Participate

Proper 23 A 2008 (RCL)
(Exodus 32: 1-14; Ps 106: 1-6, 19-23; Phil 4: 1-9; Mt 22: 1-14)


I miss Long Island weddings: ethnic Catholic, Irish or Italian or Polish or, in an incredible mix of energy and procreation and noise and food and alcohol, all three at the same time. It felt like everyone you ever knew was there. Everyone ended up on the dance floor, or laughing and watching from the side.

We’re invited to a wedding party in today’s Gospel. A generous king pitches a huge shindig for his son’s wedding. He invites the usual suspects, but those invited literally kill the messengers. That ends badly for everyone. There’s still a ton of rigatoni and peirogis and beer, so the king invites everyone possible, off the streets, out of the bars and the shopping malls and the car washes. The most outrageous wedding of the year is on its way.

We’d probably like it better if the story ended here. But there’s still one last squirmy bit about the guest and the wedding robe. That guy who doesn’t meet the dress code gets hog-tied and thrown out into the cold and dark.

There’s a real risk attached to this story. One may hear it as an unpleasant symbolic tale that confirms either our darkest hope or our worst fear. Our darkest hope is that in the end God is going to nail those people who don’t do right and don’t think right, those who don’t do or think like us. Our darkest fear is that we ourselves are in the end unacceptable, and that God really will reject us for what we’ve done or who we are. So we either hear this story with a sense of unpleasant satisfaction, or we dump it into that bin of nasty Bible material that we leave out or tune out when it’s read.

Either way, we risk missing what God may have to say.

Parables are not morality-plays in which God is clearly either the king or the landlord. We cannot say for certain who we are in a parable either—perhaps we’re everyone at different times. The world of the parables of Jesus is a world where God is not a character but rather God is the plot. By that I mean we are teased into entering the parable’s world and challenged to go where the story leads us. And notice that Jesus rarely short-changes the journey into the parable by handing us an interpretation.

At risk of seeming to hand out the Authorized Kurt Version of the parable, here’s what I personally heard in this story this past week: A wedding feast is joy. To be invited is an honor. The king wants guests. We are invited, whether we were on the first or the second list of guests.

Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to go to that wedding feast? Free food, free hooch, good company, a good time. The big news is not what happens when we refuse the invitation. The big news is that we are invited. And it’s wonderful. And it’s the king who invites. Is there really a choice?

What about that dress code?

When my second brother got married, there was great drama afoot the day of the wedding. His wife’s mother was divorced and had married a clock-maker named Clarence. There was no love lost between Clarence and her ex. Her ex had not been invited, but had announced on the grapevine that he was coming anyway and was going to clean clock-maker Clarence’s clock for him, if you get my drift.

The ex-husband and bride’s father showed up at the reception and stashed himself in the corner. He stayed alone and silent, likkering up and glowering at Clarence who died many a death beneath his hate-filled stare.

My brother was a submarine sailor at the time and several strapping young sailors had been told off to keep a weather eye out for dad-in-law and handle things if he decided to do more than stare.

Halfway through the evening, the Navy decided to act. They grabbed me, six years old at the time, and gave me my orders. I probably saluted, and walked across the dance floor to where the menacing father-in-law stood, bourbon in hand. I grabbed his suspenders, leaned back with all my weight, and let them go. You could hear the snap of the elastic everywhere in the hall.

Father-in-law stared in surprise, looked across at the sailors watching over the proceedings, then put his head back and laughed. When last seen, he was drinking and chatting with a couple of the young sailors in the corner.

It may not matter that you put on the right robe at the wedding. It matters that you wrap yourself in the right vibe, the right attitude, the right stance. A man wrapped in rage and violence has wrapped himself in something wholly different before the night was through.

The intoxicating joy of the kingdom is an invitation that resounds to the depth of our souls. To be invited to the feast of God’s reign really is no choice—why would we decide not to go? Or once there, why would we decide not to celebrate, to wrap ourselves with the same mad generous love which wraps the king who pitches the party? But we can choose. We can choose the cold and the darkness of our fears and our agendas of distrust and anger. At my point in life, the choices between hope and despair seem very clear.

A couple of weeks ago, our Senior Warden opened our fall Stewardship conversation with the theme “Participate in God’s work.” Today’s Gospel feast invites us to participate, and tells us what it’s like when we do. It’s mad love and freedom, it’s being honored guests at the best party in the cosmos, it’s sharing royal joy. Participate in the wedding bash? Oh yeah! Compared to that, everything else feels like fear and darkness, frustration and hands bound by the lack of hope of a cold world.