The Grace of Invitation, Oct 9, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 04:53PM By the Rev. Dirk C. Reinken
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"And the King said to him, 'Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?'" (Matthew 22:12)
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
"Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe? . . . Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth! For many are called, but few are chosen." And then we get to say, "Praise to you, Lord Christ!" Sometimes we just might not want to say "Praise to you" after some of the Gospels we hear. Is this the way we really want to think about God, as someone who would cast us off into outer darkness?
I mean, think about it. Isn't it a little bit unfair? The man wasn't expecting to be invited to a wedding feast. He was just a guy on the street, and some of the King's servants pass by, saying, "The King is throwing a wedding banquet. Come! Come!" And all the people come, the good and the bad. It doesn't matter how good or how bad you've been. You're invited. Now, that's good news. That's gospel.
But then, as the King is looking around the room, all the people of the city are there. They are having this great feast, and he notices this guy against the wall, sort of hanging back, not really participating perhaps, and asks, "Where is your wedding garment?" The guy looks at him, shocked. How would he have had time to go get ready for the feast? The King's servants literally just grabbed him off the street. But still, he gets banished into outer darkness.
So, where is your wedding garment? What is the wedding garment? How are we to hear this parable? How is this parable going to be interpreted as good news, as Gospel, for us in this 21st century? I think it helps a little bit for us to understand the parable itself.
As with all of Jesus' parables, you can never push the imagery too far. This is not about a wedding. This is about the Kingdom of God. And Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to this great wedding feast, to this wonderful banquet that is the best celebration you could have in Jesus' day. Many times, in Scripture, the Kingdom of Heaven is, in fact, compared to a great feast. One of the passages from Isaiah that is popular at funerals speaks of God tearing away the veil that separates earth from heaven and revealing the great feast that awaits us all. Heaven is described as a table over-flowing with food, filled with the best wine and meat. In the Book of Revelation, it's the same image: a feast at the end of time.
So the community that Matthew was writing to would have heard this passage in a particular way. They would have thought of a feast that they celebrate each week. This table, this Eucharist, this feast here on earth that is a fore-shadowing of the wedding banquet that awaits in heaven. In fact, in tradition, it was common for the priest, when the bread was broken and given to the people, to echo this wedding feast by saying, "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the lamb."
So we're talking about the Kingdom of God, not about weddings. I think the parable is calling us to wrestle with two struggles we have as Christians: the relationships between works on the one hand, and grace on the other. Both are at play in this parable, and it's something that early Christians struggled with as well.
In Scripture, Paul teaches us that we are not justified by works, but faith; and from James we learn that faith without works is dead. And we know from the words we proclaim in our liturgies over and over again that we can never save ourselves. Nothing that we can do gives us the gift of salvation. It is strictly a gift given by God freely to everyone. It's an invitation, like in today's parable, that is offered to each person on the street, whether good or bad. That's grace.
But in order to get to the feast, you have to accept the invitation. You have to be willing to show up in order to experience that gift. The good and the bad, both aware of their hunger for that grace, showed up. And then there's one person who seems to stand apart from all the rest because he doesn't have his wedding garment.
Now, everyone else was called just like he was called. And yet, the King wasn't made at them, so they must have had their wedding garments. So what does the wedding garment stand in for? I suspect it's that age-old problem that we as human beings have when it comes to our relationship with God. So often we want to define that relationship on our terms rather than on God's terms.
Remember the Garden of Eden? God says, "I've given you all this stuff. I've made you in my image. I've given you dominion over all of creation. Our whole purpose is to simply enjoy this together. Just don't do this one thing." Yet, what do Adam and Eve do? They say, "Uh, we want to be like God so we're going to eat of the one tree he told us to leave alone. We want to do this relationship on our terms rather than on God's terms." So, out they went from Eden into the darkness of everyday struggle.
But the nature of grace is such that God never gave up on them. The whole history of salvation is God saying after them, "Wait, come back! On my terms, but come back!" So God makes the fundamental covenant with Abraham and Sarah to be the God of all their descendants; so God frees them from slavery to Pharaoh, and givem their own land; so God gives them the Torah to show how to be holy before God; so God gives them the prophets to call them back into right relationship when they yet again chose to go away on their own terms. Finally, God gives them God's own son so that we can all feast with God at this great banquet.
It's an invitation that God is so insistently offering that God will even offer it from the wood of the Cross.
The wedding garment means that we need to learn to accept this invitation on God's terms. I know that as 21st century people this sometimes gets our hackles up. We say, "W-W-Wait a minute. What does this mean? I don't like people putting demands on me." First, we have to understand what God is asking. God is simply asking that we appreciate what's going, that we be aware of the invitation and of its meaning. That's where it all starts - just show up. Don't hang back. Just show up.
By showing up, by simply being willing to open our eyes to what God is doing a transformation starts to take place in our hearts and souls: the way we say God, the way we see ourselves, and they way we see each other as ones made in God's image.
The danger of this parable is that we can focus on the wedding guest without the garment and become a judgmental people. Yet the Gospel says that the invitation is given to every one , whether or God, and to accept it all that you have to do is show up and be willing to open your eyes and see what God is doing.
So often when we talk about religion in our culture we reduce it to behavior, to ideas of what's right and what's wrong. But the focus can't be on behavior. It has to be on relationship, because it is in relationship where we allow God to take the initiative in our lives. Behavior is about us. Invitation and relationship is about God. It's in relationship where God says "Come!" and we say "Yes, we come." Then, simply by showing up, we learn how to respond to that gift. Grace comes first. Works follow as a response to that grace.
Earlier in Matthew's Gospel Jesus said a couple words that puts us on edge as we think about the relationship between grace and works. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." So that makes us think, "Whoops, we have to make sure all our "I's" are dotted and all our "T's" are crossed, everything is put away properly in the kitchen, all my clothes are on straight, I'm behaving myself and never do anything wrong.
A little later Jesus tells the story of how a rich man comes to see him and asks, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus replies that he knows the man already keeps the Torah and all its commandments so he says, "If you would be perfect, go and sell everything you have." The story ends with the rich young man walking away very dejected because he has a lot of things to sell. So, we think, "O Lord, in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven, we have to give everything away, our closest possession, our latest technology, our money" and so forth.
But the Greek word that is used for perfect in both of these instances doesn't mean getting it right, it means something else. The Greek word for perfect conveys a whole host of ideas. First, it's simply used to describe an initiation into a religious community. You could think of the perfection of the wedding garment as the baptismal garment that we put in before setting at God's table to feast.
Another meaning in the Greek world was being mature in one's behavior, which means that being perfect is simply about growing up, simply about evolving and changing over time. It means being aware of your limits, but also being aware of your strengths, and all those other things we associate with maturity.
But the meaning that I really love, which is often at play in its use in Scripture, is to become truly and complete genuine - not putting on airs, not pretending to be someone else, not trying to pose, but to be simply who you are as God created you to be. That is the definition of prefect in Scripture: to become who God is creating you to be.
Another part of that definition of "perfect" implies that it's something that happens not at the beginning of the journey, but at its end. There's this wonderful sentence of invitation that's in the service leaflet of another congregation I use to serve at: "Come as you are. Leave as God intends you to be." Just simply by showing up we open ourselves to becoming the true and complete genuine person that God has called us to be.
That's what everyone was looking for at the wedding banquet - to simply become whomever God had called them to be. Because they King invited them from the streets - as outsiders - the invitation showed them had identity and value in the King's eyes. Because the invitation was given to them, their lives took on a trajectory of hope.
Maybe they came out of curiosity at first. What does the palace look like? What kind of food is laid out? What dress did the Bride choose to wear? But, that changed to hope that all the best things in the world were meant for them as well.
I suspect the one who didn't have the wedding garment was the one who wasn't interested in being who God created him to be. He was the one who was more interested in pretending whom he wanted to be instead.
The Christian journey begins with God's invitation, but it continues through our willingness to say "yes" to that invitation and our openness to seeing ourselves as God sees us. Not worrying about how others see us, but accepting the loving embrace of the one who invites us just as we are. Amen.
List to an mp3 file of the sermon by clicking: The Grace of Invitation