Exodus 32:1-14
Philippians 4:1-9 Matthew
22:1-14
Well, there’s no getting around it. Today’s Gospel Lesson is one
of the more uncomfortable passages in the Bible. In fact, David Lose of workingpreacher.com says, “Let’s just admit it: this is an ugly parable. No amount
of generalizing about God’s hospitality or vulnerability or invitation is going
to do away with that.”
Maybe it will help to just name some of the ugliness. First off,
the King burns an entire village because of the behavior of a few that reject
an invitation to his son’s wedding. Sure, they killed the messenger, but
burning a village seems a bit much. Then once it seems that everything is going
well, he has a guest bound and thrown into the outer darkness for having on the
wrong clothes. This is definitely the type of story that makes you want to – as
noted in the Pulpit Fiction Podcast – bring back the Christmas Jesus.
I mean, where is the love? Where is the God that is love? It is
in these places – where it appears that God is absent – that we must be very
careful, for before we know it we may find ourselves seeking idols to guide us
through the wilderness. They may seem innocent enough, but when we trust in the
sword or the firearm or the legislation, then we may find that we have built an
idol without knowing it. It may even seem patriotic, but when we assume that we
know our history because we are in the group that benefits most from our
version of the story, then we may have set up idols without knowing it. If, in
our anxiety over changes that make us feel vulnerable, we decide that it is
acceptable for someone else to be more vulnerable than us, we may have set up
idols without knowing it. Perhaps the wilderness is a better place for us to
start, anyway.
The Israelites had been led out of slavery and into the
wilderness. They rejoiced and complained and were fed and provided for. Now
that the presence of God was resting on the mountain they were terribly afraid,
and they sent Moses to represent them before God. It only makes sense that they
would expect that he had been consumed by the fire on the mountain. While it
may seem strange that they would try to make another God, when the Lord was so
near, the reality is that they were actually still attempting to worship the
Lord.
Even though Arron described the idol as “your gods that led you
out of Egypt” and made sacrifices to it, their festival was dedicated to the
Lord. You see, at that time a statue of a god was kind of a proxy – a stand in –
for the real thing. Not only that, but they had also encountered many regional
and household gods. The Lord, whose name means “I am”, was beginning to be
understood by the Israelites as the ruler of the gods – the Lord of Hosts – so
it seemed perfectly reasonable to make a god and sacrifice to it and declare a
feast to the Lord all at the same time.
The thing is, when you make your own god, that god’s will tends
to be an expression of what you want rather than anything truly divine. So, it
is no small wonder that the first thing they did was throw a party! Now, don’t
get me wrong here: I don’t think the Lord has anything against a good fête. The
point here is that they were really less interested in glorifying God than they
were in pleasing themselves. They let their fear and anxiety overtake them, and
they forgot about God’s promise to be with them and make a great nation of
them.
That promise is what saved them, in the end – even though Moses
actually had to remind God of God’s promise. This promise – the idea that God
has elected a people – is at the core of all of our readings today, and I
believe it is the source of both our great hope as well as a great tension that
we need to own up to as people of faith.
For here we are – God’s people – in the desperate wilderness of
post-modern life reading and celebrating these words that were written to (or
at least about) God’s people seeking hope in the midst of suffering and
oppression. It does make me wonder sometimes if my debt ridden first world
problems are relevant in the eyes of the Lord, yet I have to believe that they
are.
I have to believe it, because I do believe that God has included
me and you and even those that you and I would prefer God had not in the party
that is for the good and the bad alike. Now, going back to that nasty parable,
let’s assume that inclusion of all into the family of God was the goal here.
Even though Jesus spoke plainly about the good and the bad (some translations
even say evil), I don’t think that this is about inherent goodness or badness.
Maybe it even goes along with what Matthew wrote about the wheat and tares; we
don’t know.
What we do know is that this is all part of the drama of Holy
week. Jesus has entered Jerusalem to shouts of Hosannah (which translate to “save
us”). He has cleared the temple of the money changers. He’s teaching and
healing, and the Pharisees and Temple Leaders are trying to figure out how to
get rid of him. Yet Jesus seems almost like William Wallace in the movie, Braveheart,
going off to pick a fight with the British, because he just keeps hitting them
with stories of their rejection of God.
Whether it happened the way it was written or not, Matthew’s
community heard this story within a generation after the temple had been burned
to the ground and the son of the living God crucified so that they might be
saved. This terrible, ugly story is yet the story of God’s invitation to all
through the death and resurrection of Jesus. But it still holds an
uncomfortable tension that comes with the knowledge that God continues to elect
a certain people through whom the world might know that God is God and our gods
are not.
That tension is the chords that bind the guest who did not wear
the right cloak to the party. What in the world could be so important about
that cloak? How in all that is good and holy can God be OK with a majority of
us being lost in the “outer darkness”? For that matter, how can we be certain
that we are wearing the right cloak?
Unfortunately, these are questions that I don’t think this
parable seeks to answer. What it does tell us is that God is less concerned
about our goodness or badness and more concerned about our inclusiveness. What
it does tell us is that just showing up to the party is not enough. In other
words, going to church doesn’t make me a Christian any more than sitting in my
workshop makes me a carpenter.
We must “clothe ourselves with Christ” (as Paul tells us in many
of his letters) so that we may become what we were created to be – which is
nothing less than the very image of God reflected in hearts and faces
throughout all of creation.
You see it never was about my ability to exert my will over God’s
or yours, or yours over mine, or even about our expectation that God will do
anything apart from being faithful to God’s promises. And what God has promised
is to include us all in the banquet. What God has done is to bind us together
into the type of community in which we can rejoice in all things. In the
unbearable medical diagnosis, in the shifting of values in our community and
nation, in the loss of love, in the celebration of new life, in the tension of
disagreements spoken in love we find that God is with us.
And it is that presence, that hope, that peace that guards our
hearts and minds when all else fails. This is the reassurance that we need,
especially when we find ourselves in the wilderness. Sometimes it certainly
feels like our congregation is still moving toward the promised land. The easy
way of making a god out of our past or our traditions or some part of our life
together that pleases us is ever before us, but I believe that the harder way
is the way that we tend to go.
Anathea Portier-Young, Associate Professor of Old Testament
at Duke Divinity School describes it like this:
“The hard way forward
reckons with a divine presence that continues to elude our senses even as it
fills and animates them. The hard way forward knows the pain of absence and
doubt, but still chooses to follow cloud and fire through the desert-landscape
of freedom. And the living link between us and our God is the one who
challenges and negotiates with God for our forgiveness, for God’s enduring
presence among us, and for the fulfillment of every promise God has made to God’s
people.”
That one is Christ Jesus, in whom we live and move and have our
being; the one who offers peace when there is no understandable reason to be at
peace; the one who encourages us to move toward agreement not for the sake of
agreement, but for the sake of the gospel so that we might even recognize and
proclaim that which is true, that which is honorable, that which is just, that
which is pure, that which is pleasing, that which is commendable, and that
which worthy of praise.
Beloved of God, the Lord is near. So, let us continue to be
clothed in Christ, to invite all to the feast of love and hope, and to give
glory to God in all we do and say. Amen.
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