Participating in the Party

 

Matthew 22:1-14 (Read the text first. No, really, do it. When it was read in church today, faces all over the sanctuary were scrunched up in disgust, heads shaking. When I got to the pulpit, someone called out, "Good luck, Kara!") There is a gentle, G-rated version of this parable in Luke. I kind of wish we’d gotten that one today. It skips the rampant murdering and the gnashing of teeth. Years ago, Pastor Lisa called Matthew’s the ‘Quinten Tarrantino version.” Matthew goes for the garish violence, the action movie effects. You can almost hear the dissonant soundtrack. I’m more in a Norwegian Christmas movie mood. My week began with friends gathered in the presence of the living God with trust and gratitude, and devolved into freebasing alarming news about our world and country and worrying about my kids on their college campuses.   But then, Matthew was written not long after Jerusalem was burned to the ground and the temple was destroyed, amidst deep class divides, heavy taxation, stark inequality, and great tension between religious groups. The people would have listened to this story. Like a mom breaking through to a kid in mid-tantrum, maybe the tone matched the moment.    So maybe, sitting here today, with whatever are our own “mountains crumbing into the heart of the sea, earth-shaking, waters roaring” circumstances, as the psalmist so aptly describes, maybe what we need is not a soothing lefse-laden distraction, but a spicy shot of hyperbole. In any case, that’s what we’re getting.   So, first, let’s clear up, what even is a parable?  It is not a fable – a simple little tale with a direct moral lesson like The Tortoise and the Hare or The Boy who Cried Wolf. And it’s not an allegory with a singular aim like Animal Farm or Pilgrim’s Progress where the pilgrim named “Christian” gets insight on his journey from someone named “Interpreter” and help from, you guessed it, “Help.”    Parables are exaggerated stories meant to provoke and evoke. Jesus spoke in parables a lot. One thing I love about the TV series The Chosen how confused and sometimes annoyed the disciples are by Jesus’ cryptic parables. He rarely explains what they mean. He just drops these perplexing, unsettling stories that shake up the soul, and then goes quiet and leaves it there.   One more word of prep. Remember, to every scripture we read we bring two things: we bring our question, Who is this God and what is God up to? But we also bring ourselves and our world, and whatever is happening here and now, (sometimes we articulate that as the always-lived question, What is a good life and how do we live it?) Then we trust that showing up together, with our hearts open in the presence of the living Christ, the Holy Spirit will move through it all and somehow we’ll leave here with a word from God.   So let’s get to it, and listen again to this intense parable for the word of the I am-with-you-God to us today.   The king of a land is throwing a party. And it’s personal. He’s overjoyed. His son is getting married. This party is more food than you’ve ever seen at one time, the best meal you’ve ever eaten, dancing and music and conversation and merriment, inside the home of the king. As might be expected, those with status, power, and money are invited to attend. The world as it is.   But something inconceivable happens – the lords and ladies of the land turn down the invitation. Every single one. I have too much to do, they say, to a person. I’m too busy. I couldn’t possibly stop. My work needs me. I’m important, essential. I am making things, growing things, building things. Don’t interrupt me.  Perhaps some have even quite forgotten about the king, except as an idea, a concept out there. Their world has constricted to their own domain; they’ve lost all connection to everything and everyone beyond. An invitation to party with the king is an irrelevant fantasy, a junk-mail child’s tale, a silly side story that doesn’t matter in real life. Their life. Life with them at the center.   But the king persists.  He sends new messengers. Please come celebrate with me. Look, the table is set, the feast is prepared, it’s lavish and wonderful and ready for you. All you have to do is show up.   Then some become enraged. As though we could just drop everything and come to a party?  How dare you insinuate our work is so worthless? How dare you interrupt us again? Then, as the idiom suggests might happen, they torture and kill the messengers.   Now the king is angry, and his power and reach is greater than theirs, so he sends his army and wipes out all the murderers and burns down their city. Now all they had going is gone in an instant -  as though swept away by a hurricane or wildfire, wiped out by a stock market collapse or decimated by stage 4 cancer. Because nothing lasts anyway, and our self-made, insulated realms of safety and control are fleeting illusion.    Now with labels, power, and ranking torn down, the rat race wrecked, and no work left to do, with the wealthy unworthy, and everything exposed as fleeting and false – the king doesn’t cancel the wedding to rebuild the city, doesn’t redirect reception funds to reestablish the destroyed economy and elevate a new elite.   He goes ahead with the party. The invitation goes out a third time. This time, the king invites everyone –far and wide. This feast is for all.  And there is no more way to earn your way in. The city is in ashes, so everyone, everywhere, come to the party and find abundant food, and satisfying company. Come linger in the presence and joy of the king and one another.   And there is nowhere left to aspire to than that – but there never has been, really.  Some of these guests never thought they’d set foot on the royal grounds, let alone inside the banquet hall. Others may have been striving and straining to one day be worthy of such an invitation, but today all that is over. They are all already invited.   So, the people come from far and wide. The good and the bad, Jesus says. The truly deserving and the completely undeserving. They set down their labor and labels, and they show up.     And when one arrives at the wedding of a gracious host, you are provided with a robe fit for the occasion and fit to you, clean and scented, ornately decorated and comfortable. The robe is draped over you as you enter the door. Dusty from the road, worn out from the journey, having lost it all, or stumbling in unawares, just as you are, however you are, whoever you are, however you came you’ve now become an honored guest of the king. Each and all, without distinction or merit, equally claimed, equally esteemed, equally welcomed.   This is where Luke – which already excluded any murdering or other unpleasantness in his telling – ends the story. But Matthew continues.    Among the guests is one not dressed for the occasion. Imagine he came in his scrubs, or a three-piece suit, his marathon number, or mottoed t-shirt, sloganned cap, or unique, one-of-a-kind artsy jacket. Waving off robe held out to him, with his arm outstretched and phone recording, he captures his own arrival live for his 400K followers. Or maybe he slinks in like he’s crashing the joint, bypassing the front door to creep through the garden hedge.   The King spots the man, Friend! The king calls him, How did you get in here without a wedding robe? And the man is speechless. He has no answer. He came in the identity he cultivated; he came in the self he’d been constructing. He came ready to compete and compare, to impress and inspire. He didn’t need a robe like everyone else; he had his own garb.  How are you here, the king asks, if you refuse to receive and participate?   So the guest is dismissed, or rather, he’s forcibly removed, with all the drama and cartoonish gore of the rest of the tale.  Cell phone smashed, he is bound hand and foot tossed into ‘outer darkness.’ Which is to say, perhaps, that the lurking void of terrifying nothingness he’d spent his life fleeing and guarding against now swallows him whole.   Jesus concludes the parable with, “For many are called, but few are chosen.”  Everyone is invited, all are called. And if you wandered around the party asking people how they ended up there, every one would answer with joy some version of, “I didn’t do a thing! I was chosen!”   The kingdom of heaven is like a king who throws a party.    The king is extravagant but not indulgent, generous but not indifferent. This matters. It’s not a side thing; it’s everything. The party will cost you nothing and nothing less than everything. You’re invited but this is not your party. You don’t set the terms. It’s the King’s party and everyone is invited.   There’s a new reality coming and you can be part of it. Come, God invites. Just show up, and if you do, I will give you everything you need. You will lack nothing. This is grace. But there is an expectation. That you leave behind everything - the work, and the ranking and labels. The fears that grab you, and the defenses you build. The stories you weave and the self you construct to beat back the terrifying void—you can’t bring those in. Come vulnerable and receive. Participate in the party. You must allow yourself to be claimed and provided for, honored, welcomed, and chosen.   Sometimes the gentleness and beauty of the Luke-style invitation will do it, and I am there. This is the reality I want to live in.     But sometimes I am so entrenched in fear and illusion that I need my ego project murdered and city burned down Tarrantino-style, because I will hear the invitation and refuse. That was me this week. I’ll stay in the world, in my work, I will center myself and my fears, I will let the noise and clamor of the crumbling empire fill my ears and ignore the invitation. Sometimes the invitation feels way too invasive or risky, it pokes right at my personal projects and I lash out, defensive, self-protective. I kill the messenger or refuse the robe. And that’s an option. We can consign ourselves to the world that is ending, the story line that reaches its conclusion in the nothingness and darkness we’re running from but won’t admit it. God does not force us to join in the freedom being extended to us.   But hear this: God is remaking the world.  God is tearing down what’s broken and bringing the new. The life of reconciliation to God and all others isours in Jesus Christ.  The new creation in complete belonging to God and all others is being extended to us, even right now, today, during, and in the middle of, everything else we see and hear and feel and are convinced must be most real and most powerful. Within this breaking down world, unbreakable life is already underway. The Spirit of Christ is here, healing, renewing, connecting. This cannot be stopped. In the suffering we find joy. In the dying we’re given life. Beauty and hope break into the ugliness and despair. God has come, God is with us, God’s love will be all in all for all.  Holy One, help us surrender all and accept your invitation, receive your grace that gives us what we need, and participate in the party. Amen.