The 20th Sunday After Pentecost

The Reverend Bryon Hansen

An invitation to a November wedding has been posted on our refrigerator door for several weeks. Whenever I pause to read it, I get a little excited. We are looking forward to this wedding. It promises to be a joyous time, a party built around a new beginning. Sometimes it feels like a great honor to be guest at a wedding, especially when there is the promise of music, dancing, great food, fine wine, and fun loving people.

Weddings are often filled with a sense of newness. Small wonder! Something new takes place when a couple begin their new life together. Marriage celebrations deserve a holy blessing, a series of toasts, and a rich feast. The celebration itself opens up other marks of newness -  old friends or family members may be reunited after years and new friendships may be forged. I know some married couples who actually met at a wedding. I’ve even known of weddings where relationships are mended. At one wedding, two people who were estranged from one another made up and were reconciled. Newness all around!

As is often said at New Year’s celebrations: “out with the old and in with the new!”

With love there is newness and with newness there is transformation. What is old and stale may give way to that which is life-giving. You may even find someone at a wedding party turning water into wine … as Jesus did at the wedding feast in Cana.

Jesus tells a parable about a wedding feast. A royal wedding feast. If you think any ordinary wedding carries the possibility of great joy and new beginnings, imagine a royal wedding feast. What party could ever compare to that! Most of us will likely never attend a royal wedding in person but that didn’t stop about 29 million viewers tune into the royal wedding of Harry and Meghan in 2018. It’s the next best thing to being there. Royalty suggests something grand and festive.

In Jesus’ parable, a king hosts the wedding feast for his son and the wedding feast says something important about God’s transforming work, and God’s gift of newness.  When we reach the end of the parable, we hear how the feast that the king is hosting promises newness and transformation. It ends up disrupting old patterns and relinquishes worn out ways of ordering life and society but the trajectory of getting to that good news is this parable is a little grim and even violent.

At first, the king sends out invitations to a select group. Those on the guest list are likely people of great distinction. It isn’t just anybody who gets to attend a royal wedding feast. Before the wedding, the king sends messengers to remind those on the guest list to come to the feast but they decline the invitation. The king sends them out again to let the guests know what it is they would be missing, but this time the invitees do more than decline the invitation. They make light of it and some of them even mistreat the messengers, even killing some of the messengers. This enrages the king who sends his troops to destroy those murderers and to burn down their cities. Then the king decides to do something radical and new, and this is where the story takes a surprising turn. The king essentially says “to heck with the guest list” and sends his messengers out into the streets to invite everyone. Everybody. Anybody. The good and the bad. The invitation is to all people without distinction and without discrimination. All are welcome.

Nothing is required of the guests - no tickets, no identification, no credentials or passport. The expectation is to just show up and when it comes to the question of what to wear there is no need to worry. Someone will be at the door handing out a robe for each person to wear.  You see, the king is providing everything, even the party wardrobe.

Now, the big surprise. We might even see it as shocking.

The king notices someone without a wedding robe. “How did you get in here?” asks the king. This person who is not wearing a wedding robe is speechless. So, in a further outburst of rage the king orders this person be thrown into the outer darkness.

What are we to make of this?

The king ends up throwing a party of sheer love and mercy and grace and then throws someone out?

This isn’t the only parable in the Gospel of Matthew that is grim. And there is something about the hyperbole in Matthew that gets your attention and gets us thinking and wondering. Why on earth would the king do such a thing? Everyone came to the feast - the good and the bad. Everyone a VIP.

What are we to make of it?

I wonder if in this parable, the person who chose to wear his own clothes and refused to wear the wedding robe chose to be joyless.  He showed up on his own terms, resisting the free gift of the party. You’ve no doubt heard that “every party has a party pooper?” The person without the wedding robe is not being judged for being either “good or bad.” Remember, the king says invite everyone, the good and the bad. It seems he is refusing to join the party, unwilling to accept and wear the free garment of God’s grace.

He may represent those who refuse to accept God’s love or he may represent those parts of us – within each of us - that struggle with or refuse to accept the gift of God’s grace.

I think we bring judgment upon ourselves when we reject God’s gift of forgiveness or even God’s gift of joy. We can get crabby or, in the case of Matthew’s community, we may believe we are more righteous than other church members, still refusing to accept it the total free gift by inserting themselves and so obstructing the way of love. Joyless!

The wedding robe in the parable reminds me of the garment given at baptism to let the newly baptized know that they are clothed in Christ.

By wearing the robe of Christ, the baptized are saying they have entered a brand new world, a brand new life, and the gift of their baptism is from the God who makes all things new.

In the ancient church, the newly baptized were given a white robe and they kept it on throughout the octave of Easter.  For seven days they wore it as they received instruction on what it means to live as those clothed in Christ. John Chrysostom preached to the newly baptized saying they were wearing a wedding garment for a seven-day feast, wearing nothing less than the shining garments of Jesus Christ.

You see, no one is given clothes to indicate they are any better or worse than anyone else in the community. The baptismal garment had and has this equalizing effect.

Luther spoke the ongoing dynamic of the Christian life that begins at the baptismal waters – “let Christians regard their baptism as a daily garment.” It signals newness, God’s gift of new life and with that life we practice what it means to wear Christ, to be clothed, as it says in Colossians: “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience … above all, clothe yourselves with love which blends everything together in perfect harmony.”

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to spend five days at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a time well spent for personal prayer and joining the community for daily prayer – morning prayer, noonday prayer, evening prayer, and Compline. Just being part of that rhythm and discipline was such a gift.

Near the end of my stay, I received some bad news. A dear friend had died quite unexpectedly in his sleep.  I read the text and shouted, “What?” I’m sure my outburst disturbed the silence of those within ear shot. The news was shocking. My friend had many more years ahead of him to enjoy and to love his neighbor. At first, when I received the news I sat frozen in disbelief. Then, after a while, I went into the monastery chapel and sat alone in silence. Then I opened the Book of Common Prayer that was in front of me. I turned to the Burial service which begins with Jesus’ great promise: “I am the Resurrection and the Life” and concludes with the great prayer of commendation. These prayers and scripture gave me solace.

Then I flipped the pages back to the prayers for a prayer vigil used at the time of one’s death. It’s a series of petitions asking commending the loved one into God’s hands.  One of the petitions caught my attention:

Wash him in the holy font of everlasting life, and clothe him in his heavenly wedding garment.

“Clothe him in his heavenly wedding garment.”

That particular prayer petition stuck out, maybe because it was a vivid reminder of baptism and my friend Lance endeavored to wear Christ, his baptismal garment every day.

Asking God to clothe him in his heavenly wedding garment meant something more. Now, in death his baptism was complete. This something more is life in Christ beyond the grave. The heavenly wedding garment suggests being a guest at the marriage feast of the Lamb, as pictured in the book of Revelation, where each of the righteous ones is given a garment that they wear as they surround the throne of then Lamb, waving palm branches as they worship and adore the crucified lamb now risen and now sitting atop a throne.

There are too many of them to count. They are from every land and tribe and nation and language. They are the good and the bad, a very diverse crowd wearing the everlasting cloak of love. A lot like the great feast of which Isaiah writes – when all nations stream to the mountain of God for a rich feast of rich food and the finest wine.

What’s the cause for the celebration? Newness of course.

God has done a new thing – God has destroyed the pall of death spread over all the nations and has swallowed up death once and for all. Tears are wiped away. The disgrace of the people is gone. And it is all GIFT, a gift from God. It is God’s own doing. Let us be glad and rejoice. And with St. Paul we say, “Rejoice in the Lord always…”

Wear Christ gladly and let be known that God continues to do a new thing.

Amen.