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SERMONS

The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost
October 13, 2002

By David Christian

What is your image of God? If you close your eyes and think about God, what picture comes up? For some of us, it is a kindly old grandfatherly-looking gentleman, with white hair and a long beard. For others it may be a meticulous architect or engineer, carefully designing intricate creations. Or perhaps it is the stern judge or vigilant sheriff, watching closely for that one misstep and then, "Off with your head." Or the petty tyrant demanding that his subjects constantly tell him how wonderful he is; or Santa Claus with a bottomless bag of gifts as long as you act nice.

Let me suggest for you another image: that is, God as party animal. Perhaps that's overstating things a bit, but consider the image of God as party-giver; God as the ultimate host who throws the kind of celebrations that Donald Trump or Martha Stewart can only dream of.

It is an image Isaiah might recognize. He speaks of God as the one who "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."

The gospel accounts tell us that Jesus, God made human, spent much of his time eating and drinking with friends, to the point where the good people accused him of being a glutton and a drunkard. On the last night of his human life, when many people might be closeted in a frantic strategy session, Jesus sat down for a quiet meal with his closest friends.

And in one of his last bits of public teaching, only days before his crucifixion, as the storm clouds gather around him, he tosses out the parable we just read, the parable of the wedding banquet.

"The kingdom of heaven," Jesus says, "can be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet. The king had planned carefully. He had sent out invitations to all on the guest list. The house was clean, the candles were lit, the wine was opened and the beer chilled, the meat was barbecuing out back.

"When everything was ready, he sent out his slaves to call the guests to the wedding. But things had come up. They were busy; too busy to come to the banquet.

"But the king really, really wanted to have a party. He was not about to let all of his preparations go to waste. So he sent his slaves out again to find guests for the banquet, any guests. They stopped cars on the interstate. They went over to the truck stop where there were some folks hanging out having a cup of coffee. They went by the trailer parks and started knocking on doors. They checked down at the Stewpot; they stopped by Hal & Mal's and the Cherokee and the Dutch Bar; they looked in alleys and behind dumpsters and under bridges. They searched everywhere and brought in anyone who could walk or be carried.

"So the king had his party."

There it is: the kingdom of heaven as the ultimate party, and God, the King, as ultimate party-giver, the ultimate host.

But I hear some of you protest. "David," you say, "all of that is well and good, but you left out the other part, the unpleasant part. You skipped over the part where the king sends soldiers out to kill the guests who don't come to the party. And you skipped the part where he takes the guest who doesn't have a tux and tosses him out the door.

"This king sounds a little too much like that image of the petty tyrant or the sheriff whose just waiting for a chance to pull the trigger. I'm not sure I want an invitation to this party."

There is judgment in this parable. There is no way to ignore it; no way to avoid it. We have to deal with it. In trying to understand what is going on here I want to make a distinction between two types of judgment.

There is the judgment of the trial court. A judgment based on right and wrong, on winners and losers. It is a judgment that results in reward or punishment. If you win, you are rewarded: you get a settlement or you go free. If you lose, you are punished: you pay money, you go to jail, or you lose your life. It is what we usually think of when we think of judgment.

But there is another kind of judgment, the judgment of the physician. The judgment that attempts to discern the reality of the situation and then act appropriately on the basis of that reality. The judgment that says, "Everything looks good," or "I have some bad news for you," or "I'm sorry, but he is dead."

This second understanding of judgment is the judgment that I see as active here. If the kingdom of heaven is a banquet, if that is the ultimate end and goal of creation, then the banquet is what is truly real. There is no other business that is more important. There is, in truth, no other business.

The banquet is all that is. Everything else is a shadow. Not to be at the banquet is not to be. To refuse the invitation is to be dead. The king's soldiers were simply making the reality of the situation apparent.

In the same way the guest without a wedding garment was not punished for not owning the right clothes. All of the guests had been pulled in of the streets. None of them would have arrived properly clothed. The king, the ultimate host, must have provided the clothes as well.

Jesus tells us that when the king spoke to the man, "he was speechless." There was no response. So the king, the source and lord of life, rightly judges that if the guest is unresponsive to life, he must be dead. And he has his slaves remove the body. The center of the Christian life is joy.

The center of our gathering is the banquet. When we come together Sunday after Sunday we gather around the Lord's table to celebrate the banquet. We gather to acknowledge and to celebrate the reality that all creation was formed out of love, that all that is is sustained by love, and that in the end all will be drawn into love.

The banquet has already begun. Indeed, the banquet has been going since before time began and when continue when time is no more. This is the banquet for which we were made and to which we are invited. This is the banquet into which we can enter even now.

Come enter into the wedding feast.

David Christian
The Chapel of the Cross
Madison, Mississippi

Proper 23A
Isaiah 25.1-9
Philippians 4.4-13
Matthew 22.1-14