9 October 2011

Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Pretty audacious to turn down an invitation to the royal wedding, don’t you think? What was going through these people’s heads? Look at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton this past April; you can bet that no one who got an invitation to that wedding turned it down. And even if The New York Times got it wrong with its estimate that 2-3 billion people tuned into the royal wedding via TV and it was only half that many, an open invitation to the festivities of that day would have garnered a multitude of attendees that would have stretched the purse-strings of Her Majesty the Queen far, far, far beyond their breaking point.

So what might we think was going through the heads of those invited to the wedding banquet about which Jesus tells in the parable we just heard? Why in a thousand worlds would the invited guests have choosen to make light of the invitation – one tending to things on the ranch, another busy with the busyness of business? Had they caught wind that the guest list wasn’t exclusive enough to suit their tastes? Or were they suspicious that there would be strings attached to this royal summons, saying, “there must be a catch here, there is no such thing as a free lunch”? Perhaps there were some who were sure that they had been invited by mistake. “Who me? Invited to the wedding banquet? But I’m nobody. I haven’t done enough or been good enough to earn the king’s favor. Obviously it was meant for someone else. Surely the royal scribe put the wrong address on the envelope.” And doubtless, others regarded the king as some sort of weak-minded fool who could safely be ignored – a pretender to the throne – soon to be overthrown by modernity, post-modernity, sophistication, or whatever the latest emerging trend might be. Still others likely regarded themselves better than the king – if the king ever really existed in the first place. After all there had been a spate of best-selling books claiming that the king was merely a social construct of a by-gone era, a figment of weak minds, a delusion wallowed in by the gullible and the needy.

And so it turns out that  nobody who’s anybody really wants to come to the feast. What’s a king to do? “I know,” says the king, “I’ll bring in all the undesirables – all those who are on the roads leading out of town – those who are not fit to dwell inside the city – those who must leave the city at sunset when it comes time to close the gates to the city. I’ll bring in those dwelling in the darkness on the edge of town.” And so – in come all those too dense or too desperate or too-whatever – those who aren’t about to turn down a free meal – or for that matter, anything else that’s free – into the feast come those too unsophisticated to question whether the king be real – those who don’t care what’s going to be served. Heck, some don’t even know what a feast is they’ve been hungry for so long – but it’s been promised to them by the monarch and by God they’re going to be there.

What a nice parable, right? “Oh, not so fast Pastor,” you say. “You’ve left out a few not-so-little details. What about how the king kills those who murdered the king’s servants, and what about how the king burned their cities? And what about the guest who wasn’t wearing a wedding garment? And while talking about wedding garments, how did the riff-raff get theirs?”

We’ll take the last question first. As early as the fourth century of the Common Era, the doctors of the Church opined that the wedding garments for the riff-raff were given out at the door to the banquet hall. The king – who by know you have guessed to be God-the-Father – the king provided their wedding garments. Free. Unconditionally free. No questions asked.

OK – but what about the killing and burning? Ah yes, those little incidents. Let’s move killing and burning out of everyday uses of language and into how a culture of another time and place would use language – and lets say that death and fire are a way of saying that this very passionate king is all about destroying anything in us that gets in the way of the king’s invitation to the banquet that knows no end. Nothing, no how, is going to get in the way of God bringing you, me, and everyone else to the feast – even if that means destroying our pride, our status, and our enlightened ways of thinking and being. And God will go to the farthest lengths to have you and everyone else that has been, is now, or ever will be as God’s honored guest at the feast. We might not much approve of God’s methods, but God will do whatever God has to do to have us – God will even descend into hell and break down its walls and shatter its every chain in order that all be freed to come to the banquet. God’s own self will enter into the valley of the shadow of death – there to put an end to the evil that separates us from God, there to burn down the opulent mansions of evil whose well-appointed rooms belie the cold emptiness lurking there.

“One more detail, Pastor. The person who gets tossed out of the banquet for not wearing the right clothes.” Oh . . . . you mean the one thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth? That may actually be the best part of the whole story.

You know, there is more to New Jersey than Snooky, The Situation, and star non-presidential-contender Governor Chris Christie – there is also Asbury Park and its native son, Bruce Springsteen, who sings a psalm from from “a spot out ‘neath Abram’s Bridge” where “there’s a darkness on the edge of town,” who sings with those who have been bound and cast out into where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, who having lost everything sings: “Them things don’t seem to matter much to me now / Tonight I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop / I’ll be on that hill with everything I got . . .” The Boss cannot help but be drawn to that hill which is outside the city walls . . . to that hill of refuse where Very God from Very God is present absorbing into the Incarnate body of the Most Holy One our every refusal of God’s love, our every refusal to come to the banquet, our every refusal to accept God’s gift of the wedding garment. And from that hill, from that darkness on the edge of town, God from God, Light from Light speaks the Word, the Word that breaks our bonds; from that hill God speaks forgiveness to the most hardened and heinous sinner, to you and to me – and in exchange for our every refusal of God, gives us the glowing garments of an empty Sunday tomb – that clothed now, not in just any wedding garment, but in the wedding garments of Christ the bridegroom, we come to the hill of the abiding tree, that hill once covered in darkness on the edge of town, that hill where “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines . . . and it will be said on that day . . . Lo, this is our God for whom we have waited . . . let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation” of the whole world.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.