Helpers and Wedding Banquets - Sermon for Oct 15th Lectionary 28

Sermon:

Text: Matthew 22:1-14

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who invites us to the wedding banquet. 

            I worked on this the week before my wedding, and when I first glanced at the title many bibles give it I was greatly relieved, The Parable of the Wedding Banquet. What a perfect text to have the first Sunday back. But, then I read it. And well, if only we had Luke’s version of this parable, which just contains the parts where the people invited decline, and so the owner invites all the people on the street. There’s no hunting down and destroying of those who decline like we see here in Matthew, there’s no killing of the slaves that the king sends to again request they come. And finally there’s no odd ending with the man who doesn’t put on the wedding garment.

            Well, I was a bit disappointed. And then I looked at our Old Testament reading that we’ve been following all summer and fall. It’s getting to a finality point. Next week is the final week in the book of Exodus, last week you heard of the giving of the Ten Commandments. You would expect a party, they’ve received the law! They have the tablets! They’ve received what God wants to tell them.  But, something else happens.

            After they receive them, Moses goes up again to talk to God, and it takes a little while for him to come back, well, quite a while, 40 days and 40 nights. But, it seems almost like as soon as he disappears all the people go up to Aaron and ask him to make gods for them. Pretty much right off the bat they’re attempting to break the commandments. First chance they get they go against God’s covenant.

            And God’s mad. God tells Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely;” Perversely being the same word that shows up in Genesis when God floods the world, and then again “ ¹⁰ Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.” The ending there a similar promise to Noah of a great nation. Again, God is close to starting over again.

            But, something happens. Moses intervenes. Why should the Egyptians say that God took the people out of Egypt to kill them here. Remember the promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’”

            “And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on the people.”

            It’s easy to listen to this grace of God in this text. God remembers the promises again. I like it because we see forgiveness, we see grace and mercy.

            But, when it gets to the Matthew text, it’s seems to be just hard stuff. It seems to be just more commendation, it’s the anger and rage that seems to be present in Exodus.

            It’s a hard thing to look at this parable, it’s full of hard stuff, and it’s easy to get distracted by those hard things, to only concentrate on them.

            We’ve had a lot of hard things going on in our country the last couple weeks, the Las Vegas shooting, hurricane relief happening in Texas and Florida, and now the horrific situation going on in Puerto Rico and the fires in California.

            It’s easy in these moments to get distracted by all these hard things, and not see the good that is happening in these places. People are going across the country to assist in these situations, there is help going up, people are caring for each other in the midst of tragedy. It’s hard, but we see helpers. It’s on of my favorite quotes from Mr. Rogers. When  I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.

            It’s easy to get overwhelmed by everything in this text and the world, but we have to look for the helpers we have to look for Christ working in with and through us.

Because this text and the world are also full of wonderful things. In this parable we hear, you are of those people invited off the streets, the ones welcomed into the grand feast, the ones who through nothing of our own doing are invited. This feast, this free festival, is ours. Dance at it! Put on your free robe and party like God wants you to! Respond to the invitation! Enact your baptism! Be Changed by who God is in inviting you to the feast. Be helpers in this world dancing in your baptismal garments.

            Because, this isn’t a parable about being sent to heaven, it’s a parable about being changed and invited by God into a new way of living through Christ who dies and is raised, who calls us to live in that new way. To be people who invite others into this new way. Who through our new way go out to be Christ for people.

            May you walk this new way with Christ his week, feeling the grace that you are invited in to the free feast, and given a new robe. May you be a helper in the moments when hard things are happening. Amen. 

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