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 is 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 the 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 is ours 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.

Not a good time for a party

Matthew 22:1-14

Oh, friends.  We are so ridiculous when it comes to parables.  We like to know what things mean and we like for them to mean one thing, and we are flummoxed when they elude us.  

This parable is awesome.  It throws a scatter bomb into the preacher’s text study table, it twists the commentators and the scholars in knots, and leaves everyone flailing and grasping and often simply preaching the Old Testament text instead.  

What to make of the violent wedding feast before us: Was this parable originally about the religious leaders? A division within the early followers of Jesus? Was it about Herod – the king in the story is really bad and that’s him?  Is it about living like you mean it, about being God’s strictness in calling or choosing people followers, about our own rejecting or accepting eternal salvation? Is it a very subtle joke? 

There have been and will continue to be all sorts of interpretations in all sorts of times and places.  Because God is alive and active in our lives and world, and because scripture is a tool God uses to speak to us, then the Holy Spirit can speak through this parable a message God wants us to hear.  That’s the delight and frustration of parables, after all.

So without getting bogged down trying to crack the code and figure out the one right message, let’s accept that it’s an exaggerated story meant to provoke and evoke, and that God can use it to speak what we need to hear. And let’s approach it with curiosity, from our own place and time and struggle, right here and now, and see what might has to say to us.

So, first, where are we? What is our place and struggle?

We sit here tonight among human beings with a higher standard of living than any other time in history.  We live comfortably.  Even when we struggle, it’s a different kind of thing than generations and centuries gone before. 

And we have another unique distinction.  For the first time in history, it is possible to live almost entirely without God.  By that I mean, we don’t have any sense of needing God, any obligation to acknowledge God, or any built in mechanisms for experiencing God.  We’re a demystified people, without the thinness between the spiritual realm and the physical realm that has existed for all of human history leading up to the modern age.  You and I live in a scientific, material world, where things can be explained and tested, and where the authority of all is our own selves, our own experience, and the systems we’ve set up to keep things running smoothly.  There is no need for something bigger than us, we have gotten pretty darn big.

Life in this new world without God, without transcendence, what Charles Taylor calls, “The imminent frame”, consists primarily of meeting our own needs and wants, figuring out who we are, and pursuing our goals.  Personal advancement, upward mobility, and the ever constant fight against death, which, if its measured by delaying death we are winning, but if its measured by avoiding death, we’re just as ineffectual as ever.  Finding meaning today means pouring ourselves into our work, our families, perfecting our bodies or our portfolios or our home décor, and while there may be a hunger deep underneath for more, we don’t generally know how to talk about it or what to do with it.  Instead, when religion comes up it does so as fundamentalism or ideology, arguing about beliefs and world views, battling and warring over differences – either literally, or with words and judgment and separation and loathing.

We read and listen to the things that reinforce our own beliefs and cut off or ignore or openly disparage the things that don’t. We organize ourselves in communities that support our ideas and goals and divide ourselves from those that don’t.  There are simply too many choices and too few tools to help us make good ones, so we contract and get smaller and build higher walls.  We distract ourselves from any form of discomfort and feed ourselves with more – more food, more amusements, more work, more diversions – from sun up until way after sundown, we live on a gluttonous starvation diet of busy, and it keeps us from having to feel the longing or face the void.

Into this reality speaks this parable.

The king is throwing a party.  A stop what you’re doing, drop everything and come to the party kind of party.  The king’s son is getting married. It’s a big deal. This party is more food than you’ve ever seen at one time, the best meal you’ve ever eaten, and someone else is preparing it for you and serving you.  Dancing and music and conversation and merriment, and all you have to do is show up.  Only, you can’t because you’re an ordinary Joe and this party is happening at the king’s house, so, naturally, only the rich and the famous are invited to attend. (There are  standards, after all).

But something happens – they don’t go.  They have other, more pressing things, apparently, than celebrating at a lavish party with the king.  Some say they have to work on their farm, or on their business- they’d rather be working than celebrating, rather be trying to earn their way up the ladder than skip up to the top and dine with the king.  They’ve received the invitation – but tossed it right away; it just wasn’t going to be possible to attend.  I’ve too much to do, they say. My business needs me. My farm needs me.  I wish I could, but… and they turn away, unable, unwilling, to simply stop and enjoy the feast.  Many have quite simply forgotten the king, their world has constricted to their own domain, losing their connection to everything and everyone that lay beyond.  
The invitation to party with the king is just irrelevant fantasy.

Because life is production and consumption, a relentless uphill battle, stopping to feast makes no sense; no matter who it is that has invited them. Who’s got time for that? How far behind would I get if I did that? 

In fact, some get so angry at the invitation to drop it all and come party, that they torture and kill the messengers – it enrages them to be treated as though they could just leave things and come to a party.  How dare these messengers insinuate their work is so worthless they could just drop it? How dare they stand there parading an alternative as though it was a real option – so enticing and taunting?  Flaunting this freedom, this silliness, in the face of their essential work?  

It’s the family who refuses to sign their kids up for everything, saying that time at home is more important, the person who turns off their email and phone on the weekends, the one who takes their full vacation time, or leaves the board meeting for their kid’s volleyball game – how nice for them! 

I could never do that –

 my life is too busy,

my work is too pressing,

the pressure is too great.

 The kids would get behind. 

My boss would think I’m not committed.

I would lose the chance for advancement. 

What would people say? 

There is little in life as infuriating as someone living health right in front of your unhealth, someone balancing in the face of your imbalance.  Who do they think they are? They are breaking the rules, the messages that say we are supposed to be too busy, too committed, running too fast to keep up, eating not quite like we should, not sleeping enough, wishing we could have more but knowing it’s impossible.  And here they stand, acting like it’s possible.

How dare they!?

There’s a little folk tale that goes something like this:

There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.

As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.

The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”

The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”

“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.

“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.

The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”

The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.

“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?”

The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”

The fisherman asks, “And after that?”

The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”

The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

And the business man kills the fisherman. 

No, that’s not really there. But it might be. Because the fisherman just took away everything the businessman had ever been about, in one fell swoop.

So after they kill the messengers, the king retaliates and wipes out all the murders and burns down their businesses and the whole thing they had going is gone in an instant-  it doesn’t last, nothing lasts, after all, but we pour ourselves into it all as though it does.  The grass withers and the flower fades and all day long we toil under the sun…and insert all those other biblical images for how temporary things are here. 

Now with the farms gone and the businesses gone and the wealthy business owners gone with all barriers torn down, and false power and ranking and rat race and security gone, and everything exposed for what it was – fleeting –the invitation goes out again. 

And this time, the king invites everyone –far and wide, this party needs people and this feast is for all.  And there is no more way to earn your way up, the city is in ashes, so everyone, everywhere, come to the party and find abundant food and rich company and sit in the presence of the king.  

And there is nowhere else to aspire to than that – there never has been, really.  Some of them never thought they’d set foot on the royal grounds let alone inside the banquet hall, others may have been working up to being established, or wealthy, or respected, enough to one day be worthy of an invitation, but today all that is over. They are all already invited.

There is no more distinction between rich and poor, connected and marginalized, wealthy and impoverished – the city is in ashes and they are all invited to the party.  Those who have already self-selected out are missing it. But everybody else – good and bad, is welcome in the palace ballroom.

So the people drop their work and come, from far and wide, they set down their labor and put aside their theories about who should and shouldn’t be allowed at such a thing and which category they belong to, and they show up.  Scrubbed and dressed up with flowers in their hair and fiddles in their hands, they stream into the celebration to dine with the king.  Bring your swimsuit and a jacket for the bonfire! This is going to go on for a while!  And the party commences. 

Except among them is someone who is not dressed for the occasion. Among them is one who came in his uniform, in his scrubs, in his three-piece suit, in his work clothes – standing in the banquet hall with one foot out the door,

I can only stay a minute,

 I’m not really here, don’t mind me!

I just need to slip out in a few,

 I just need to take a quick call,

let me just shoot off this last email, I wont be but a second…,

I came to the party, but not really, because I really should get back to

the office, the shop, the farm, the factory, the rat race.

Too risky to go home and change into my swimsuit-  what if the pager goes off and I have to run?

 I’m juggling so much. You understand.

And the guest is dismissed, forcibly removed, really, with all the drama and cartoonish gore of the rest of the tale.  He’s not dropped off by shuttle at his office lobby doors to resume his duties; he is bound hand and foot and tossed into the outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth.  

He’s given over to his worst fears, suddenly realized - the thing he works so hard to avoid.  The lurking void that drives him on and on, harder and harder, catches up to him; the nothingness he’s spent his life fleeing and guarding against, now swallows him whole.  No work or distractions to save him here, only endless emptiness, staring at him from without and within.

Every parable is meant expose something about the way of fear and reveal something about the way of God, it is meant to uncover the absurdity of a way of life bent on self-preservation and accumulation, competition and scarcity and, ultimately, destruction, and to point to a way of life of connection and trust, participation and abundance, and, always, welcome.  But oh, how hard it is to look at what it reveals and accept what it might be asking of us.

Remember, friends, we are wired for life. We are made to be in connection with God and each other and to live fully, abundantly, participating.  We are set free, and yet we continue to go after slavery, we are brought into wholeness and we continue to break and divide, we are children of the light and yet we continue to hide in or hide from the darkness, we try to earn what God wants to share with us, and all the time we keep missing the big picture.  

God is alive and active. Transcendence is lurking.  Redemption is afoot.  There is a deeper meaning. And it isn’t found by fleeing death, but by facing it. It’s not in outrunning fear but by embracing it, not by relentlessly moving, but by standing still from time to time and meeting God, meeting  ourselves, meeting each other, right here.

I wonder, friends, how often we forget the king.

I wonder what our excuses are for turning down the invitation to the party.  Or whether we show up in our work clothes with one foot out the door, because we are simply too important and essential to the work we are doing to preserve our own lives to stop it, even for a moment, and join in what the big picture is bringing.  I wonder what it would be like to set it all down and come to the banquet table.

As we've been doing with all the parables - hear now the invitation to a time of reflection and prayer:

The kingdom of God is breaking in in all sorts of ways – not just one way, in all sorts of lives - not just some lives, and God’s truth can grip us where we are and tell us what we need to hear. 

So we hold up the parable today before God, and ask,

What parts of my life rise up to meet it? 

Where is there discomfort? Where is there peace?

How might God bring this story alongside me and illumine what God wants me to notice?

Each week in Lent, we write our prayers on a light table in ashes.  These are this week's prayers.