These days, in the midst of a pandemic, Emily Post’s social etiquette has been completely upended. Accepting invitations to social gatherings is fraught with potential landmines. Some people are rightly reluctant to attend in-person social events because of COVID-19, but many also worry about causing offense when they decline invitations.
Some have a stock list of excuses that stretch the truth in order to save face. How do you avoid risking your health at an outdoor, maskless barbecue? Or do you simply tell the truth and acknowledge that you’re scared of contracting the virus? And will the person who invited you feel shunned or insulted, as if you are assuming that they might be behaving carelessly during a pandemic? It’s messy, as you can see.
In the marriage feast described by Matthew in today’s Gospel reading, those invited to the feast responded in a whole host of ways. Some simply wouldn’t go. I wonder if they explained why they wouldn’t. Did they make up false excuses for not attending? Or did they own up to the fact that they really didn’t want to go in the first place. Others who were invited clearly stated their excuses, dismissing the invitation as less important than other more pressing business. As for the ones who killed those who invited them, well, one wonders what would elicit such a hostile reaction.
In any case, it’s easy to focus on those who rejected the offer to the feast. They are either snobs or rude or both. They are ungrateful for the kind offer of a lavish feast. And one can sympathize, up to a point, with the king, who becomes angry at the disregard shown for his numerous, generous invitations. We can understand his outrage, at least until he responds with violence himself.
This parable, as many parables do, has a hyperbolic air to it. It’s full of extreme scenarios, which hopefully accomplish what they are intended to do: get our attention. We want to find someone likeable in it, but it’s hard to do so by the end of it. And we too often allegorize these parables in an overly literal way. The king is usually God. The mistreated son is Jesus. And we are the servants.
This is all fine and well until the king authorizes violence and orders an improperly attired guest thrown into the outer darkness. How unfair is this? This guest was a last-minute invite, so how can we rightly expect him to have the correct clothes on for the party? And I imagine that few of us want to imagine that God condones violence and exhibits an unpredictable, murderous rage. And then there is that one disturbing verse, telling us that many are called, but few are chosen.
If you have a certain evangelical background, those words might be painful. If not, you wonder what to do with them. And in the end, God ends up looking quite unfair and unfavorable. If God is going to be unfair, it should at least be an unfairness that upends the injustice in our world, not one that blindsides the well-intentioned with random pronouncements.
At the vilest nadir of interpretation, this very passage has been used to justify anti-Semitism, vilifying the Jewish people as having rejected Christ. This we should reject with all our being. So, our task this morning is to name all this interpretive history and to start afresh.
Let’s suppose for a minute that God is the king, Jesus is the son, and we are the servants and the invited guests. That does not need to suggest that God will behave exactly the way this anonymous king in the parable does. Let’s take a meaning from the text without being literalists.
Now, we might have a picture that makes more sense. The king hosts an incredible feast. It’s sumptuous and festive. It’s an extravagant and gratuitous offering. We are invited. We’ve done nothing to warrant the invitation, but we have received the gracious invitation.
The reality is that many opt out of the feast. The Church is all too aware of this these days. Many are hostile to the invitation, perhaps because they’ve seen the violence that has happened at the feast over the years.
One response is to fixate on those who reject the offer to this incredible repast. But of all the verses in this passage on which we could focus, it’s the response of the unrobed guest that strikes me as the most chilling and stops me in my tracks.
For a minute, let’s sit with the response of the ill-prepared guest and not with how the king ultimately treats him. This ill-clad guest, called into the banquet at the eleventh hour, is interrogated by the king. How did you get in here without a wedding robe? How did you get past security without your ID? How did you roam the high school hallway without a pass? How did you enter the Union League Club without your fancy jacket on?
The sobering response is nothing at all. It’s dead silence. This guest, we are told, is speechless. We might feel sorry for him. He had actually accepted the offer to the banquet, unlike those who initially rejected it, and now he is bluntly accused of being improperly dressed by the king. Harsh judgment ensues.
Now, remember that at the final call for guests to the feast, the servants invited everyone they could find on the streets, both good and bad? Was the unrobed guest bad? Or was he good but unprepared? Does it really matter?
What is more concerning to me is that this guest, when asked why he had no wedding robe, was speechless.
Now, imagine this: God has called us to a great feast, here on earth and in the life to come. The guest of honor is his Son our Lord. And we are both the invited guests and the servants called to summon others to the feast. But among us there are those, like the unrobed wedding guest, whom we have invited but who are seemingly out of place. They are not properly equipped to enjoy the feast. And when asked how they got in, they are speechless, too. They are without words because those of us who have been at the party for a long time, have given them no words with which to respond.
This, it seems to me, is a challenging conviction of those of us who are in the Church. Rather than casting stones at those who initially rejected the invitation or at the guest who is casually dressed for a white tie affair, we might look into our own souls.
We see on nearly every corner of the Main Line a sign reading, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.” The intention is well-meaning, but how many have been truly welcomed in so that they can belong? How many people have been invited into an experience beyond the walls of a church but are then left to fend for themselves? How many have a deep understanding of the faith we profess? How often do we take the time and effort needed to explain just what we do on a Sunday morning and then out in the mission field during the week?
It seems that there are many who are speechless among us, through no fault of their own. And those of us who have been immersed in the life of the Church for our whole lives may have the thickest blinders on about this. We may fail to see that behind the persona of a person in the pew is a soul in need of care, of formation, and of true embrace.
On a more sinister level, we also see people who profess to be Christians who nevertheless take for granted their status as guests at the party. They officially accepted the invitation a long time ago, and so they think they can party hard and neglect any interaction with the other guests. I dare say that at times, they mistreat the guests. There are others who proselytize and evangelize to get people into the party, and then the invited guests are left stranded, improperly clad, and standing alone at the buffet table.
It could be that the reason we think the party itself is dying out these days is because we, the servants, who have been charged with inviting other guests to join us, have left our guests speechless after the fact. And the results of that neglect, are God’s judgment.
The reality might be that many are called and few are chosen, but is this eternally carved in stone? Doesn’t God want this to change? What if being chosen means fully accepting the responsibility as a guest at the banquet? What if it means responding with our Christian duty to love and serve the hurting around us? Rather than seeing God as a fickle judge of who’s in and who’s out, could we see God as a generous host of the party who eagerly longs for all the guests to join in the revelry?
God has thrown a feast for us, which is unmerited on our part, and yet God has instilled in each of us a seed of goodness, and an ability to feast joyously at the banquet. Our Christian task is to accept that call. The feast is rocky at times. Frequently, there are family feuds because we often don’t know how to keep it together, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Ultimately this feast is one of joy and love. God calls us to celebrate this day, to partake of his Body and Blood in the Eucharist, to go out and serve so that the least of these among us can join in the feast, too. And God has assured us in his Son Jesus Christ, in whose honor this feast is held, that we can hope for a sumptuous feast in eternity, where every guest will be robed and prepared and no one is left speechless.
A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 11, 2020