Sermon: “Counting Our Blessings: 
God’s Bountiful Table”

Last week, God was the angry landlord, upset at his tenant farmers for spoiling the vineyard and killing his son and his messengers.  And in this week’s parable, God is full of wrath again.  Jesus casts God as the angry king – outraged out at the disrespect shown for his son and the stubborn refusal of the people do as they are told and come to the wedding to rejoice together.  Before we begin, we need to remember how Matthew’s preaching – like much of the Gospels, like the laborers in the vineyard – is fired up with frustration at his own religious leaders who greeted the Good News of Jesus’s death and resurrection with the same ignorant disdain with which they had greeted his life and ministry.  We know that feeling, don’t we?

I know I’ve found myself calling for the kids to come to the dinner table [sweetly], “Kids, dinner’s ready…” and by the third or fourth time I’ve had to call, it’s more like [yelling], “You kids come to the table RIGHT NOW, and we’ll say ‘grace’ and give thanks to God!”  It’s awful when you have something great to share but the no one is interested.  So in this banquet parable, we might assume those Jewish leaders Jesus (and Matthew) expected to welcome the coming of the messiah were the first invitees who refused to come, the King is God, and Jesus is the son getting married.  So far so good, but the ending of the story gets pretty confusing and unpleasant.

This is such an ugly parable you might not have even heard of it before, and one scholar actually warned preachers to steer clear of it! Ira Brent Driggers, Associate Professor of New Testament at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, SC, writes, “I'm not sure this parable is conducive to a Christian sermon at all. … Preachers will not be able to extract a ‘practical’ lesson from this text. There are no nuggets of wisdom to be ‘applied’ to a congregation.”  Oooh, I love a good dare!  One thing you might not know yet about me – if you want to get me to do something, just tell me that it cannot be done!

So let’s get to work and try to extract a practical lesson from both of these texts.  It helps to remember how the story of the chosen people is in many ways the story of a long and tumultuous marriage between a passionately jealous God and a beloved yet unfaithful wife.  The entire book of the Prophet Hosea is predicated on this metaphor – his nation is compared to his cheating, lying, unfaithful wife – it would make a great country music tune, that book!  Yet Isaiah predicts a better time, after the people’s exile in Babylon, when the separated bride and spouse would reconcile and there would be a great banquet:  “The Lord of hosts will make for ALL peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud [the funeral shroud] that is cast over ALL peoples, the sheet that is spread over ALL nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from ALL faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from ALL the earth, for the Lord has spoken.” 

This sounds so much like the prophetic preaching of Jesus – who proclaims the coming Kingdom of God, a glorious feast where ALL will be welcome, and it sounds a lot like our own “open and affirming” statement.  ALL are welcome at God’s table – red, yellow, black and white, rich and poor, men and women, old and young, gay and straight, able-bodied and disabled.  But the catch is that we’re supposed to be ready to receive God’s grace when it is offered.  Remember the parable of the 10 bridesmaids?  It’s at the beginning of Matthew 25, if you’ve forgotten.  In that one also, Jesus has to go and ruin a perfectly nice banquet with steaming hot servings of divine wrath.  How can we smile and sing “Jesus loves me” with all that weeping and gnashing of teeth going on? 

I mean, if all are welcome, who is that poor guy who gets dragged into the banquet wearing the wrong clothes, who then gets punished for his mistake?  Why should he get bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness?  Some people have tried to say it’s Judas but I have another theory, which I think helps us to know the Good News Jesus has for us in the story.  I’ll get to in a moment, but first, let’s sympathize with the poor guy who’s punished (unfairly, it seems) because he didn’t happen to be ready for a party.  Who goes around wearing fancy wedding clothes when they’re just out walking down Main Street minding their own business, unless their business is catering?  But we need to understand what was worn in a traditional Jewish wedding – and more importantly, why – before we can understand why NOT wearing it could be offensive.

Here’s what the text says: “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless.”  He was speechless, I believe, because at a Jewish wedding only the bride and groom wears a wedding robe.  Other guests had rules of what to wear – like proper head coverings – but that question today would sound to us like a random wedding guest being thrown out of church for not being dressed like the couple getting married – in a bridal gown, or a tux.  But the interesting and significant detail is that tradition calls for both the bride and groom to wear the same white robe for their wedding that will be their burial shroud at the end of their marriage.  I saw this for the first time at my husband’s best friend’s Orthodox Jewish wedding in California, and I never understood this part of the text until just this past Thursday, on Yom Kippur – because I wore the traditional white clothing of Yom Kippur to my Thursday prayer class, to illustrate the confession and repentance that is practiced on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar year.  Poor Barbara and Jeannine in the church office had to deal with me doing a happy dance in the office when I finally understood this parable – but I couldn’t help myself! 

I had heard the story before, but this was the first time I made the connection.  Back when John’s friend Brian got married, he knew we didn’t know the tradition, so he thought he’d better explain in advance why BOTH the bride and groom would be in white gowns at his wedding.  Just as on Yom Kippur, when wearing white to temple helps Orthodox Jews remember the coming day of judgment – traditional brides and grooms wear those same funeral clothes, with no jewelry and no pockets, of course, to remind us we can’t take it with us.  It is also to remind them that one day their marriage will end in death, and one of them will have to shroud the other in those very same clothes.  It is a humbling thought, and one that is supposed to remind them to remain pure and holy in their living – keeping faithful covenant with God through all their days. 

You see THOSE were the clothes God expects us to wear to his bountiful table of grace – we are expected to clothe our naked souls in a shroud of humility and repentance.  We are to rejoice in the Lord always, but because we have been redeemed from our sin and are living in faithful obedience to God’s way of love – not just because we got caught up in random excitement of a good party.  The guy thrown out was thrown out NOT because he hadn’t had the foresight to know there’d be a dress-code enforcement, but because he had not remembered to clothe himself in purity and humility before God IN HIS DAILY LIFE, at all times, not just in one last-minute deathbed reconciliation.

I’m so sorry to bring you all down – you should see your faces!  I know that for most of us, this kind of “Fear of the Lord” preaching seems very negative – but I think sometimes we are hungry for so much drama and violence on TV because we don’t get enough of it in church!  I had this insight this week when we were reading about the United Church of Christ “Media Violence Fast.”  I think, on some deep subconscious level, when we watch those scary end-of-the world movies where the asteroid hits the earth, or even a hospital TV show, for instance, where random people die from rare diseases and accidents, we are reminded of our own mortality, and the human frailty of our loved ones.  This, we hope, might inspire us to make to wise moral choices, to treasure our own families, and to rejoice – and again I say, rejoice, in the life we are called to lead as God’s people.  Because God is still speaking, and calling to us, and extending the invitation for us to dine at his side – as faithful companions at a bountiful table of grace.  This parable reminds us that we are not merely honored guests at the table, but the beloved of God – the church, remember, is to be the bride of Christ.

So before we move on, what does this relationship look like in our daily lives?  Are we truly savoring this bountiful wedding banquet, and accepting Christ’s deep and abiding love?   Our Thursday prayer class has been wrestling with this very issue, as we’ve realized how hard it is to truly bare our souls and be honest and intimate with God – it’s very easy for even my personal and private prayers to take a wrong turn into phony, churchy talk.  We are so tempted to hide our true selves from God, because some parts of ourselves, frankly, need so much work.  But the Good News of this metaphor is that our Creator knows us anyway and longs for us to come close, to join our flesh to Christ’s body in a faithful covenant of intimacy and love.  The One who loves us longs to hear all our whispered thoughts in the night.  Not only that, we are called to share this Good News with others.  For instance… There is probably no finer moment in our church life than what happens on Yankee Fair weekend, when we open our barn doors the widest to share the massive gift we’ve been given with the world – sharing God’s bountiful table with our wider community, with our friendly and fun, smiling faces pouring out upon their to-go servings great heaping gravy boats of God’s love for ALL humanity.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.