20th Sunday after Pentecost

Matt 22:1-14

We are marching on into October and thus continues my quest to avoid the dealing with the readings from the Gospel of Matthew for this season.  But alas, there is no major saint’s day this week so I got stuck reading from Matthew.  And the reading for today could be good, in fact in Luke, it is good.  Because both Matthew and Luke remember this story.  And Luke’s version is this perfectly normal little parable about a man who invites his friends to a banquet and his friends are too busy to come so he invites all these other people and they come and they all have a good old time.  I like Luke’s story, in fact it would have fit perfectly with our stewardship themes about how generosity can create places of welcome.  I like it so much that I really, really thought about swapping Luke’s story in for Matthew’s today and hoping that no one noticed.  It was very tempting.  But alas, I couldn’t do it.  Because Matthew’s albeit ridiculous insertions do have something to say to us in our world today and to our community. 

What are you going do if the world ends?  Who are you going to be and how are you going to behave if the worst things imaginable actually come to pass?  Because that is what we are dealing with here.  The fundamental difference between Matthew and Luke is the trauma load in their communities.  Because the churches, the communities that Matthew and Luke led were fundamentally different.  As best we can tell, Matthew’s community was made up almost entirely of Jewish refugees from the fall of Jerusalem.  You see, in the year 70 about 35 years after Jesus’s death and resurrection, the Roman army, in response to increased religious and political unrest, swept into Jerusalem and burned God’s temple and most of the surrounding city to the ground killing thousands and displacing many thousands more.  The people who made up Mathew’s church were among those forced to flee the carnage in Jerusalem.

And so, their memory of this parable becomes different, everything becomes extreme almost to a ridiculous extent.  The whole thing is actually insane.  The regular guy becomes a king, giving a wedding for his son.  Luke’s friends all give perfectly reasonable excuses for missing out, while Mathew’s simply refuse, which makes no sense. Who refuses the invitation of their king? And then when asked again, they beat up and even kill the messengers.  Who does that?  So the king goes and burns their city.  But if he is king inviting his own subjects, that means he’s burning down his own city.  Which is dumb.  Yet despite the time it takes to burn an entire city to the ground, somehow this lovely dinner he made is still hot and ready on the table and so he goes and drags strangers off the street to come eat it.  But then some guy doesn’t have on his wedding robe and so the king gets so mad he doesn’t just kick the guy out, he ties him up and throws him into the outer darkness with ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’, a widely used euphemism for hell. Which seems like a bit of an intense overreaction right?

It’s totally crazy, unless you understand where Matthew’s community is standing.  For Matthew’s community, all the terrible things in this story have already happened.  The king has already burned the city.  Jerusalem is gone, the temple is gone, the Jewish way of life preserved for hundreds of years is gone.  The promise of a great military messiah and Jesus’s immanent return is gone.

But then somehow, some way God invites us back.  In the midst of the destruction of ideas, and institutions and values and ways of life that we thought to be infallible, God keeps inviting.  In fact, God goes above and beyond.  God goes and sends his servants to invite everyone, I mean everyone, including those previously excluded.  In this story, God in fact lives up to the slogan ‘God loves everyone…no exceptions’.  They are all there, welcome at this banquet.

And that has something to say.  That has something to say even to us here today.  Elections come and go, institutions come and go, health and money and even church buildings come and go.  And what matters is how we behave when this chips are down.

It’s easy to celebrate God’s abundance when we feel like we are living in the heart of it.  It is easy to be generous with our excess.  It’s easy to welcome strangers when we feel secure.  It is easy to live in Luke’s version of the parable.  But can we say the same when the opposite is true?  Can we trust in God’s welcome when we feel like our world is ending?  This story says we can.  This story says that God will always find a way to welcome us back, to regather the community, to create new life, no matter what the odds.

But this story also comes with a warning, because God means it.  God means that welcome.  And we not to be the ones who stand in the way of it.  And I think that is what we are getting at in the rather enigmatic end to this story.  In the face of great and unimaginable destruction, the king does this amazingly generous thing, He regathers the community, he welcomes everyone, everyone back to the party.  But some of his old friends, I guess the ones who decided to show up after all, they just aren’t having it.  They refuse to put on the wedding robes.  They are not willing to party with these new guests.  Because welcoming new people comes with risks.  What if the new people aren’t like us?  What if they don’t know the rules?  What if they make noise?  What if they sit in my seat?  What if they try to make us do new things?

Yeah they do.  And apparently God is here for it.  God is here for all the mess that comes with welcoming strangers.  In fact the only thing the king seems truly upset about throughout this whole parable is the refusal of his friends, those who already know him, who already know his truth to participate in his generous abundance.

So the question becomes, will you put on the robe?  Will you come to the feast of God’s table?  Will join the party and welcome all the guests?  Even when it is weird and strange.  Even when means being in relationship with people who you really don’t like.  Even when it means seeking reconciliation and forgiveness with people who have wronged you, who have held repulsive views, who have hurt others through their actions, beliefs or inaction.  Even when our own survival and security feels threatened?

Because that is what abundant welcome really means, dangerous risk and unimaginable rewards.  But when we can welcome it, that is when the party truly begins.  Amen.