19th Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 25:1-9 Psalm 23 Philippians 4:1-9 Matthew 22:1-14 Dear fellow ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, grace and peace to you from the one who invites us to the banquet. Amen So, I always get a little uncomfortable when gospel readings include people being thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. To be fair, it’s supposed to make people uncomfortable, the threat of being cast out is used to motivate those on the receiving end of the message to act in a way that avoids this action. However, I’m more uncomfortable with it because it doesn’t square with my understanding of God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, who sent Jesus to save the world. And yet this was a teaching common in the early church which Matthew deliberately included in his gospel, the teaching where Jesus tells the story of a King hosting a wedding banquet on the day of the banquet he sends servants to remind everyone who has rsvp’d yes that the banquet is that day, and the servants are ignored. So the King sends more servants, who describe this great feast that has been prepared, surely free food will bring them in, but those invited go on about their business or stay behind to kill the servants. So the king, enraged, takes a moment before dinner, to wreak vengeance on them, and destroy their city and after that he feels a bit better but he still has no one to eat his banquet, so he sends his servants back out to gather anyone available, it doesn’t matter who they are whether they are good or bad, the King wants those seats in the banquet hall filled and so the servants do this and they fill the hall, and the king comes to look at his full banquet hal l and he sees someone, just dragged off the street, not wearing a wedding robe, and the king confronts the guy and asks why aren’t you wearing a robe?! And when the guy has no answer he is thrown out of the banquet hall into the outer darkness. The good news of the Lord? Why does Matthew include this story? I think he includes it because once we get past the hyperbole and ridiculousness of the narrative, it points to a central and uncomfortable truth: the truth that most humans will reject the invitation of God to participate in the abundant life of God. The abundant life of God that starts in this life. As Jesus travels around, teaching, preaching and healing, he spreads the news of the kingdom or God’s reign on earth, God’s reign is in direct contrast to the way the world works, think of the beatitudes, blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the peacemakers, these are the attributes valued in the kingdom of God, rather than the powerful, the violent, the rich, and the manipulative that seem to be blessed in this life. Jesus’ message preached primarily to the powerless, the victims, the poor and the manipulated is that life doesn’t have to be this way, in fact God desires pretty much the opposite and you can start living that way now, you don’t have to wait. With Jesus, God come to earth, kingdom living starts now! And it looks like a banquet where everyone is invited and the best food and drink is served, shelter is provided and God lifts the burdens from every shoulder and all this is freely given, offered to everyone both the good and the bad. It sounds so good it’s hard to imagine that anyone would turn down the invitation. And yet it happens, the grace of God is offered and is ignored or actively, violently rejected. Why? because the invitation is for more than a banquet, it is for a way of life which means giving up the way of life where wealth leads to power and power leads to the illusion of independence. Think about it, why would those initially invited go to the banquet when their businesses will allow them to provide their own banquet? We think, why would we go through the pomp and circumstance and trouble to go to someone else’s dinner when we can come up with something just as good, better even because we can avoid social obligations And in our quest for independence, we turn down the grace of God. We pass up our seat at the banquet because we think we can do just as well for ourselves if not better. We don’t talk about this very often but the truth is that we humans are free to resist and reject the grace of God, and we do. Why? Because we are addicted to independence. We are addicted to doing things for ourselves so much that we even turn down invitations from God. Because to accept grace means admitting that we need help, that, we can’t do it on our own, because accepting grace means we are then responsible to others, living in community. But God made humans to live in community, life is better when lived together even though a small amount of independence must be surrendered to be a part of community. The other Pastors and I were talking about this at our weekly text study and you know what this reminded us of? All of the older folks we’ve walked alongside who have been adamant about staying in their own homes, maintaining their independence, even though it often means increasing isolation. And invariably when something happens where they can not avoid it any longer and they move into a community, and when we go and visit we hear some variation of the exclamation “this was the best move I ever made, I should have done this years ago!” Because now, even if they are still doing most things for themselves they are living in community. We gain so much more than we lose when we accept the grace of God and yet again and again we resist and if we’re confronted, like the man without a robe, we often have no good answer for why, why when we have been offered the chance to live in the kingdom of God, right now, we would turn down that invitation. Now you might be wondering, with all this talk of resisting God, is there any hope? And if it were just up to us, I’d say no. But it’s not just up to us, God, knowing that left to our own devices we would never be able to fully live into the kingdom of God, no matter how hard we tried, sent Jesus. Jesus who died on the cross to save all of us stubbornly independent humans who will only be right through our association with Jesus. At our baptisms, we are joined to Jesus and God promises that we are God’s, forever. And we know that God keeps the promises God makes. Even as we go about our lives turning down the many invitations God sends to participate in kingdom living, even if we turn our backs on God exiling ourselves from the presence of God, God still loves us, sets out a banquet offering life and forgiveness and invites us to come to the table because no matter what we do, God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Now, the banquet is ready, come and eat, there is a place for you. Amen
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16th Sunday After Pentecost
Jonah 3:10-4:11 Psalm 145:1-9 Philippians 1:21-30 Matthew 20:1-6 Dear fellow ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, grace and peace to you from the one who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Amen If you are ever between books and need a story that will make you laugh I suggest you pull your Bible off the shelf and read the book of Jonah. It’s short, only five chapters and is satire of the other prophetic books. Jonah upon receiving the call of God does what most of the other prophets frankly wanted to do, he runs away. But as he finds out he can run but he can’t escape God, and after a lesson in humility learned in the stomach of a big fish he goes and gives the message from God to the Ninevehites, that in 40 days Nineveh will be overthrown. Now usually people ignore the prophets, Ezekiel and his brothers busted their buns trying to get God’s message out and nothing... and in a way Jonah is counting on this response because he really doesn’t like Nineveh, they conquered his own people, he’d actually like to see them be destroyed by God, but wouldn’t you know it, Jonah’s reluctant prophesy works, the whole city repents and God decides not to destroy them and as we heard in our first reading today this displeases Jonah and he throws a temper tantrum “He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’’” He’s so dramatic, it makes me laugh every time and the thing I find most funny is Jonah’s ability to make God’s virtues sound like a bad thing. Jonah, for all his faults knows his scripture, where God is described as gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and Jonah knows that God really is gracious and merciful slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love which is why he didn’t want to go to Nineveh, because he knew that God would be this way with the Ninevites, and Jonah didn’t want them to be on the receiving end of God’s grace. God’s grace makes Jonah angry. Well it makes him angry when it’s directed at people he doesn’t think deserve it. This happens in the parable in our gospel for today as well with the landowner who keeps hiring people throughout the day, now in a sense his continual hiring of people is an act of grace, each time he goes out into the marketplace he sees people who want to work, need to work, but for some reason have been overlooked for jobs. Think of it like picking teams on the playground, the strongest most noticeable are chosen first and the rest are left on the sidelines to watch, no matter how much they want to take part. So it is a matter of grace that these leftover people are hired to work for even part of a day, and he promises to pay them whatever is right, this of course is determined by the landowner and I’m guessing that none of those hired later expected a full days wage, and yet when it comes time to settle up for the day the landowner tells the manager of the vineyard to pay those hired last first, and to their great surprise they receive a full daily wage, more than they expected but surely much needed. And so it goes on down the line until those who were hired first are paid, and they receive, the usual daily wage. And they grumble at this, having seen those hired later get paid they expected more. It’s not fair they grumble, those others don’t deserve to be paid the same as we do, we did all the work. And the landowner reminds them that they are getting exactly what they agreed to at the beginning of the day, had the landowner never hired the others the outcome would still be the same, and the landowner asks them “are you envious because I am generous?” The short answer is ‘yes’ they are. The longer answer is that we humans tend to live our lives from the perspective of scarcity. Where whether it is true or not, we think there is only so much to go around before it runs out and so we hoard what we have and seek to acquire more and come up with all sorts of ways to judge who is worthy to use the resources, who we think should get a piece of the pie and from this we get our sense of what we think is fair and this transfers to our idea of justice where we think people should get what they deserve and what they deserve is an eye for an eye, it’s Jonah wanting God to destroy the city of Nineveh in return for what they had done to his people. But God views the world differently. God looks at the world from the perspective of abundance where resources are shared with everyone and justice looks like people getting what they need which they deserve because they are beloved creation of God and this perspective is in such contrast with the way of the world that when it is applied in the world, it upsets people, though not I should note, the people on the receiving end of the grace of God. Which makes it odd that anyone should get upset, because we are all on the receiving end of the grace of God. If we got what we deserve, according to our own understanding of justice, it would be us up on the cross rather than Jesus and yet on Good Friday, there Jesus was, for us, living and dying the truth that God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and that truth continued on through to Sunday morning and the empty tomb, and when Jesus appears to his disciples, alive, he claims them, and all of us who have come after, for the perspective of God. Having been claimed by the risen Christ we are to see the world from the perspective of abundance where justice is everyone getting what they need. And not only are we to look from this perspective We are to make it a way of life We are to live lives that work to make sure That people get what they need Whether the world judges them as worthy or not And yes, this is difficult because we live in the world and sometimes the generosity of God upsets people, us included and we get angry and dramatic like Jonah and that’s when Jesus comes to us once again and gathers us at the table where all are welcome and there is enough for everybody and breaking his body, pouring out his blood, Jesus gives us not what we deserve but what we need, forgiveness, and then he sends us back out into the world to live from God’s point of view, God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Amen |
AboutPastor Emily Johnson preaches weekly at Christ Lutheran. These are manuscripts of her sermons given at Christ Lutheran. Feel free to engage with them in the comments section of the blog. Archives
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