Dress Rehearsal for the Feast

Matthew 22:1-14
Jesus responded to them again in parables: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who planned a wedding feast for his son. He sent his servants to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they did not want to come.
Again he sent other servants, saying, "Tell those who have been invited, 'Look, I have prepared my meal; my bulls and fattened calves have been slaughtered and all is ready; come on to the wedding feast!'"

But they neglected it and went off, one going to his field and one going on to his business. The ones remaining seized his servants, insulting and killing them.

Then the king became enraged and sent his guards, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, "The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy of it. So go out into the highways and call whomever you find to the wedding feast.”

Those servants went out into the streets and gathered up all whom they found, the wicked and the worthy, and the wedding feast was filled with diners.

But when the king entered he looked at the diners and saw there a man not dressed in wedding garments. So he said to him, "Friend, how did you come to this place without wedding garments?" He had no response.

Then the king said to his servers, "Tie up his feet and hands and throw him into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth."

For many are called, but few are chosen.

One of my favorite theologians is Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches at the divinity school at Duke. Dave Magruder may be taking a class with him right now. I like Hauerwas because he’s plainspoken, earthy, and provocative in the right sorts of ways. I don’t always agree with him, but he always makes me think.

Hauerwas is a United Methodist and one of his favorite things to do is to provoke the church into being more like the church Christ intends us to be. He needs to be provocative because there are a lot of things that need to be challenged. Every church needs to be shaken up from time to time to look at its core convictions…to look at what it really believes.

Those of you who have been working with me through the United Methodist Social Principles on Wednesday nights will appreciate his approach, I think. One time Hauerwas said, “I used to believe that Methodists had no core convictions but I now realize that I was wrong. Methodists do have a core conviction and that is that ‘God is nice.’ And the corollary to that is that because God is nice we ought to be nice, too.”

Hauerwas is convinced that there must be something more to the faith we confess that ‘being nice.’ As I have said several times already in these sermons, being nice is nice but it’s not the calling of followers of Jesus Christ who have been shaped by the cross, washed in the baptismal waters, and called to travel in the footsteps of a God who is transforming the world, not just accepting it as it is. We are called to Christ’s side in order to be remade. We are gathered together in community in order to hold ourselves accountable to this transforming love that leaves nothing untouched.

That is a very Methodist vision because if Methodists are true to their tradition they know John Wesley’s emphasis on a Christian journey that involves more than just a moment of justification when we are made right with God by accepting Jesus and the salvation offered through his death and resurrection. Wesley knew that the journey doesn’t end there; our whole lives are then enrapt in a process of sanctification – of becoming more holy so that our lives look distinctively different.

As Hauerwas puts it: “To be made holy is to have our lives rendered unintelligible if the God who has claimed us in Jesus Christ is not the true God. To be made holy is to have our lives ‘exposed’ to one another in the hope that we will become what we have been made” [A Better Hope, p. 160]. Holiness is the journey we are on and we’ve only just begun. If United Methodists…if Franktown Church could reclaim the road to holiness and ‘going on to perfection’ we would look different indeed. We’d be dressed for the kingdom feast.

Now that’s a reference to this really scary parable from Jesus that we’ve just read and before I go on to it I should warn you that dressing for the kingdom feast is not an easy thing. We’re pretty comfortable in the world as we know it. We’re used to an American society that doesn’t ask much from us. Our nation believes in nothing so much as personal choice and individual autonomy. What I do, how I dress, what I watch, where I surf on the Internet, what my visions and dreams should be, what my responsibilities should be, what my relationships should look like, whether I participate in acts of justice or mercy, how I pray, how I treat the poor, how I treat my parents, how I raise my children, how often I attend church – think how many of these we treat as private decisions involving nobody but me, myself and I! And for many of these, if someone were to question us, we would say, “Butt out! It’s none of your bees wax!”

But life in the Christian community runs on a different ethic. As people who find our life, our true life, in Jesus Christ, we know that our lives and even our bodies are not our own. As people who believe that we are radically, inseparably connected to the God who runs the universe we know that we are never in isolation and when we act as if we are autonomous we invariably fall into sin and distortion. Christians believe that they have been given a great freedom and a great power, but it is never freedom to be unrelated or power to determine our own salvation. We need to be continually reminded of who we are and what God requires of us.

And you know how hard it is to do it on your own. You know how exhausting it is to believe that it’s all up to you. You know how absolutely soul-eating it is to be perfect. If there’s not a place to let down your guard and admit who you are and what you are fighting, then sin will consume you. The world will continue to be a place of violent struggle instead of a place filled with the presence of a loving God.

It’s the violent struggle that gets me about this story Jesus tells. He seems to be saying that things are so bad between God and us that the whole story is plagued by violence and separation.
It’s supposed to be the story of a wedding feast. In Jesus’ day these were even more elaborate affairs than they are in our day. The celebration would last for days and no expense was spared on them. It’s not surprising that Jesus would compare the kingdom of heaven to this kind of festivity. God’s kingdom is like a huge party where the community is gathered together to celebrate love.

But in Matthew’s gospel this story comes at a time in Jesus’ ministry that is not marked by celebration. It is near the end as Jesus is moving toward the cross. He is in Jerusalem, after the waving palm branches and loud hosannas. The expectation of that day is starting to give way to continuing conflicts with the religious authorities and plots to kill Jesus. As Jesus is teaching in the temple, the leaders challenge him and he responds with a series of stories that each move to a more explicit denunciation of the way the leaders and the people have responded to him.

Right before this parable of the wedding feast, Jesus tells the story of a vineyard owned by a man who leased it to tenants. When the harvest comes and the man sends servants to collect the produce the tenants are hostile and beat up and even kill the servants. Finally, the man sends his son and they throw him out of the vineyard and kill him. To us, hearing the story after Jesus, the Son of God, was thrown out of the city and killed, the implications of the story seem clear.

But the religious leaders are pretty swift, too, and they get the message. They don’t like it one bit and they want to arrest him. The only reason they don’t is that they are afraid of the crowds.
Jesus isn’t done yet, though. He goes on to tell another parable that is really more of an allegory. The wedding feast story is another story laced with rejection, murder and judgment—not the sorts of things you normally associate with weddings.

He tells the story of a king who plans a wedding feast for his son. He sends out servants to call in the invited guests, but they don’t want to come. Now this is a little strange. The king is throwing a party and you don’t want to come? It’s like getting an invitation to the White House and tossing it in the trash.

The king is persistent, though. He sends out other servants and they have more detailed instructions for the invitees: “Tell them that this party is going to be great. I’ve got bulls and fat calves slaughtered. There’s blood everywhere. Everything is ready!” Now that doesn’t sound to attractive to us, but in the day it was the equivalent of saying, “We’ve got champagne chilling and caviar laid out by the paté. It’s going to be off the hook!” Or something like that.

But even this invitation doesn’t work. In fact, the people have a really strange response. One guy goes off to check his fields. I can’t imagine that. Can you imagine Add Nottingham or Charles Ames passing up a party to go check on the fields? Another guy has some business affairs to attend to. And the rest of the people seize the servants and insult them and kill them. It’s a party, people! They are inviting you to a party!

Something has gone horribly wrong in this community. The relationship between the king and the invitees is so bad that even signs of peace are treated with violence and death. Jesus seems to be comparing this to the response of the religious establishment and the people to the prophets God sent. Even good news sounded like bad news. Even the invitation to salvation was seen as a threat that had to be snuffed out.

But the response of the king to the murderous invitees is just as astounding. He becomes enraged and sends his guards to destroy the murderers and to burn the city! Meanwhile, there’s a feast waiting. Do you remember that this is all about a feast? The tone is going to be a little somber, I’m thinking. But Jesus seems to be referring here to an event that will happen a few years after his death. In A.D. 70 Jerusalem was leveled by the Roman Empire. The Temple was destroyed, many of the city residents killed. Many people, Jewish and Christian, saw this as a punishment for the faithlessness of the people.

But back to the feast. It’s still sitting there…waiting for diners. So the king gathers his servants together again and says, “Let’s try again. Go out into the highways and call everybody you find to the wedding feast.” And that’s what they do. They go out into the streets and collect all the people – the wicked and the worthy – and the table of the wedding feast is full.

If the story had ended there, we might have a satisfactory picture of what the kingdom looks like. There’s a lot of violence leading up to it – a really troubling division between the king and the people, but here is a table where everyone is welcome – the good and the bad, the Jew and the Gentile, Cavaliers and Hokies – everybody’s got a place at this table.

But the story’s not over. In fact, it gets even more troubling. The king comes in and he sees all these people at his feast. You think he’d be pleased to see all these people finally showing up to join in the celebration. But there’s this one guy. One guy showed up in a dirty T-shirt and ratty jeans. So the king goes over to him and says, “Friend, how did you get in here looking like that? Don’t you have the sense to put on clothes befitting a wedding?” No response. The guy doesn’t say a thing.

So the king throws him out. Not only throws him out – the king has him tied up, hands and feet, and thrown into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Matthew is big on wailing and teeth gnashing. He uses this image throughout his gospel. When the angels come to separate the wheat from the weeds in an earlier parable, the evildoers are thrown out to wail and gnash their teeth. The parable of the net that catches good and bad fish – the bad fish represent the evildoers who get thrown out to wail and gnash teeth. The unworthy servant in a later parable that doesn’t use the money entrusted to him wisely? Wailing and teeth gnashing.

The point is that this parable of the wedding feast is suddenly not about the people Jesus is talking to anymore; it’s about the church that will follow in Jesus’ footsteps. Church members who got the first part of Jesus’ allegory might be saying, “Yes! You tell ‘em, Jesus. Those people didn’t understand what you were saying, but we did!”

Now Jesus is turning the tale on them. What he says is, “Don’t be too content with your position. You have received an invitation to the kingdom but that doesn’t mean that you are therefore free to do as you please. This feast comes with some responsibilities. There is a certain dress that is expected. If you don’t look like someone who is expecting the greatest feast you’ve ever attended, you may lose your seat…and then there’s the outer darkness, wailing, teeth gnashing and all of that.

You see, you have been claimed. There is a new life awaiting you, but as with every new birth, something radically changes. If our lives are no longer our own, we will see the world differently. If our lives are hidden with Christ in God, we will live differently. If we are part of the body of Christ, we will relate to other parts of the body differently. If we have been liberated from the power of sin, we will confront those places where sin still threatens us and we will act differently. Not out of anxiety that if we don’t we’ll be thrown into the outer darkness, but out of love for the God who made us and transforms us. The outer darkness is not the power that claims us or threatens to claim us…God is the power that claims us. The Holy Spirit is about the work of sweeping us up into God, not exiling us to teeth gnashing. When we resist that movement of the Spirit it is our own blindness and recalcitrance that moves us away from God.

In the closing scenes of Stephen Spielberg’s World War II movie, Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hank’s character, Captain John Miller, is dying from a gunshot wound he received in a battle. It’s the days following the Normandy invasion and Miller and a small band of soldiers are trying to find a paratrooper, Private James Ryan, behind enemy lines. Three of Ryan’s brothers have died in the war and the army has decided to send him home so that his mother will not have to receive news that all of her sons had been killed. They are there to save Private Ryan.

In the final battle scene Ryan is spared but Captain Miller is mortally wounded. As he looks at the young private whose life he has saved, he says to him, simply, “Earn this.” Earn this. A final scene follows when we see Ryan as a much older man visiting the grave of the captain. It is clear from how he reacts that his whole life has been launched from that moment with the captain. He turns to his wife at the grave and breaks down in tears. He says to her, “Tell me I have led a good life. Tell me I’m a good man.” He desperately wants to know if the life he has lived from that moment was worthy of the gift he had been given.

That is what we’re about in this Christian life. We have been given a priceless gift. In a world marked by violence and sin…in our lives that too often seem so far from God and so far from the way God intends us to be…a feast has been prepared. There is a place at the table for you…even you and even me. And if we accept for ourselves the incredible good news that God has chosen us to be God’s own people…that God in Jesus Christ has saved us for a new life…that God has saved us…then the rest of our lives is about earning the gift…not because the gift depends on our merits, because nothing we can do is that good. But because when we have known such love, the only proper response is to love in return. So that at the end of our days we can say that everything is made new, including me. To quote Hauerwas again, “To be made holy is to have our lives ‘exposed’ to one another in the hope that we will become what we have been made.”

Thanks be to the God who meets us where we are but who is not content to leave us as we are. Thanks be to God.