October 13, 2002 - Twenty First Sunday after Pentecost
Philippians 4: 1-9
    NRSV KJV CEV
Matthew 22: 1-14
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“Celebrating the Presence”

“Life is a banquet . . . .”  Seven years ago I stood in this pulpit for the very first time.  That day is still in my memory and on that day I quoted Patrick Dennis’ wonderful character ‘Auntie Mame’ who said, “Life is a banquet and most poor (fill-in the expletive) are out there starving.”   I believe that to be a profoundly spiritual observation.  Life IS a banquet and yet we choose starvation rations because we can’t open our hearts or our minds to imagine a God so big, so generous, so loving as the God who invites us to the banquet of life.  Because we can’t imagine this generous, banquet-giving God, we project a God of rules and regulations, a small-minded God who reflects our image, a God who loves, but only conditionally.  Fortunately, that’s our image and not the reality of who God is.

Jesus is trying to make this same point in Matthew’s gospel.  He wants us to understand that the Father is gracious and invites us to the banquet of life.  The parable of the wedding feast is at once elegantly simple and wickedly complex.  We’re treated to the picture of a king who wants to share his joy as his son is married.  So he throws a party and invites his friends, who can’t be bothered to attend.  Here Jesus evokes the imagery of the ‘messianic banquet’ that would climax the covenant relationship between God and God’s people.  The people would have known this imagery because it first shows up in the Exodus experience.  Later the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel use the image.  Isaiah’s vision of the ‘peaceable kingdom’ even extends to the rest of creation with the “lion laying down with the lamb” and sharing the same food as the ox.

When we think of judgment – and this is the image that has been pushed – it’s a doom and gloom thing.  However, this is not the image in the prophets or in this parable.  The final reckoning is a banquet, a joyous party, a celebration of life in God’s presence.  Jesus’ parable is designed to get us ready to accept the invitation.  God, the king, flings open the doors of the banquet hall so that all may enter.  However, only those who really want to be there, those who put on the wedding garments, are permitted to stay.  It is not God who judges, then, but we ourselves as we choose to live in the presence or to pursue our own way.

Tom Long is one of the best contemporary American preachers.  He’s from the South and has a way with language and with stories.  This is how he interprets this passage and the wedding guest’s incorrect attire.

The parable urgently reminds us that being a part of the Christian community should make a discernible difference in who we are and how we live.  In other words, there should be a sense of awe and responsiveness about belonging to the church, belonging to the community of Christ, being a child of the kingdom of heaven.  Sure, the spotlighted guest in the parable was pressed in off the street unexpectedly and was probably wearing cutoffs and clodhoppers, but, when he got inside, only a fool would fail to see the difference between what he wore and where he was.  He was in the banquet hall of the king; he was at the wedding feast for the royal son.  The table was set with the finest food; the best wine flowed from regal chalices.  He is the recipient of massive grace.  Where is his awe?  Where is his regard for generosity?  The other guests humbly, quietly trade in their street clothes for the festive wedding garments of worship and celebration, but there he is, bellying up to the punch bowl, stuffing his mouth with fig preserves and wiping his hands on his T-shirt. [Matthew, p. 2476-248]

The celebration of the presence calls us to a sense of place and sense of who we are, and who we are to become.  To realize that God, the Creator of the Universe, Sustainer of all that is has called us into intimate relationship and invited us to address God as ‘Father,’ ought to fill us with a sense of awe and wonder.  We should be overwhelmed in the presence of such incredible love.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians had earlier urged them “to have this mind of Christ” and to clothe themselves with righteousness.  The wedding garments that we’re to put on are new attitudes and orientations to the way we approach life and relationships.  Paul is giving us insight into good mental hygiene when he advises, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuler may have popularized it, but thinking positively, staying focused on that which is true, and good, and beautiful goes a great deal farther back!

When we respond to the call to become ‘followers of Jesus Christ’ we are invited to see the world through Jesus’ eyes.  Jesus looked with love on all that the Creator, his loving Father, had made.  He opened his arms to embrace those that didn’t fit in and didn’t pass the dress code of the time.  The new dress code for us is that same loving, embracing mind that Jesus demonstrated.  We’re now invited and welcomed to look on our world and behold the wonder of God’s living presence in the very ordinary happenings of everyday life.  We do have a reason to rejoice.  So with Paul, “again I say ‘Rejoice!’

We need to remind ourselves that we have a reason to rejoice.  The last months have presented some real challenges to joy.  The economy has been in an investor-depressing slump; we seem headed toward yet another armed conflict in the Middle East, and we’ve seen violence that frightens us and makes us wonder about our personal safety.  Friday’s accident on I-43 makes us just stand back and wonder ‘why?’  Still, even in the midst of these troublesome things, we are called to rejoice because “the God of peace will be with you.”  I suppose that’s what I hold onto – that the God who holds all things in being is with us.  How can I NOT rejoice?  We are called to look at the bigger picture and take joy with us because behind it all there is God.  “Again, I say, ‘Rejoice!’

I ran across something from a book with a provocative title, Angels in Red Suspenders.  Jim Milton, the author, recounted this little story about a church service that he had attended some years ago:

The ushers had just taken up the offering.  They were walking down the aisle when one of them tripped on the pile in the carpet, and sent his offering plates and those of the other usher flying in a flurry of envelopes, dollar bills and quarters all over the front of the church.

The congregation sat in stunned silence.

Then the minister said the only thing that could be said.  “For goodness sake, laugh.”

And they did.

Till the tears rolled down their faces.  And while they laughed, they got down on their hands and knees and picked up the money, put it back on the offering plates, and carried on with the worship service.

The world has always been in trouble.  It may be in more trouble now than ever, but trouble is not a new thing for the human species.

There are at least two ways to react.

One way is to be so solemn about everything that you never laugh at all . . .

The other position is to laugh at almost everything, on the theory that the laughing, while it doesn’t solve the problem, does at least put it into perspective.  It’s a bit like praying  . . .

I’ve said it so often, my friends are getting tired of hearing me.  Laughter is not the opposite of seriousness.  Laughter is the opposite of despair.

Jesus was a Jew who lived when times were at least as bad as they are now.  He used wild hyperbole and wry humor, as much as he used cries of outrage, to confront the powers and principalities.

Leo Tolstoy, who lived in a time of turmoil, put it this way: “If someone were to tell me that it lay in my power to write a novel explaining every social question from a particular viewpoint that I believed to be the correct one, I still wouldn’t spend two hours on it.  But If I were told that what I am writing will be read  . . . by the children of today, and that those children will laugh, weep and learn to love life as they read, why then I would devote the whole of my life and energy to it.”

I am willing to pour the rest of my life and all of my energy into proclaiming and living this joy.

Life IS a banquet and there is no reason for anyone to go hungry, to not know joy, to not celebrate the presence of the living God, even in the face of trouble and despair.  It is up to us – to you and to me – to make sure we have our wedding garments, our party clothes, on and that we go out and invite others to the table.  Life IS a banquet.  Now, let’s get on with celebrating the presence, shall we?