Rejoice always! Come to the wedding banquet! Invite others.
Proper 23 A
Transcribed from a
sermon given
By Valerie Ann Hart
October 9, 2011
St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14
Rejoice always, again I say
rejoice. This is one of the most wonderful things that I think Paul wrote.
Rejoice always! Always!
Paul was already at the wedding
banquet. He knew that his relationship with Christ meant a joyous celebration,
and he invited all of his readers to live a life of celebration knowing the joy
of the relationship with God. To know that the kingdom had come near and was
part of them. Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.
We are at the wedding banquet. The
wedding banquet is an image used over and over again in scripture to describe
the relationship between God and God’s people.
The imagery of wedding is so rich
and full and complete. After all, what is a wedding but a celebration of a
relationship. The celebration of a relationship of love and mutual commitment.
A celebration of the whole community. It is a welcoming of everyone.
We don’t do wedding banquets the
way they did back in Jesus’ time. They knew how to do a wedding banquet. A
wedding banquet back then was not an afternoon affair where you had some
cupcakes and tea. These lasted for days, sometimes over a week of feasting.
They had meat and food and drink and song and celebration and dancing and
everything joyous. It was a time when the whole community came together.
It served a number of purposes.
One of the purposes for the wedding banquet had to do with feeding. People at
that time, even the rich, did not have an overabundance of food. The poor lived
on very little, and they didn’t get to have meat very often. So, when you had a
wedding banquet it was a chance for the wealthy or even the not so wealthy, to
share what they had with others. It was feasting and sharing and bringing
together of the community, of the whole clan.
In fact, it was the bringing
together of two clans because often it was the matter of the husband and wife
representing two different clans coming together to make one. Especially if it
was the wedding of the leader of the clan, which is what this king probably
was. The king in this parable doesn’t sound like a high king in charge of a
whole area, like David or Solomon. What Jesus is probably referring to is a
king over a couple of cities, a clan, or an area. We need to remember that the
Palestine of this time was a tribal area. It still is a tribal area. Sometimes
when we see what is going on the news it is hard for us to wrap our minds
around it because we don’t live as tribally. But the relationships and interweavings
based on blood relationship was extremely important then. If a leader of an
area, lets say a tribal leader’s son, is getting married often that was used to
cement a relationship, to make a treaty. The son might be marrying the daughter
of another tribal leader and then the two tribes would become one, would have a
relationship. If you remember your European history, that’s what the kings in
Europe did for many years.
So this wedding, this wedding that
Jesus is talking about, is much more than just a celebration. It’s about
relationship, its about bringing people together, bringing the whole clan
together. It’s a time to see people you haven’t seen for a long time. It’s a
time to reconcile with people you haven’t talked to.
Maybe you have been to a wedding
where there was some cousin you hadn’t seen for a long time and you weren’t too
sure you wanted to see him, but if you have several days of eating and drinking
there is a good chance you are going to find a chance to make up. It’s about
that relationship, that celebration, that joy.
One of the ways that scripture has
been thought about, meditated upon, is by taking all the characters in the
story and imagining yourself as each one of the characters. Now I’m going to
ask you to think about how you might be each character and I’ll reflect upon my
thoughts.
First there is the king. I have had
two children get married. I know what it is like to send out those wedding
invitations. You go through who do we invite and who do we not invite. Sometimes,
if it is a small wedding, you only have a certain number of invitations as you
try to decide who to invite. So, from the point of view of the parent it is a
very special thing to invite someone to come to your child’s wedding. You are
so happy when people say yes and you are disappointed when they so no. Now
sometimes they have a good reason for not being able to be there, and you
understand that, but there is still a disappointment. But then if there is a
friend or a cousin that doesn’t come and doesn’t explain why, maybe doesn’t
even respond to the RSVP, that relationship is weakened. You feel like that
person doesn’t really care about you. Maybe you aren’t as close as you thought
you were.
So for this king to send his
servants to invite these people was an honor. It was something special. Please
come. Join in the celebration.
The next ones to consider are the
first two people invited. They are too busy. One has to go to her office the
other has to go to his farm. They can’t come to the wedding. I think most of us
have at least once in our life been invited to something that had to do with relationship.
Even though we were in a good relationship with that person we decided that we were
too busy. That we just don’t have enough time to go and be with this person. We
have all had to make those choices. Sometimes its hard. Sometimes we really
want to spend time with this friend or relative or child but other things are
calling us and we feel torn. We know what that is like.
We also know what this is like in
terms of our relationship with God. Do we have enough time to go on retreat,
because there is all the business to do? My to-do list is too long to take the
evening off for a special service. We are behind at work and don’t come to church
on a Sunday morning. We all have to make those decisions about relationships
and our responsibility.
It is interesting that these first
two are not condemned. They have just chosen not to be in relationship with the
king.
The next group of people that are
invited are ones who get angry at the servants that are sent to them and they
beat them up and they kill them. Now imagine that you are the head of the clan
and you run a couple of cities and perhaps the reason people from a certain
city have been invited is that your son is marrying a daughter in that clan and
you are inviting the whole city so you can establish a deeper relationship. They
make light of you. They make light of you so much that they even kill the
servants you send. The are saying, “We don’t think you matter.” Can there be a
more direct way of saying “You are irrelevant to me? You are weak. It doesn’t
matter. We don’t owe you anything.” So you can understand that the tribal
leader who sent his servants now has to show these people that he is powerful.
But it was their choice not to be in relationship.
And then the next thing the
servants are told is to go out and invite everyone, good and bad. Everyone.
Everyone!
What a generous welcoming thing to
do. To say, “I have all this feast, come and share it with me. I don’t care, I
want a relationship.” That’s the action of someone who really wants relationship
with everyone and everyone is invited. Imagine being invited and not expecting
to be invited. It would be like a few months ago when there was that big royal
wedding in England, one day going to your mailbox and having an invitation to
the royal wedding. Wow!! I’m invited. It would be exciting, you’d be thankful.
You’d be all set to go.
Which brings us to the next
character, the one who showed up at the wedding without a wedding garment. Now
a wedding garment back then was not something real fancy. A wedding garment was
basically clean clothes. Generally, if you had two sets of clothes, one you
used for work and the other you used for special events. To show up at a
wedding without a wedding garment would be like going to a wedding on Saturday
afternoon and beforehand changing the oil in your car. You now have oil all
over your hands, you have overalls on and you haven’t brushed your hair yet you
show up at the wedding. What does that say about how you feel about the person
who is hosting the wedding? What does that say about how much you value the
relationship? It’s obviously not terribly important to you. You didn’t even
brush your hair. You didn’t even put on some clean clothes.
Now if I had been invited to that
royal wedding you darn well know that I would have gone out and bought
something new. I might have needed to go to the thrift shop to find it. And I
might even have gotten one of those silly hats. I wouldn’t show up in my jeans
or my short shorts, or whatever. God help me if I showed up in short shorts.
But this last one chose not to take
the wedding banquet seriously. In the imagery of scripture, the wedding banquet
is not between two people, the wedding is between God and the person who shows
up.
At the end of the parable Jesus
says that many are called but few are chosen. I would put that a different way.
Many are called but few chose to be in relationship. You will notice in these
stories, the ones who aren’t there all chose to not be in relationship with the
king. There were good ones and there were bad ones who were there because they
chose to come. It is the ones who chose not to be in relationship that are not
at the wedding.
There is one more character or group
of people in the parable that I haven’t mentioned. Anybody think of who it is?
The servants. The Greek word is doulous.
Doulous has often been translated as servant. In the New Revised Standard Version,
it’s translated as slave, and that is probably a more accurate translation
because what it means in Greek is someone who has given themselves totally to
serve someone else. They have given themselves up totally to the other person.
Which a slave would do.
What the servants do is they go out
and they invite people. I would say that here we are, all of us were invited to
the wedding banquet and we showed up. Showing up is a large part of being in
relationship. And how did we hear? Someone invited us.
Now that you are part of the
wedding banquet, now that you are able to rejoice and celebrate the great joy
of your relationship with Christ, the next step is deepening that relationship.
It is about offering oneself wholly to serve the other, to become servants of
Christ. And what is it that the servants do? They go out and they invite
everybody to come to the wedding.
