Welcome Table

Scriptures:     Exodus 32:1-14         Psalm 23        Philippians 4:1-9                    Matthew 22:1-14

What would you do if you threw a party and nobody came?  It sounds like something out of a  nightmare, perhaps one of those recurring nightmares, like the common recurring nightmare about being back in school and having to take a test for a subject you’d never studied, and needing to pass it in order to graduate.  But seriously, how would you feel if you threw a party and nobody came? Or if it did happen to you, how did you feel?  Hurt?  Angry?  Needing to sit in a corner and cry?  Feeling a sudden need to re-evaluate your list of friends?  Maybe tempted to break into a verse or two of “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…..you would cry too if it happened to you.”

In our Gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem.  He’s having one clash after another with the religious leaders there, the Sadducees, who were in charge of the Temple and its rituals and in cahoots with Rome, and the Pharisees, who sincerely loved God but were obsessed with making up rules – about appropriate foods to eat, about how often to fast, about what and how to sacrifice – lots of rules for themselves and everybody else to follow – we might say the Pharisees had a serious case of religious OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.   The Pharisees looked down on those who didn’t follow all their rules, whom they deemed less worthy of God’s love than themselves..  Jesus’ message, among other things, was that God was more concerned with right relationship with God and neighbor than with the rituals of the Sadducees or the rules of the Pharisees – quoting from the Old Testament, he told these leaders that God desires mercy, not sacrifice.  And the religious establishment not only didn’t want to listen, but looked out for opportunities to entrap Jesus and arrest him – and we know their efforts ultimately led Jesus to the cross.

And so Jesus told a parable, a story that was intended to say something about God.   But Jesus’ parables in Jerusalem were also intended to hold up a mirror to the religious leaders, showing them areas in which they needed to grow and change.  And so Jesus compares God’s reign to the scenario with which I started my sermon – somebody threw a party and couldn’t get anyone to show up.  A king’s son – not just anybody, but a king’s son, a prince – was to be married, and his father, the king wanted to throw him a wedding banquet.  He invited all his friends, allies, supporters.  But he got no RSVP’s.  So he sent his messengers to peoples’ homes, saying: “ I know you got the king’s invitation.  Maybe you just hadn’t gotten around to responding.  Please come to the wedding banquet.”  But all the messengers heard in response were excuses – really lame excuses, on the order of “ I can’t come….because I have to stay home and wash my hair.”  And those were the polite responses! We’re told some of the invitees attacked and killed the king’s messengers.  Harsh!   With friends like that, who needed enemies.

So the king blew his top, and ordered his servants to kill those who had attacked and killed his messengers, and to burn their city.  Pastor’s note:  If you throw a party and nobody shows up, don’t try this at home.  This is just a story.  Anyway…the king got the satisfaction of vengeance, but still had no guests for his sons’ wedding banquet.  So he told his servants to go out and round up anyone they could find to show up at the banquet.  So the son had a full house for his wedding banquet, even though it was a room full of odd, random folks, all strangers to the king, his son, and one another.  Perhaps it’s a bit like stories we read of companies you can pay to hire actors to pretend to be your friends. In Jesus’ story, free food and drink were payment enough to get people to show up. What could go wrong?

But one guy still managed to mess it up.  Evidently it was the custom in those days for the host to hand out wedding robes to those who came to a wedding banquet – we might think of party hats at a children’s party – and one of the guests apparently refused to wear it.  The host noticed and had the guy kicked to the curb.  May seem a little extreme to us – different customs, different times.  But we might think of other ways in which someone might misbehave at a wedding party – drinking too much and getting obnoxious, hitting on the bridesmaids, vomiting on the carpet, fighting with the other guests, so that the host ends up calling the bouncers over to do their thing.

What are we to make of this story.  Jesus was inviting the religious leaders into a different kind of relationship with God, one based on love, justice, mercy, not rituals and rules – and they weren’t having any.  It was a message that the prophets had spoken for centuries – God cares about right relationship more than religious rituals – to quote one of them, God was calling them to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.  The prophets had been persecuted in their time, some of them killed. Jesus came with much the same message, and would be rejected in the same way.  These religious leaders, the so-called “good people” - had refused Jesus’ invitation.

By contrast, the people who were considered not so good – prostitutes and other folks that the good people looked down on, and especially  non-Jews  - loved Jesus’ message.  They followed him everywhere he went.  They responded.  And so, in Jesus’ parable, they were the ones who accepted the invitations made at the last minute, when the king was desperate to find people to attend his son’s wedding.  And so they were welcomed.  But they still had to abide by the rules of the house.  In the parable, they might have been dragged in at the last minute in their cutoff jeans and sweaty t-shirts, gnats buzzing around their heads, but the king was  kind enough to provide a robe for them to wear so that they could look presentable. We might say that the wedding robe represented love, which they received from God and were expected to show to the other guests.

Remember that Jesus was a Jew, as were his disciples, as were the religious leaders who opposed him.  As non-Jews, as Gentiles, we are the folks in Jesus’ parable who were invited at the last minute.  We have experienced God’s love, mercy and grace, totally undeserved.  And even though we hear the message in church, Jesus compared God’s love to a banquet.  We might think of our once a month dinner churches – First Wednesday, remember – where we eat and drink and enjoy one another’s company, celebrate communion, hear a story from the Bible.   That’s a faint, faint reflection of what God wants for us.  Jesus’ phrase “the kingdom of heaven” makes us think of the afterlife – pie in the sky by and by when we die -  but really Jesus is talking about living in right relationship with God and one another right here, right now – as St Catherine of Sienna put it, “all the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’”  So God has invited us.  But God’s invitation does not include the phrase “Anything goes”.  To attend the banquet, we need to be clothed in God’s love, to experience God’s love ourselves and extend it to others.  Most of all, we need to remember that it’s God’s banquet, not ours…..something we in the church forget sometimes, when church leaders get high and mighty and act as if we’re in charge and not God.  We’re just folks who’ve received party invitations, who are asked to invite still others to the party – as it has been said, “Evangelism is one beggar telling another where to find bread.”

I’ll end with a quote from, of all characters, Aunty Mame – “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”  So come to the banquet!  As we sing at our Wednesday night service sometimes, “I’m gonna sit at the welcome table.”  So come, sit at the welcome table…and be amazed at all the different kinds of people who might be sitting next to you and across from you.  Know that God loves you!  Know that God wants you to love others.  Show that love through words of kindness and deeds of love.  Amen.