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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
And I say this, remember, as Jesus reveals with his life and this story, I'm gonna argue, invitation is God's defining posture. Punishment and violence, those are our cruel and misguided obsessions. Last week we jumped into a new teaching series, this stretch of conversations we're having before Advent this year entitled Jesus on Judgment and that might sound ominous, might tap into some memories that you have of your own religious experience or perhaps it's new for you. Whether you might be coming from far away or maybe you're, as I've already set, a fixture around here, we're going to do our best over these next few weeks to work through some of the stories that Jesus told that quite frankly Christians haven't always known what to do with them. And why why would we do something like that?
Speaker 1:Well because the stories are there for one and we're kinda like a book club. Right? A big book club. We read, we discuss and then we repeat. And I also wanna say though that we are diving in because Jesus is at the center of these stories.
Speaker 1:He's provocative and he's surprising and he's prophetic and also comedic in them and we trust that along the way he reveals something to us of whoever and whatever God might be. And last week, we worked through a parable that is often called the story of the wicked tenants. These characters who are living in someone else's vineyard and there's some violent imagery there of course and Jesus seems to have told the story with great effect because they shouted him down when he was done. But I love how Jeremy nudged us to consider that instead of trying to figure out who the real life historical reference are for those tenants, maybe we should remind ourselves that if God as the owner is fighting for anything in the story, it's for what is God's. Jeremy said it this way, we are the vineyard.
Speaker 1:Those of us who have avoided religion for far too long and those of us who become too religious for our own good. And Jesus, Jesus, he's the faithful, self sacrificing son intent on bringing everything that can be harvested back home to God. And I wanna suggest to you that this is the way we should always listen to Jesus with judgment on his lips. With this keen awareness that he never said anything in judgment or in harshness or in warning that he could undo or that could undo all that he showed us and sealed us in with his love. And today, we need to cover another doozy of a story.
Speaker 1:We need to work through a parable of unprepared guests. We need to talk about inspired reception and a banquet and wardrobe matters and judgment and disruption. But before I drag you with me into all of that, why don't we take a moment and pray together? Join me. God, you are present to us.
Speaker 1:Now in the rhythms and the mystery of community, certainly as we've observed the sacrament of baptism today we are caught up again in the mystery of grace that comes to us in the welcome we receive in this moment, in the kind words spoken, in the familiarity and the difference that we encounter here and there is no need for us to posture, there's no need for us to perform in these moments because we are seen and known as we are and we are known by your goodness And we trust that you meet us here maybe in a state of contentment or perhaps we feel disquiet as we come to this space. Maybe we feel in our minds a sense of scatteredness. Perhaps we're feeling quite settled today. And in it all, we ask, would you come and would you let us be found in our seeking and in our wonder? And in all of our questions as we turn to ancient words.
Speaker 1:Words that feel like they come from so far away from us maybe. We pray, spirit, would you be our guide into light and into truth, showing us a new way forward. And may we catch a glimpse of your kind and persistent work in us, we ask in the name of Christ our hope. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna press play on the VCR. Let's jump right in. Matthew chapter 22 begins this way. Jesus spoke to them in parables saying, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. And he sent his servants to those who'd been invited to the banquet to tell them to come but they refused.
Speaker 1:So he sent some more servants and said, tell those who've been invited that I've prepared dinner. My oxen and fatted cattle have been butchered. Everything's ready. Come to the wedding banquet. But they paid no attention and they went off.
Speaker 1:One to his field, another to his business, and the rest of them, they seized his servants and they mistreated them and they killed them. And this made the king quite angry so he sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. And then he said to his servants, the wedding banquet is ready. Those I invited didn't deserve to come so go to the street corners, invite to the banquet anyone you can find. So the servants went out into the streets, gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good And the wedding hall was filled with guests.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna pause it right there. There are some scholars who think that the earliest versions of this story actually ended there. That the remaining verses, which we are going get to, they're another story or episode imposed on the original and as I said, we'll get there. The reason I pause is so we can remind ourselves of the opportunity that we have when we get to read stories like this. See, this is a parable that appears in some form in a number of different places in ancient texts.
Speaker 1:There's this version from Matthew's gospel where the story is positioned in an exchange that Jesus is having with some of his contemporary teachers of Torah. In this particular version, as you have seen, is quite bleak, quite dark with those people invited to the banquet rejecting and killing the postal workers. Right? And then the king going all John Wick and destroying them and burning their city. Coincidentally then he once he's done tirating, he goes and invites some more guests which read one way with God playing the part of the king means that God kills people to scare other people into God's kingdom.
Speaker 1:And that doesn't sound right given who's telling the story. Alternatively, in Luke's version, the invites go out and the host receives a bunch of excuses from people who can't work it into their schedules and this makes him upset but he just turns and as the text says he invites the poor, the crippled and the blind to the party. And when that still doesn't fill the table, his servants go out into the roads in the countryside to ensure that every seat will be filled. Interestingly, there's another version comes to us in the gospel of Thomas which is this apocryphal text that was written likely a little later than some of the gospels and in that version there's this long list of invitees to the party and they all decline citing business or personal matters and while the servants are sent out to collect some more guests, here Jesus does something interesting. He offers an oddly specific injunction that traders and merchants will never be welcomed into God's house which is problematic if you handle your own investments or go on Facebook marketplace.
Speaker 1:Right? And I mentioned that there are versions of this story because in almost every parable we're going to work through over the next few weeks, there are multiple versions. Each of them inspired and shaped by the ancient community that held them and by the ancient authors and editors that inspired themselves and the communities around them to think about who Jesus was and that creative authorial intent is assumed whenever you read the scriptures and we should be wary of any tendency to try to flatten such texts into a cohesive one version or any attempt to wriggle free of the nuance that there must have been in the early Christian understandings of what Jesus meant when he told certain stories. And why should we be careful? Well, because to assume the inspired and culturally informed intent of ancient authors is the surest and safest way to open your heart and mind to the spirit inspired, culturally engaged reception of scripture today.
Speaker 1:To assume that they were creative humans writing these texts is also to take up the work of being creative humans receiving these texts. Yeah, we gotta be honest about what the complexity is as we come to this text and we can try to be faithful to let Jesus' life help us understand his words. Put put another way, because these are such layered stories, it's really important to always anchor our interpretations in what we know about the storyteller. And maybe that isn't how you've heard the scriptures talked about before and some of what I'm saying is making you a little uneasy. Or maybe you're the kind of person that you're wondering why people even read the bible anymore anyways.
Speaker 1:It's just an ancient book full of violence and misogyny and classism. Likely we're probably all somewhere in between these things. We're just curious about how to read really hard stories. And wherever we are, I assure you the tension you feel isn't unique. It's been there since Jesus got in front of people and told parables to his followers and then they tried to make sense of them.
Speaker 1:And I think it's actually the tension that keeps us moving in the right direction. Now, what's unmistakable here is that there's a central metaphor that Jesus uses in the story. In describing the kingdom of heaven as a wedding banquet, he was drawing on an idea that was already ancient in his time. For example, the prophet Isaiah had written hundreds of years before Jesus was alive anticipating a day when, quote, the Lord Almighty will one day prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats, the finest of wines and the sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces. That's Isaiah 25.
Speaker 1:Which is this picture of a future messianic hope that was part of and in some ways continues to be part of the Jewish imagination. It pops up all over the Hebrew bible, it pops up in later Jewish commentary. Instance, there's a story in the Babylonian Talmud of a rabbi who tells a similar tale to what Jesus does here about a king who invites some guests to a banquet but he forgets to put the date and time on the invites. And some of his guests see this so they get decked out and they go and wait beside the king's door because it could happen anytime. While other people go about their business saying, I'm not going to waste my time waiting for this party, I've stuff to do.
Speaker 1:And what such stories reveal is a couple of things. First, the way that Jewish people were waiting for deliverance that could arrive at any time. And they felt they needed to be watchful. And second, there's this image of a time when all will be gathered. How divine time would be realized in a banquet to which all nations would be invited.
Speaker 1:And I mention that to you because the Christian tradition, as interpreters of these Jewish ideas and imagination, we've done some funny things with Jesus when he sounds judgy. We've undervalued his primary metaphors at times. We've had this tendency to fixate on the particular kinds and duration of torment reserved for those who incur God's wrath and if you doubt me, just go ahead, Google medieval Christian art and judgment and make sure there aren't children in the room. Okay? I promise you, we've had this tendency to read stories of judgment and then hastily construct theological categories or try to identify the historical actors that we feel that those stories refer to.
Speaker 1:And what happens when we read that way? Well, we remove ourselves from the scope of Jesus' words which I would argue and I'm not alone in this, that's what early Christian authors and readers of Matthew's gospel seemed to be doing with their injection of violence into this story. For the record, the violence here is ridiculous, it's absurd, it's hyperbolic. I mean think about it, think about the narrative structure. The king in the story sends out invites, RSVPs come back violently so he blows out the candles, he cancels the DJ, he lets all the food go to waste and he goes to war.
Speaker 1:It's obviously fantastical but it is full of violence. Violence potentially rooted more in early Christian attempts to distinguish themselves from other religious groups decades after Jesus was alive. Violence potentially imported more from their experience of watching Jerusalem fall and burn in seventy c e than from Jesus' actual storytelling. The violence here in Jesus' words, it was rooted in human experience But it's violence that's at odds with the metaphor and the imagery that Jesus was drawing from and certainly trying to emphasize. Remember, trust the storyteller.
Speaker 1:I would argue that the defining characteristic of this story is not impending judgment. I'm with scholar Alice McKenzie when she says that this is a story in which we are barraged by invitation. Jesus is offering a warning and we're gonna get to that. But he does so because he's attempting to stir hearts with an ancient and holy image of the kingdom of heaven, his kingdom as a banquet with the best of meats and the finest of wines and an unlimited guest list and that's probably the image we need if we've been exposed to traditions of Christianity that have talked more about punishment and divine anger than they have about the feast that is ahead for all. Maybe we've had this kind of undefined fear that God might somehow be more committed to excluding us than welcoming us home.
Speaker 1:Or maybe we've been written off or we've been left out or we've carried the sense that our mistakes are somehow part of an intrinsic flaw that we can't change. And I think in this way, I probably name all of us. And I say this, remember, as Jesus reveals with his life and this story, I'm gonna argue, invitation is God's defining posture. Punishment and violence, those are our cruel and misguided obsessions. That brings us to the closing versions of this story.
Speaker 1:Here's the final scene, let me set it for you. The banquet hall's been filled, the band's playing, drinks are flowing, dessert course is being served and the king comes in to see his guests and he notices that there's a man in this party who wasn't wearing wedding clothes. So he asks, how did you get in here without wedding clothes friend? The man is just speechless. Another king told the attendants, tie him hand and foot, throw him outside into darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Speaker 1:And that's the end of the story and then Jesus says this, for many are invited but few are chosen. Lots going on there. We won't get to all the nuance. But I do want to start by pointing out something to anyone who might be suspicious of the ways I've suggested we should read the preceding verses. Perhaps you feel I've rigged the deck too far to the side of a Jesus who would just frivolously push aside human error and sin.
Speaker 1:See, there's something hidden here in plain sight. I missed it in most of my reading and I was well into my writing and thinking about today when I was stuck or struck by how the king comes up to the guy not wearing the right outfit and he calls him friend. And this is no small insignificant descriptor thrown in. This is a brilliant literary signifier intended to stop us in our continuing attempts to image God as a vengeful petty king that would let someone into a party just to throw them out. And and why did that stop me in my tracks?
Speaker 1:Why did it change the way fundamentally I have always heard and read this story? Well because as Barbara Reed notes, this is the same term that Jesus will use in Matthew 26 to address Judas, his friend, as he betrayed him to the authorities. And that means that this parable and that term are a great affront to our tendency to think that even our unfaithfulness to and our betrayal of God's goodness could somehow inspire judgment from Jesus. In having the king in his story say friend, Jesus welcomes all of us at our worst and our weakest. And I invite you to think about this.
Speaker 1:Isn't it fun to consider that Jesus had to work out and form in his parables the great resources of mercy that he was going to need in his future and his great dark moments? With that word friend hanging over all of us, I rest my case to some degree. Because we still have to deal with the imagery here and we need to do so imaginatively. What I can tell you is that Christian commentators throughout the centuries have almost exclusively interpreted Jesus' language here as addressing concerns about what theologians call the elect. Those who are saved and held by God's hand at the end of all time.
Speaker 1:Another way of saying that is to say that Christians have often thought that this parable deals with who's going to be in and who's going to be thrown out. I do think that Jesus is warning about that but maybe not in the way that we assume. It all comes down to what we think is going on with this guy's wardrobe and let me give you some examples of how we try to explain this. Well, in the fourth century, Saint Augustine, he interpreted it allegorically. He said, I think Jesus is warning Christians to clothe their hearts with righteousness and good conscience and to fail to do so, this is going to risk God's judgment.
Speaker 1:A little later, Gregory the Greek, writing in the sixth century, he read this parable in line with what Paul says in first Corinthians 13. He argued that this character signifies the person who thinks they can benefit from God's mercy without clothing themselves with acts of love And I appreciate those imaginative interpretations but I still not quite sure what to do with the imagery here and I I'm inclined to try to interpret more in line with the themes and the details that we derive from the gospels themselves. See, the story already told us that the good and the bad were all let in as guests and that's in line with the stories we have of Jesus who forgives and heals and restores those who were considered outsiders. Just go and read the story of the Syrophoenician woman or the Roman centurion slave or the thief on the cross if you want to know what I'm thinking of. And this means that this character isn't being judged because they somehow inherently deserve God's wrath.
Speaker 1:What's important is that the character made no preparation to wear something fitting to a feast they were invited to and chose to attend. And in this way, Jesus is telling a story I think about any person who's invited and included in God's great mercy but who in their actions chooses to identify themselves as anything other than the undeserving guest at God's expensive table? Jesus was telling this story to teachers of the law in his own time so is it possible that he has in mind those in his day who were separating themselves from sinners, those who were ritually impure in their eyes? We see Jesus do this in other places in the gospels. Also Jesus' parable has come to us.
Speaker 1:Here we are sitting reading it. So is it possible that this character mirrors those parts in me? That sometimes think that the moral high ground or informed political views or wokeness or being uncompromising instead of compassionate that that somehow makes me different or better than anyone I might sit beside at any table. With that frame, the darkness this character is put out into is the darkness of their own choosing. Because they mirror what Jesus said to Nicodemus in John three nineteen when he said that if God offers any judgment, it's this, that light has come into the world through Jesus.
Speaker 1:But people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Beware, Jesus says in this parable, because not everyone chooses to let mercy be the only way they get into God's future. Beware, because the temptation to claim special status or recognition for myself, to somehow position ourselves as right or as God's chosen or as justified over and against those people over there, that impulse is so strong and it is misguided. To not heed Jesus' warning to us here would be like all of us showing up at the best party thrown downtown, an opulent, raging party that none of us deserves to be at and instead of wearing your best outfit and your dancing shoes, you put on your team colors and your medals of distinction and your affiliations and your flags instead. Be careful, Jesus says.
Speaker 1:God's mercy will let you choose those things and the ways they separate you from something so much better. And in this, I think Jesus shows us the connection between judgment and disruption. And I don't mean that the disruptions in our lives like when things go awry or we mess things up, when it all falls apart, that somehow in those moments God's judgment is there behind the scenes giving us a verdict. I get it, we can learn from our mistakes surely and sometimes there are consequences and outcomes that disrupt our perspective and then help us adjust but to reduce judgment to something only punitive either now or in some far off day is to do a disservice to the story Jesus told. In this parable, Jesus takes our tendency to imagine God as vengeful and he disrupts it with his dream of things made right around a long and open table, not a scorched earth.
Speaker 1:He takes our tendency to think of all stories and narratives that we have as being defined by the clear sides they give us and the applications and the theological lines we get. And he disrupts our moral scales by reminding us that even at our worst, Christ calls us friend. In this story, maybe Jesus disrupts your long held loyalty to the idea of a God who longs to give you what you deserve And maybe in this moment you can feel something in yourself moving toward and maybe it's really tentative. This move towards a holy invitation you never expected you'd receive. It's an invitation to go home today, to put some music on and to dance at the sheer wonder that is your life as a gift or maybe to dance because it doesn't feel like one right now but life is worth dancing in.
Speaker 1:It's an invitation to attempt forgiveness with someone this week, maybe yourself, maybe it's a choice to choose joy over cynicism in your faith for a couple of days and see how that works. Maybe it's to make a meal with all the best meats and the finest of wines and to find some people to share it with, adorning your life with the kind of undeserved welcome you realize you've received and can't help but offer to the world. And why would you do that? I think because Jesus lived his life to show you that that's a better way and he told this story to help us find it. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:Spirit of the living God, present to us now in the mystery of word and image and the intersection of those metaphors with our lived experience and what it means to be human. We're grateful to be people of the story today. A story that stretches all the way back and it sweeps toward us and it catches us up and maybe that leaves us feeling a little disoriented. We aren't sure what to do with these ancient words. We aren't sure what to do with our life as it is which is why we pray.
Speaker 1:Would you help us as we do the work of holding onto the metaphors you wanted us to use in imagining a better world? Would you help us, each of us, this week as we struggle to hold on to the ways that you come right next to us wherever we are in our complexity and you call us friend? Would you help us as we carry? We're like the workers in this story carrying this wondrous invitation to a banquet where all are known and fed And that image changes everything. Thanks be to God in Christ who is our hope.
Speaker 1:Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 2:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk
Speaker 1:to you soon.