Who Invited Them?

Scriptures:  Exodus 32:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

Who Invited Them?

Our reading from Matthew’s Gospel offers us a truly bizarre parable – one of the most difficult Jesus told.  As we follow the action, our heads are spinning – first the king invites some people, they turn him down, then the king kills them and invites different people, and then he tosses one of those people out because he’s wearing the wrong clothes.  When Jesus says that “the Kingdom of Heaven is like this” we really have to struggle with questions about what this parable tells us about God, and what this parable tells us about ourselves.  I should also note that Luke’s Gospel, chapter 14, has a version of this parable, with many similarities and some differences, and so I’ll be referring to Luke’s version of the parable from time to time as well.   The differences from the two parables come, in part, because Matthew was writing to a community primarily consisting of Jewish converts to the way of Jesus, while Luke was trying to interpret to a community primarily of Gentile converts – and so each retells Jesus’ parable to their differing audiences in slightly different ways, leaving out some details while including others.  So, in a sense, I’ll be preaching on two Gospel texts – double our confusion, double our fun.  I’ll try not to make the sermon go on twice as long, though.  You’re welcome.

In considering this parable, though, I’d like us to keep in mind a phrase that will resonate with our members of a certain age.  You’ll remember the musical and movie “Mame”, about the fun-loving aunt who shattered – more like exploded - the conventions of respectability of her day.  Her famous line, which I’m editing slightly for church consumption:  “Life’s a banquet, and most poor schlubs” – Mame used a slightly different word – “are starving to death.”  And so as we unpack this parable, I’d like us to keep that saying in mind:  “Life’s a banquet, and most poor schlubs are starving to death.”  So in Jesus’ parable, let’s ask who’s throwing the banquet, and let’s ask who’s starving to death.

Luke’s Gospel begins “A certain man gave a great supper and invited many.”  Matthew, in telling the story, ups the stakes:  “A king prepared a wedding feast for his son.”  So far, so good.   And imagine yourself in the situation: wouldn’t you feel amazingly fortunate if a wealthy person or a king invited you to his home?  Surprised, likely intimidated to be sure, but still fortunate.  What it would be like to be inside that home?  What would the food be like, the wine be like?   Besides the host, what other VIP’s would I meet?  For those so inclined, what an awesome networking opportunity!  Just one problem:  In both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospel, the host sends the servants to tell the invited guests that the banquet is ready, and in both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospel, the invited guests thumb their noses at the king’s servants and blow off the invitation.  I suppose we might understand that not everybody could come – after all, a wedding banquet in that day could go on for a week or longer, and perhaps not everybody could put their life on hold for a week even for a time of feasting – but for everybody without exception to turn it down? – wow! Just wow.  Luke’s gospel gives some of the responses: “I just bought a piece of ground and have to go look at it; I pray to be excused.    I just bought five yoke of oxen, and I have to test them; I pray to be excused.   I just got married; I pray to be excused.”  Excuses:  Lame, lamer, lamest.  I suppose today we’d say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t go; I have to wash my hair” which, of course, is a thinly-veiled way of saying, “I’d rather stick an icepick into my eyeball than go to your banquet.  Or, to borrow a movie title, “I’m just not that into you.”

In Matthew’s Gospel – not in Luke’s – the host of the banquet sends more servants with another round of invitations: “My oxen and my fatted cattle have been butchered; come to the banquet.”  But now those on the invite list behave in an even more bizarre way – while some just ignore the second round of invitations as they did the first, one going to his field, another to his business –others on the invite list beat up some of his servants and killed others.  And the king reciprocates the bizarreness by sending his army to kill the invitees and burn their city – one of the cities he himself ruled, that up until that time had been supporting him through their taxes.  Anger management issues, maybe?  Yikes!  

We’re probably scratching our heads at this point, and I think a little historical context would be helpful.  Both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels are thought to have been written after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in AD70.   For Luke’s Gentile listeners, this wouldn’t have been of great note – certainly an unfortunate event, but probably not worthy of anything beyond a shrug and a roll of the eyes – “Oh, those Romans, such bullies, they’re always beating up on somebody.”  But Matthew’s Jewish converts were at that time in an ugly, heated sort of family feud within Judaism, in which the Jewish converts to the way of Jesus were being ostracized by Jews who found nothing compelling in Jesus’ message – we see similar tensions in John’s Gospel.  So for that audience, the details about the mistreatment of the servants and the burning of the city would have resonated strongly in light of traumatic current events - the hostility they experienced, the burning of the Temple.   It’s important to consider this tension and hostility within the context of the Jewish community of the day – because this passage has often been misused as a warrant for anti-Semitism - forgetting that Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew and that the earliest disciples were Jews – this passage misused as a warrant for anti-Semitism with awful results, so that’s a road of interpretation down which we don’t under any circumstances want to travel.

So, in both Matthew’s and Luke’s version of the parable, the host finds himself with a whole lot of food and an empty banquet hall.  What to do?  Especially in Matthew’s version, in which the king is about to have a wedding for his son with no wedding guests, what to do?  So the host tells his servants to go into town and grab anyone they can find and invite them, the poor, the lame, the blind, and the maimed.  He invites the previously uninvited, those who would never be on anyone’s “A” list.  And, while in Matthew the king issued a second invitation to the original invited guests, in Luke’s gospel the host of the banquet issued a second invitation to those on the streets – he was told that, even after the servants had gone into town and grabbed anyone they could, there was still room, and so the host told the servants to go out into the country lanes and drag in anyone they could find – “compel them to come in”.  “Drag them in kicking and screaming, if you have to.”

But now Matthew’s version of the parable – the one with the king throwing a wedding banquet – goes off on perhaps the most bizarre tangent in a whole parable full of bizarre tangents.  The king goes in to see his guests – not the ones he originally wanted but the ones he wound up with, remember - finds someone without a wedding robe, and gives him the boot – as Matthew’s gospel says, has him bound hand and foot and thrown into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth – for, as Jesus ends the parable in Matthew’s Gospel , “many are called, but few are chosen.”

Is your head spinning yet?  Mine certainly is.  And so I want to return us to the questions I asked earlier – what do these parables – Matthew’s and Luke’s – tell us about God?  What do they tell us about ourselves?  And I’d like to return to that quote from Mame, and ask, “Who’s giving the banquet?  Who are the poor schlubs who are starving to death?”

I think first of all, it tells us that God is a God of hospitality and grace.  The kingdom of heaven is compared to a banquet – not a chain gang, not a summons to jury duty, certainly not a church service with somebody like me droning on for all eternity – but a banquet.   Free food! Free drink! What’s not to like?  But it’s a banquet at which God really, really wants guests – so much so that if the invited guests turn him down, he’ll take in anyone he can find.

Why was the host’s (or the king’s) hospitality turned down?  It’s hard to say.  It could have been that they hated and resented the king, that they found him oppressive – again, borrowing from the movie title, “Sorry, king, we’re just not that into you.”  It has been suggested that perhaps the invited guests had calculated that, if they accepted the king’s hospitality, they’d be obligated in some way to reciprocate – and to entertain a wealthy man or a king would drive people of modest means into financial ruin.  But an obligation to reciprocate is nowhere in the king’s invitation, not even between the lines.  All the king says is, “Come to the party.  I want to celebrate, and I’d like to have you celebrate with me.” And this dynamic points out, among other things, both the willingness of God to offer grace and the difficulty people having in accepting it.   For heaven’s sake, it’s an invitation to a party, not a summons to jury duty or a sentence to spend the remainder of one’s natural life breaking rocks in a quarry.  Free food, free drink – what’s not to like?

I already discussed the violent response to the king’s second invitation and the king’s violent response to that violence in terms of the growing tension within Judaism over what to make of Jesus, along with the Romans’ destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD70.  But then we come to Matthew’s strange ending, the one with the guest being bound and tossed into outer darkness because he wasn’t wearing a wedding garment.  What on earth are we to make of that?

I should begin by saying that, in that culture, the wedding robe would not have been something a person would have been expected to bring, but rather would have been provided by the host for the occasion.  So the guy would have been handed a wedding robe on the way in.  But, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to wear it….maybe he’d have dropped it in the corner behind a chair or something.  In any case, even though he’d gotten in the front door – perhaps dragged in the front door under protest – he wasn’t going to get with the program.  He wasn’t going to participate in the wedding feast.  And so the host saw that the man had jettisoned the wedding garment that he’d been given on the way in, and so the host said, “You don’t want to be here?  Have it your way.” and kicked him to the curb.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a banquet.”  “Life’s a banquet, and most poor schlubs are starving to death.”  We worship a God of grace, who invites us to experience life within the reign of God – a life of love for God and neighbor.  Many people turn down the invitation – they’ve bought into the world’s systems of domination, into our society’s materialism and militarism, structures of greed and hate and violence.   To live within the reign of God is to reject all that, indeed to live in a way that’s subversive to the false choices our world offers.   In considering the banquet our world offers and the banquet God offers, we might compare the back-to-back stories in Mark chapter 6 of Herod’s banquet, where the guest list consisted of Herod’s cronies and at which John the Baptist was beheaded, to Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, where the guest list was whoever was in the area, all were satisfied, and there was abundance left over.  We can’t dine at Herod’s banquet and at God’s. 

We in the church may count ourselves as those who have accepted the invitation.  But it’s easy, especially if we’ve been in the church a while, to start to feel entitled, to feel like it’s our banquet, not God’s.  We may start to wonder about some of the other banquet guests – “What are they doing here?  Who invited them?”  And it’s then that we should remember that we, just like them, are guests of the king; that we’re here, not by merit, not because of our winning personalities or whatever, but by grace.  “Who invited them?  God invited them!  They, and we, and all of us, are here by royal invitation”

But then there’s that odd ending about the wedding banquet.  God’s grace invites us, but once there, there are expectations.  Not onerous expectations – after all, the wedding garment would have been provided; we just have to wear it.  But still - we can’t expect to come to God’s banquet, can’t expect to live within God’s reign of love for God and neighbor, and expect to continue to play by Herod’s rules, by the world’s rules. As it’s been said, “God loves us just as we are.  God loves us too much to let us stay that way.”  Within the context of the church, in the words of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 3, verse 27, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”

And today we have a baptism.  Today we are baptizing one who has responded to God’s gracious invitation to the banquet – Robert “Bobby” Kennedy.  Bobby’s life has not been easy.  He’s experienced injustices, and he’s made mistakes – just like every one of us here, in one way or another.  Bobby is one of those that, if you want to find him, you have to go out into the highways and byways.  I think it’s safe to say Bobby doesn’t get a lot of banquet invites.  And yet, several members of our church, Penny and Nessie, wanted to help him.  And now Bobby’s here, responding to God’s gracious invitation – dressed in white, wearing the wedding garment of grace, preparing to be clothed in Christ through the sacrament of baptism, preparing to be welcomed within the circle of this community of faith.  So, Bobby, we welcome you to this family of faith.  But the story of the wedding garment reminds us that in this family, as in any family, there are expectations – you’ll be making baptismal promises, as we all have, to renounce the powers of evil and desire the freedom of new life in Christ, to profess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, to live as a disciple of Christ, and to be a faithful member of the church.  And the church will make promises to you as well – we promise our love, support, and care.

The kingdom of heaven is like a banquet.  May Emanuel Church, our little outpost of the kingdom of heaven here in Bridesburg, be like a banquet open to all, and may we welcome all God sends our way.  Amen.