Proper 23 (A) + Welcome Table / Party on! + 10.15.17

M. Campbell-Langdell

All Santos, Oxnard

(Exodus 32:1–14; Ps. 106:1–6, 19–23; Phil. 4:1–9; Matthew 22:1–14)

We just re-watched the film “Wayne’s World” (1992) with Genesis. It is beautifully silly and very profane at times. But many of you might remember its refrain: “Party on, Garth. Party on, Wayne!”

I think this parable might be teaching us a thing or two about how to party on.

But let’s talk about that parable. Ah, the parable of the wedding feast. So beautiful and thorny at once.  Everyone is welcome. But if you aren’t wearing the right shirt, you are tossed into howling darkness. Uh, Matthew, when did you go nutso? How do we make sense of this?
To me, this parable raises two big questions. One is about who we invite to the table, be it a wedding feast, or a church. But another is about how we respond when we are invited to the table, and how do we interact with the other guests.

The wedding feast is both a parable for the ways of God’s kingdom but is also Jesus’ wily way of saying that even though God has invited everyone to the feast, not everyone can handle Jesus’ queer brilliance, or his choice of bride (that being all of us) and thus not everyone will be able to come into the kingdom at first.

So what happens here? There is a king and his son is getting married, which we know is a big, several day, gala event in the ancient world. And he invites those in his social group. And they say no. They have other things to do. This “no” is a way not just of speaking of schedules, but of disapproving of the situation. Some of them don’t just say no, they kill his servants – the messengers as it were. These may be the religious authorities of Jesus’ time who, although they might have had the spiritual insight to see what he was bringing to the world, just couldn’t go there, and hence ended up doing very mundane things, or, sadly, killing the ones who brought the message, killing the son even.

Then king sends the servants into the highways and byways, where all the less than reputable types hung out, and they were invited. So of course, not wanting to pass up a free meal, they come in, but they don’t all know how to respond to this grace. Because this feast is our salvation freedom in God, not foremost an actual feast. See, in ancient feasts, since clothes were harder to come by, there were often garments available for the poorer attendees so that they could wear them and feel part of the party.[1] The garment here is a symbol for the spiritual practice of being in the state of grace that responds to God’s love and is actively sharing that love with others. A bit of what Paul is getting at here in his message to the Philippians today (4:1-9) when he is saying “rejoice always” and focus on what is admirable and good. As we know from our practice of inviting everyone and anyone into our doors, not everyone is going to be able to handle God’s grace or our hospitality. Most will, and that is wonderful. But some need to learn some things about being in the party. And that is a part of the learning process, too.

This past week, as many of you know, I was at a conference called “Radical Beauty,” about how to use art to approach the wounded-ness of our world and to respond through ministry. We heard from the poet Natasha Trethewey, a US poet Laureate, about her experience as a person of mixed race, Black and White, in the South, and she described the odd experience of exile that a person of color feels when the monuments are erected to people who would have your people not be citizens. This made me think about our country, and we do and at times do not practice welcome to each other. While here in Southern California we have very few monuments to Confederate generals, we do have monuments in our midst that may speak of similar judgments about who is in and who is out. For example, we are talking about building an even bigger monument  of the wall with Mexico that is a symbol of who deserves to be treated with welcome in this country and who does not.

The exile that Trethewey described goes both ways. Due to the breakdown of dialog between different groups, many folks on the conservative side of the political spectrum fear a loss of their life as they know it as Americans as US culture continues to become more diverse.

If you look at your own lives, you may find that even as you may love the increased diversity of the United States, you may also struggle with frustration at how things change or moments when you feel you do not understand the culture around you. I feel that every day as I learn a new aspect of teenage culture!

But how can we take that frustration and turn it into joy? How can we continually place back on our poor selves the wedding garment of being a part of the party? I think this is the very challenge which Jesus gives us today.

I have two images that may help illuminate this concept:

One was at the conference, an artist couple put popcorn into a little popcorn maker and set it going. [They said, isn’t this inviting? Do you hear it? Do you smell it? Don’t you want to come and experience it? That is church.
And then one of them took the lid off and said, no, this is church. All of a sudden, the popcorn was flying out everywhere, most of it popped, some un-popped. That is church.]

Another image is of a concept I learned about at the conference called The People’s Supper. In it people of all different backgrounds sit down together and break bread and talk intentionally in small groups of 8-12 as a way of beginning to learn about each other and bridge ideological and other divides in our society. And the groups have an agreement, an “Invitation to Brave Space,” and it goes like this:
“Together we will create brave space

Because there is no such thing as a ‘safe space’ —

 We exist in the real world

We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.

In this space We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,

We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,

We call each other to more truth and love

We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.

We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.

We will not be perfect. This space will not be perfect.

It will not always be what we wish it to be

But It will be our brave space together, and

We will work on it side by side.”

(Micky ScottBey Jones, www.thepeoplessupper.org)

Maybe, this is church. Going out into the world and inviting everyone. Those who have constructed golden calves with our precious resources and who have ruined that which we feel is holy; those who believe somewhat as we do but have a different way of living it. And everyone in between.
And maybe, this is church. To come both to church and in fact to every moment of your life remembering that you are washed in the blood of the lamb. That you wear the garment of God’s grace. So nothing can harm you or shake you from the joy of being a Christian. And so you, too, can be a worthy guest of God.

So that we can all, in the immortal words of “Wayne’s World,” “Party on!”

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[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 111.