October 15, 2023 | Rev. Loren McGrail
Now Disrobe: You Are Invited
Rev. Loren McGrail
Matthew 22:1-14
Holmdel Community United Church of Christ
October 15,2023
He is our clothing who wraps and unfolds us for love,
embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love,
which is so tender that he may never desert us.
Julian of Norwich, English Mystic
What a parable. How can heaven be like this? On first reading I didn’t know what to make of the violence in the parable. What didn’t make sense to me was the interpretation that God was like this awful violent King or that we should all dress properly so we can be chosen. This didn’t square with my idea of who either Jesus was or what God’s essential character was.
It also smelled like anti-Semitism to read that the A-list guests who refused to attend the wedding were God’s chosen people, the Israelites, and that the B-listers were last minute guests like us—the Gentiles. It’s a convenient interpretation for those who see themselves as the latecomers who get to cozy up to the king in his palace. Don’t we all secretly relish that we are glad we are not like those other guests who rejected the king’s invitation. Haven’t we all placed ourselves in the category of those who flock to the wedding feast in our fancy garb?
Dear Ones, I think we need to repent and reboot this parable. As Christ’s followers, do we really believe in a hotheaded vengeful and petty God who was ready to burn an entire city to the ground in order to appease his ego? A God who invites a homeless guy into his palace and then casts the guest into the “outer darkness” for reasons the guest can’t control? Do we really believe in a God whose holiness rests on unyielding and violent anger? A God whose invitation to salvation has strings attached? Many of us were brought up with this kind of father/king God and have been severely damaged by this judgmental tyrant.
But what if the king in the parable is not God at all? What if the king is what we project onto God? What if the king embodies everything we’ve learned to associate with power and authority from watching human kings and rulers? Rulers like Pharaoh? Kings like Herod? Or leaders in our own time who exercise their authority in abusive, violent ways that have even led to unnecessary deaths, even genocides?
Let me share with you another interpretation from the wonderful and humorous Lutheran pastor Nadia Boltz Weber, from her sermon The Worst Parable Ever:
A king throws a wedding banquet and invites the other rich, slave-owning powerful people. Seemingly unimpressed by the promised veal cutlet at the wedding feast, the elite invitees laugh at the invitation and proceed to abuse and then kill the slaves of the king. Well then, the king kills them back. But he doesn't stop there, not to be outdone, he burns down the city… and it is there amidst the burning carnage of the newly destroyed city he sends more slaves to go find whoever they can fill the seats. After all, the food is ready, and he has all these fancy robes for the guests. All he cares about is having every seat filled at his big party.
But who is left? He burned the city. The rich and powerful have been murdered so it's the regular folks wandering the streets looking for their dead, picking apart the charred debris of their burned city who are then told that they have no choice but to go to the party of the guy responsible. And it's already been established that he doesn't respond well if you turn him down. So, the terrified masses show up and pretend that this capricious tyrant didn't just lay waste to their city. Out of fear they all dutifully put on their wedding robes given them at the door and they pretend. Slipping on a gorgeous garment was what you did for a king's wedding feast. And the guests got to keep the outfits, just a little souvenir of the king's generosity - and a reminder to keep in line. You don't get anything from the empire without it costing you a bit of your life.
Well, our story ends with these well-dressed survivors looking on as the King spots the one guy at the banquet who isn't wearing a wedding robe. And when the innocent man has nothing to say for himself the king has this scapegoat hogtied and thrown into the outer darkness. Many are called but few are chosen he says.
What Nadia’s interpretation does is to invite us to think more deeply about the guy who refuses to wear the king’s wedding robe. What if the kin-dom of God is all about that guy who says no to imperial authority? What if the kin-dom of God is about a guy who gets scape-goated and hog tied because he doesn’t conform? What if Jesus is the unrobed guest? What if the kin-dom of God is about a man who ends up wearing a loincloth on a cross?
Dear Ones, what robes of power, privilege, wealth, empire, or complicity would you refuse to wear? What feasts would you forgo to follow the unrobed dissenter when he’s escorted into the darkness? God is not an imperial king; therefore, God’s kin-dom will not look like it does here where you must be an elite to get on the A list or come and conform if you are on the B list. However, it is true if you refuse to submit to imperial authority, you may indeed be cast into the darkness because of your refusal to wear empire’s finest finery.
Dear Ones, I experienced two events this dreadful week of violence where I got to hear and stand with those who are refusing to wear empire’s bloody robes of vengeance. The first was a Service of Lament I attended on zoom hosted by the Sabeel Center for Liberation in Jerusalem, one our Global Ministries partners. Thursday is normally Bible Study but this week they invited the Christian leaders to share prayers about the current cycle of violence. Each of them spoke passionately about following Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies and to resist violence with Jesus’ call to nonviolence. Again and again, each spoke of how evil + evil does not equal resolution or peace. They also spoke about the over 75 years of violence and displacement all Palestinians have witnessed and continue to experience. As I listened to the leaders I know and have walked down the Via Dolorosa with on Good Friday, I was reminded that Jesus’ Way has always been unpopular and dangerous to those in power and that it often leads to feeling or being cast out.
My second event was a zoom meeting, later Thursday night, that the Palestine Israel Network called to gather our Steering Board leaders who we knew were heartbroken over the news. At the last minute we opened up the invitation to anyone weeping, struggling, or heartbroken.
Dear Ones, our PIN Steering is about 12 people. Over 64 people found their way to our impromptu pastoral zoom meeting. We had no agenda but to begin and end in prayer and hold the space for our fellow clergy and activists from around the country. To say the Holy Spirit was with us, is an understatement. Folks were spiritually and emotionally drained. Pastors were scared and confused about what to say this Sunday. Many did not know the full context of where the spiral of violence began or how the violence could have reached this barbaric point---the full on slaughter of innocent people and now genocide. And I too was thinking about why this lectionary parable about violence and killing now? This weekend out of all weekends.
And then I realized, this is the perfect text for today because Dear Ones, as followers of Jesus, we are called to be peacemakers, we too are invited to God’s feast. However, we must choose our wedding garments carefully and not wear what we are given.
Is the invitation to heaven to come as you are? Or could you wear the sun like Mary, or don a long white robe with a golden sash like the Son of Man? Should you put on the armor of God or simply allow yourself to ‘be clothed’ in Jesus’s tender love.
Dear Ones, this is the good and bad news. God will garb you, but it will cost you. There will indeed be a heavenly banquet, a feast where everyone is invited including your enemies.
Dear Ones, we are all invited and chosen but we must disrobe first. We must lose empire’s fancy threads, its straitjacket of dos and don’ts, compliances with violence as redemptive, and allow ourselves to be garbed by God who has made each of us a robe from the fabric of our lives, using patterns God has already implanted in us long ago---patterns of justice, forgiveness, loving-kindness, and peace. Go now and disrobe, get ready for the feast.
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