is usually a pretty telling sign that I need to spend some more time with the Gospel. A good way to guard ourselves against taking the Bible and bending it to our will is to sit with the stuff that we would rather not. So here we are, you, me, and the Holy Spirit jumping into another challenging sermon. :::sigh:::

We pick up in today’s reading from Matthew with the third of these parable-allegories that Jesus is sharing with the Chief Priests and Pharisees. Maybe sharing is too gentle a word. Jesus is issuing these as a warning, as a condemnation for their behavior and actions, and as an opportunity to straighten up or face the consequences. These are the folks in power, and they have not been using their power responsibly. You can go back to the last few weeks of sermons and relive all the power plays and disgruntled grumbling amongst themselves that those in power have been having around Jesus’ first few parables for this crowd. We are also still in the time warp of reading Holy Week scripture in October, so keep the tension of this moment in Jesus’ life in the back of your mind as we go through this.

Today’s parable is similar to last week’s. I was tempted to go in and recycle the sermon from last week, making situational changes, but that would be disingenuous. And that lack of transparency and genuine action is kind of the whole point of today’s reading.

Last week we had the owner of a vineyard whose tenants killed the owners servants and his son in order to take not just the harvest, but also to take the son’s birthright. This week we have a king who is giving a wedding banquet for his son that no one attends.

If this story sounds familiar but you remember it differently, it’s because there’s a MUCH easier to preach on version of it in Luke. In Luke’s gospel, when no one comes to the party, the king goes out and brings the poor and hungry into the banquet hall. It’s a very Luke telling of this parable. Matthew’s parable takes it’s own turn, in an equally Matthew telling. We run into this a lot in the Bible, where two stories don’t match up. This is often used as a means of disproving the Bible’s relevance, but unless you pick up your bible and assume it’s a straight historical transcript, this doesn’t disprove a thing. The parable is true for Luke’s audience and it is true for Matthew’s audience. As both texts were written nearly a century after Jesus’ death based on oral histories that were shared in many different communities, and the writers of the Gospels had their own social locations that these stories are filtered through, we have to look at the same stories as separate narratives of what was true and relevant for the communities they came from.

So this king has a wedding feast for his son. He has pulled out all the stops. The dinner is prepared, oxen and fat calves have been slaughtered, it is ready for everyone to come and celebrate.

But no one wanted to come. It’s hard to imagine no one sending back their RSVP for a wedding, but that was the case. So the king sent a second wave of servants to all of those on the guest list. All of those on the list laughed, the joked about this banquet. Some of them went to his farm, another to his business. We’ll circle back around to this in a moment. This “business as usual” piece.

The others were pretty horrible. I mean, there have been some weddings I’ve dreaded attending, but I’ve never been to the point where I roughed up the postal worker who delivered the invitation. These folks though, they killed the servants sent by the king. Remember last week, how the tenants roughed up and killed the servants of the landowner? Same story. Last week, the servants were the prophets. You can draw the conclusions from here.

Obviously, the king was mad. He sent troops in and destroyed the murderers and burned their city.

Whoa.

But, when we look at Jewish tradition in the Hebrew scriptures, we see destruction of cities because those inhabiting them have lost their way. If we jump ahead, after Jesus’ time, but before the Gospels were written, we also see the destruction of the Jewish Temple. Are your supercessionist alarms going off? We need to be careful with this part of the text to make sure we aren’t taking it to an anti-Semitic level, or elevating Christianity above Judaism. Matthew writes a VERY Jewish-informed Gospel. This is written for the Jewish community. We must remember that.

So, after pausing the party for citywide destruction, the King is back at it again, trying to fill the seats at his Son’s wedding banquet. If it seems a little over the top, it is. Allegory tends to make that leap so that you read it as something that is highlighting a bigger truth rather than merely as a story being told.

He send the servants out again into the streets to invite everyone that can be found. Good and bad.

Good and bad. Good and bad according to whom? It’s pretty broad, but they’re all invited, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. The clinking of champagne flutes, the awkward conversations of total strangers celebrating a wedding they weren’t initially invited to, but then, there, someone isn’t wearing proper wedding attire.

Dang.

Based on just how Jewish Matthew’s texts are, we can read that this third invitation is that Gentiles are invited to the wedding now too. Again, this can and has been misused as antisemitic text, so just don’t go there.

But that guy who came in flip flops and a tank top, he’s sticking out like a sore thumb in a crowd of tuxedoes and ball gowns.

The king approaches him, calls him friend, but also asks how he snuck in past the dress code. The guy is speechless. He came in, knowing it was a black tie affair, but figured he could get in, get away with casual attire, and he was caught.

And here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The guards don’t just 86 him, they bind him hand and foot and throw him, not just into the street but into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

For many are called and few are chosen.

This isn’t here to open up an argument about whether he had a wedding robe. This isn’t Luke’s Gospel, where inequitable conditions could be raised to question this action. This narrative assumed everyone has their wedding robe. Everyone is on the same footing to enter this banquet. What this is saying is that this person did not put in the work to pick their robe from the dry cleaners from last week’s banquet, but instead he assumed he was welcome to the party anyway.

This is a calling out of those who behave in a way that is abhorrent to God, but still try to fake it like they’re doing things right. This is pointing out disingenuous behavior and drawing a line, saying that there is absolutely no way one can act one way, but pretend they aren’t committing those actions in front of God.

How does this apply to us, as we sit here, possibly as the wedding guests, but I encourage us to be open to the ways in which we also sometimes embody the priests and pharisees? This parable, this allegory warns us against just being easy-saved. It warns us that if we go the cheap grace route, we’ve not just missed the party, but we’ve behaved so badly that we’re not wanted there.

Not fun to preach, believe me, but it’s the truth. As we examine the life and teachings of Christ, we need to sift through what actually came out of Christ’s mouth, what traditions were directly taught through his actions, and then we have to live them. We have to critically read them so we can separate what we think we know that Jesus said and what was really preserved in these traditions.

And you know what, that also means that when we’re invited to the banquet our garments to get in and stay in are going to look an awful lot like the ways we were strong allies to marginalized communities, how we used any scrap of privilege we had to amplify the voices of those who can’t seem to be heard by those with power no matter how loud they shout. That means…here it comes, we’re circling back, even if we are in the first wave of invitees, we cannot just go back home, back to our fields or our businesses when we are invited to this party. We cannot simply go about our lives as our culture would prescribe us to do, we must make sure that the threads holding out wedding robes together are threads of justice, threads of compassion, threads of honoring diversity and threads of caring for our neighbor.

As we go into this week, let us examine what the stitch work on our garments looks like, what the threads that weave through it would tell God if we were to wear it to the best banquet of all, eternal union with the divine. Many are called, but few choose to do this divinely inspired embroidery. May each stitch in our garments be made in the Glory of God. Blessings on you this week, friends.