Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
October 13, 2002
Matthew 22: 1-10
Preacher and teacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, tells this true story: “Several years ago I attended a weekend retreat with about seventy other people. The opening exercise was to tell a story about someone who had been Christ for us in our lives. After we had all thought about it for a little while, some people got up to tell their stories. There was one about a friend who stayed put through a long illness while everyone else deserted, and another one about a neighbor who took the place of a father who had self-destructed. One after the other, they were stories of comfort, compassion, and rescue. The conference room turned into a church, where we settled into the warmth of each other’s company. Jesus our friend was there with us and all was right with the world…until this one woman stood up and said, ‘Well, the first thing I thought about when I tried to think who had been Christ to me was, ‘Who in my life told me the truth so clearly that I wanted to kill him for it?’”
Says Taylor, “She burst our bubble, but she was onto something vitally important that most of us would be glad to forget: namely, that the Christ is not only the one who comforts and rescues us. The Christ is also the one who challenges and upsets us, telling us the truth so clearly that we will do appalling things to make him shut up.” I suppose you could say that no one was ever crucified for telling people what they wanted to hear.
In his book, The Company of Strangers, theologian and teacher, Parker Palmer, talks about all the ways public life has broken down in this country, largely because we have begun – for good reasons and bad – to regard strangers as enemies (and he wrote this before 9/11.) In a world that grows scarier every day – snipers in Maryland, the seemingly inevitable war with Iraq – more and more of us, says Palmer, are retreating into well-defended private lives. We sort ourselves into tribes of like-minded people who are suspicious of other tribes and quite often we go to war with one another, either overtly or covertly. The strangers we meet either must be kept out of our lives or made to be like us. The endless variety of humankind becomes a threat, not a blessing, and the whole body suffers. Then Jesus comes along and he blows this way of thinking, – this way of being – completely apart.
“The Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son…” Scholars seem to think that this parable has undergone some transformation since the time it was first uttered by Jesus. The parable has become an allegory – an allegory being a story in which everything seems to stand for something else. It is pretty clear that in this story the king is God, his son is Jesus, the marriage feast is the great feast of the Lamb of God at the end of time (see Rev. 19.19), the slaves who were sent out by the king are the prophets, those who are invited are Israel; violence is Israel’s rejection of the prophets, the destroyed city is the fall of Jerusalem to Rome in 70 A.D. The king throws a banquet for his son, and God throws a banquet for Jesus, but those invited – the chosen ones – refuse to come. This enrages the king, who proceeds to destroy their city (I told you I was mad!) But then he does a radical thing, this king. The feast will still happen. No longer worried about those who refused to come, he sends his slaves back into the streets to invite anyone they can find. All kinds of strange and wonderful people now find a place at the king’s – at God’s - welcome table.
Many who first heard these words must have been shocked, even angry. “Who in my life told me the truth so clearly that I wanted to kill him for it?” The truth, Jesus seems to be saying, is that no one has a privileged position at God’s table or in God’s kingdom. God’s guest list is so much bigger, so much more inclusive, than ours. As New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan, points out, the shocking news of parables and teachings such as this is that the kingdom of God often appears to be a kingdom of “nuisances and nobodies.” You never know who might show up at the king’s table -- God’s table.
The religious authorities of Jesus’ day, the law-abiding Jews, did not want to hear this. They assumed they had a privileged position in the kingdom. They were, after all, the chosen people. They assumed that at the great messianic banquet, they would have a place of honor at the table. But in this allegorized parable, they end up being the ones who are excluded. They don’t want to hear this. But enough of them, how about ourselves? In the eyes of most of the world today, we are the privileged ones. Do we want to hear this?
Says Crossan, “Think for a moment, if beggars came to your door, of the difference between giving them some food to go, of inviting them into your kitchen for a meal, of bringing them into the dining room to eat in the evening with your family, or of having them come back on Saturday night for a formal supper with a group of your friends.” In this parable, is Jesus just being quaintly eccentric, charmingly iconoclastic, or is he presenting a picture of God’s kingdom which is so radically inclusive as to be radically challenging to many of our cherished assumptions about who really belongs and just what our place of privilege really is? “Who in my life told me the truth so clearly that I wanted to kill him?”
I’ve shared this story with you before, but I just can’t resist because, it fits so well here. His name is Bill. He has wild hair, wears a T-shirt with holes in it, jeans, and no shoes. This has literally been his wardrobe for his entire four years at the university. While at the university, Bill became a Christian. Across the street from the campus is a well-dressed, respectable church. The members have talked at some length about developing a ministry to students, but are not sure how to go about it.
One Sunday Bill decides to attend worship there. He walks in with no shoes, his T-shirt, jeans and wild hair. The service has already begun, so Bill starts down the aisle looking for a seat. The sanctuary is full and he can’t find any room in the pews. But he is noticed. How could you miss him? But not a word is spoken.
As Bill gets closer and closet to the front of the church, he realizes he will find no empty seats. So he just plops down on the carpet. No one has ever worshipped in that church sitting on the carpet. No one – Ever! By now, even as the worship service continues, you can feel the level of tension rising inside that sanctuary.
Then an amazing thing – an unexpected thing – happens. From way at the back of the church, a deacon is slowly making his way toward Bill. This particular deacon is well known in the church, a man in his eighties, with silver-gray hair, impeccable three-piece suit and pocket watch. He is truly a pillar of that church, always dignified and very proper. Walking with a cane, he slowly makes his way down the aisle toward the young man on the floor. Everyone is watching, everyone is expecting a less than pleasant confrontation. How can you expect a man of his age and background to understand some scruffy kid sitting on the sanctuary floor?
It takes a long time for the man to reach Bill. Worship has stopped. Everyone is silent, everything is silent. The sermon will wait. All eyes are focused on the old deacon. What will he do? What he does is this:
He drops his cane on the floor near Bill and then with great difficulty he lowers himself and sits down next to the young man, making it clear that this young man will not worship alone. Needless to say, there is quite a murmur around the congregation. Finally the minister says, “What I’m about to preach you will never remember. But what you have just seen, you will never forget.”
That old deacon, that godly man, clearly understood the thrust of Jesus’ teaching. Who is welcome at the table? Jesus wants to know…just how broad is our sense of community?
Referring back to our text, Barbara Brown Taylor says, “The minute Jesus denied their special status he went from favorite son to degenerate stranger, who offended them so badly they decided to kill him.” She then continues, “That is how sensitive we are to being told that our enemies are God’s friends. That is how mad we get when someone suggests that God loves the people we won’t sit next to – the people who disturb and offend us, and who belong to God just as surely as we do. No matter how hard we try, we cannot seem to get God to respect our boundaries. God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way. The problem is not that we are loved any less. The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an appallingly upsetting sense of community.”
We talk so much about being community here and in all of our churches. Our call to worship today spoke of this church fellowship as family. We are family. You are all welcome here. And my hope and prayer is that this is a goal to which each of us aspires. But even as we speak such fine words, let us never forget that finally it is not we who make this church a community or a family - it is God, a God who cares for the stranger and who indeed comes to us as a stranger. It’s a radical idea, but it just might be that our differences are God’s best tools for opening us up to a truth that is bigger and broader and more inclusive than we have ever dared to imagine.