The Wrong Robe?

This morning I want to start with the most confusing part of the Gospel.
I want to talk about the man without the correct robe on who gets kicked out of the wedding banquet.

It has always seemed odd to me that the person who accepts the invitation to the banquet feast is the one who is kicked out.

One way to interrupt Matthew’s parable is allegorically which means that the pieces of the parable equal something else.

The king is God, the slaves are the prophets, the guest initially invited where the religious people of Jesus’ day, the destruction of the city is the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the people invited are the people of the church, and the guy without the right rob is a person who doesn’t get it.

So this is one way to get us to solve what the parable is trying to say.

The problem with allegory is that it only gets us so far.

We know what Matthew was saying to the people who he is writing the Gospel for, but what is God trying to say to us through this parable?

There is another step that needs to happen in figuring out this parable, and it is for us to leap to our day and time and try to understand how God is speaking to us.

Allegory only gets us so far, and I might suggest that stopping at that point has led to some very bad behavior on the part of Christians towards Jews.

The allegory suggests that the Jews reject Jesus and have Jerusalem destroyed because of it.

However, what is really going on is an internal struggle among Jews.

Even in Matthew’s day Christians were still Jews.

They still practiced all the dietary laws, circumcision, and worshipped in the synagogue.

But there is an internal fight about weather Jesus was the messiah or not.

I would equate it to the fight between Missouri Synod Lutherans and ELCA Lutherans.

Both of us claim Lutheranism as our heritage, but we have very different understandings of what that heritage means.

So what are we going to do with Matthew’s parable, and what are we going to do with the man without the right clothes on.

I would start by saying that this is always a concern that we face on a very practical way.

What to wear?

I am going next Friday with my mother to anniversary celebration at the church in Worcester were my grandfather was the pastor.

I was talking to her on the phone to make plans, and I asked her, “What is the dress code?”

I didn’t want to show up with Jeans and a t-shirt when everyone else was wearing suits.

Also, I don’t want to over dress show up in a suit when everyone else was wearing business casual.

So dress matters.

My mom actually taught me that people make a decision about you in the first minutes of meeting you based on your dress.

One time I was going to a visit and college campus and came down in what I thought was appropriate.

My mom saw what I was wearing and sent me upstairs to change.

I would say this is even more so for women.

Who have even more choices of what to wear.

We face on all the time the decisions of appropriate clothing.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that when we accept the invitation to the feast of God that we think about what we are going to wear, not in physical terms but spiritual.

What is the right attitude to have a feast offered by God?

What is the way we should show up at such a feast?

This parable is about more than what clothes are acceptable at a wedding feast.

It is about what attitude, what behavior we bring to the wedding feast.

God is not mad because the person forgot the right clothing, God is mad because the man is not prepared to be at the feast.

The man has not changed himself to be at a wedding feast.

This is a problem within modern Christianity.

We have made being a Christian about nothing.

I am guilty of this on many occasions.

We have so emphasized grace and love that we have forgotten that being at the banquet of grace and love changes us.

It makes us different.

When we come here on Sunday morning and sit in this pew it should change us.

It is not about legalistic ideas of behavior so much as it is about the way that we recognize and accept God’s grace.

Notice that the people who accept the invitation are both good and bad people.

And more than this we individually are mixture of good and bad.

There are good things about all of us, and some bad things.

So this is not about morals, this is about how we show up.

Are we ready here in this place to confront those parts of us that need work?

Are we ready to commend those things into God’s gracious hands?

Are we now ready to be honest about who and what we are?

Are we ready to have our lives given over completely to God?

For me the key to this parable is that people are invited to a feast.

They get invited to a really great feast!!

It is so great that we hear it described, “Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready.”

Why wouldn’t you want to go?

And once you got there why wouldn’t your life change because of it?

Why wouldn’t you live in that place in joy!

And sometimes we as Christians who have come to the feast we lose the joy of the celebration.

We lose the joy of serving others.

All of Matthew’s understanding of what it means to live in this kingdom goes back to the Sermon on the Mount.

It all goes back to the people that God blesses, and those people are not the pretty, rich, and powerful.

They are the weak, poor, and miserable.

And God blesses them and us not in our greatness but our weakness.

And sometimes it is hard to celebrate that.

It is hard to be honest about ourselves, and therefore it is hard to accept God’s grace to us.

Let me give a practical example.

Let us say that a church is failing.

Not in terms of mission, but in worldly terms.

There are only a few people in a congregation, but they put all they have into serving the poor in their community with a daily lunch.

They spend all the money they have in providing this lunch.

They spend all the service hours they have in providing it.

On Sunday morning they still only have 30 people in worship.

Eventually, they have to close.

No one throws them a party the Bishop doesn’t go down and have a big celebration luncheon.

We see them as a failure, but if we believe what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount they are blessed.

Not the huge church with the full Sunday school, and million dollar endowment celebrating their successful building campaign.

Most of us would look at that church and want to emulate it, but what Jesus calls us to, what we are invited to is a feast of joy celebrating the one who gave himself for us and the world.

We are celebrating not just our good selves, but our broken selves that have come to know the wonderful life changing gift of God’s grace given in Jesus Christ.

We have come to eat the finest meats, and share in the wine.

It is not drudgery or obligation; it is joy to be here.

If we don’t come with joy, if this banquet does not change our lives and how we serve and give for others, than we too are lost in the outer darkness just like the people who don’t show up at all.

So here we are this morning.

We have come to the feast of God.

We have accepted the invitation.

Let us live in the joy that comes in knowing that God’s grace is sufficient for this day.

This very day with all of its good and bad, with all of its ups and downs God’s grace is sufficient for today.

Let us celebrate at the feast that we are changed and made new by knowing Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior who prepares the banquet for us.

Amen

Lord, Make My Heart Good Soil!

As someone whose calling it is to preach and teach the word of God I have always taken great solace in this particular Gospel parable.

Being a pastor is not like other professions.

At the end of every day I don’t have a lot of physical results to show for my work.

I am not a plumber who can fix a broken sink in a couple of hours and then look at it with satisfaction that I have done my job.

My job is all about people, and helping them have a relationship with Jesus.

People are complex, and even on a day where I think I might have helped someone come grow closer to God you just never know.

I have had many times when I thought I had helped only to have someone’s life fall apart again.

For example, there is one particular person who comes and sees me every couple of months or so.

He has had a difficult life.

And there just doesn’t seem to be any improvement.

He came again this week, and we had the same discussion about God’s love for him and how that love can help him find some peace he is looking for, but he left and I just got the feeling that he didn’t hear what I said.

So I have always been glad to hear Jesus tell us that even though we spread the Word of God it just doesn’t always fall on good soil.

However, as I read the parable this week I had another thought.

What about me?

What kind of soil am I?

I would like to think I am the good soil, who hears the word and takes it to heart.

I would like to believe that I am a person who lives out their faith with passion and heart.

But I have to admit that it is not always the case.

I was thinking that the sowing of the word is not a one and done event.

Every week when we gather God once again sows the Word in our hearts.

Every week we come here to have that Word once again get planted into us.

And well….I leave here and sometimes I suppose I do live it out, I am passionate about God and my faith, but not always.

Sometimes the cares of the world do get the best of me.

Sometimes I do worry about money and if there will be enough this week.

Sometimes I do get anxious that others will make fun of me because I am a person of faith.

Sometimes I do not understand God’s message and let the devil snatch it away from me.

Sometimes I wonder if I am simply not producing enough fruit for the kingdom of God, and perhaps all I am really doing is feeding my ego.

I was thinking that probably all of us at some time or another have had problems that are similar to the one that Jesus is talking about this morning.

That at times we had wished the soil was better.

Perhaps if it had been better we could have missed out on something unpleasant, or we could have made less mistakes in our lives.

There is another reason why this parable is so unsettling.

Because soil is what it is.

There is not much soil can do to change itself.

If you happen to be soil on a rocky path, or without much depth, or with thorns all around it, then that is about it.

I was thinking about my Dad who every year had a garden.

And every year it would just be a failure, but not because he didn’t work hard at it.

He would come home from work every night and he would weed the garden, and he would water it.

One year he even chopped down a tree in our yard because it would give the garden more sun.

He tried everything within his power to make that garden grow.

And at the end of the day he just had bad soil, it was really rocky, and it was near pines trees, and it just wasn’t going to be good a garden.

Sometimes soil is just bad soil.

It is God, the creator of the world, who puts soil where soil is.

If we stretch the parable we see that we are who we are, and there is not much we can do about it.

That seems to me to be one of the points of this parable.

Nothing is up to us.

God sows and we simply accept what is fallen based on what type of soil we are.

But you can see the problem here.

Why does God allow bad soil at all?

If this is all up to God than why not make all the soil good?

I don’t know the answer to that one.

But if all that is true, if the soil is what it is, if God put it there, than we had better hope that God is who Jesus tells us God is.

God better be merciful.

God better be full of Grace and love.

God better be patient with us.

If not than we are all in trouble.

Because even if at times I find that I am good soil, there are plenty of other times when I am not.

And all I have is God to rely on.

All I have is God who I know through Jesus Christ.

And what Jesus tells us about God in this parable is that despite all the obstacles in the way, despite the fact that the sewer is not more careful in his planning of planting the seed.

Despite the fact the three out of the four types of soil are no good.

Despite the fact that it would seem impossible to for anything to grow Jesus tells us that the yield is great.

“This is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty,”

I was reading this week how a good harvest in first-century Galilee would have produced ten bushels for every bushel of seed.

The idea that one it would produce a thirty fold, much less hundredfold, was unheard of in Jesus time.

In other words God is going to provide a spectacular harvest.

And God is going to use you and me.

As meek and insufficient as our attempts are God will use it.

So we are back were we started.

This parable is a great comfort to us, because it says that this is not dependent on us.

It is dependent on God.

God provides.

And today what we pray and ask God for is simply that God will make our hearts good soil.

Not that we will make our hearts good soil.

Not that we will find some scheme for bettering the soil, but that God opens our hearts to the hearing of the word.

Because every time we gather we get to hear again, and again that sweet message of God’s mercy, grace, and love is sowed into our hearts.

And then we get to go out and share it with others, so that God might produce in us and them a mighty harvest for the kingdom!

Amen

Damned if you do....Damned if you don't

“You’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t.”

We all know this expression, and at some point in our lives have felt this way.

We have come upon a situation that is really a no win.

We all know that making a decision comes with someone who will disagree.

It is impossible to make everyone happy all the time.

I had to learn this lesson early in my ministry, and it is one that I have to constantly relearn.

There is no decision that we make that everyone will agree with.

Just as one small example.

I know that there are people who want worship to change-to have it be more “modern”.

I also know that there are people who never want it to change, who want to do the same thing all the time.

As a pastor I am always caught between those two groups, and any decision that is made in regards to worship will make someone unhappy.

What are we to do?

Well this morning’s Gospel Jesus tells us that God feels this same way.

That no matter what mode God chooses to get our attention someone rejects it.

John the Baptist came as a prophet, he came as an aesthetic, giving up worldly pleasures, living in the desert, eating only locusts and wild honey, preaching repentance.

He came to show people that God wants for them to return to God.

And people said he was crazy.

That is what we do with people who are “too religious”.

We call them nuts.

Jesus comes among the people.

He doesn’t go off into the desert to live by himself.

He goes into the world, enters into people’s broken lives.

He eats and drinks with everyone who will have him.

He makes friends; he lives as everyday people live.

And people call him a “drunkard and a glutton.”

This is how we react to people who are too worldly.

They can’t possibly be religious because they act and look like everyone else.

God can’t win.

So no matter what form God comes in people seem to miss the point.

What does God have to do to get people’s attention?

What does God have to do to get your attention?

This is an important spiritual question for us to ask.

It goes to the heart of what do we expect God to be like, to act like.

And in that answer we find much of our own spiritual life.

I think that what we have done is over complicate things.

We have loaded God with a bunch of nonsense a lot of unnecessary rules and regulations.

Instead I want to suggest it is simpler than we think.

Jesus tells us this very truth.

That God reveals things not to the wise and intelligent but to the simple folk who understand the Gospel at its simplest form.

What God revealed in Jesus Christ is that God loves us no matter what.

That is the Gospel in a nut shell.

No matter what we do God loves us.

All who are carrying burdens Jesus takes in and releases those burdens.

Those who want us to follow unnecessary rules will never understand the freedom and simplicity of the Gospel.

I have tried in my ministry (sometimes I am better at this than others.) to clarify always with simplicity.

Worship is not about the songs we sing, the prayers we pray, the candles we light, the colors of the altar.

It is about having God give us the good news of Jesus Christ.

For an hour a week it is about being released from our burdens as we hear God remind us of God’s love for us.

I have tried to remind people of this.

That anything else we do in worship serves that sole purpose.

Nothing else matters.

And to think it does matter is to miss the point of worship.

Pastors are often the worst offenders of this.

We have been trained in seminary, and in some cases it is a problem to know too much.

I belong to a Facebook group where pastors from across the country post questions to each other.

During advent someone asked about the meaning of the advent candles.

And this started a long discussion about what colors they should be, and what the meaning should be.

At some point it became utterly absurd.

Finally, a friend of mine posted, “Who cares about the color of the candles. God took on human flesh. Mind blown.”

You see in the middle of some obscure debate we had lost the real power and wonder of that time of year.

We lost the central thing that was really important.

That God choose to dwell among us, and show us what loved really looked like in the flesh.

This is what happened with Jesus.

Instead of focusing on what Jesus was saying.

The way Jesus lived out the kingdom of God; people were focused on how much wine he had with his dinner.

It is really absurd.

But it goes back to our expectations of how we think God should show up, and what God should look like when God arrives.

Jesus suggests that God is not found in those presuming to know it all.

But the infants, the simple minded.

God is found with those at the margins who know only of their need for God’s grace, those not screaming from the top of their lungs that they are right and the rest of us just don’t get it.

We see a lot of this in our world today.

We see people taking sides against others, and telling us that they know best.

We see those trying to divide us because we come from a different place, different perspective.

Most of us are sick of all of it.

We are tired of the bickering and the yelling.

We are tired of being divided.

And in the Kingdom of God we are invited by Jesus to lay it all down.

To put it aside and to act, and speak like Jesus teaches us.

To be people who try to find peace among the screaming, and to bring people together.

To invite others to rest with us, pull up a chair share some food and wine.

What Jesus invites us into this morning is to find God in our lives.

To know God not through our own intellect, but through the wisdom of God taught to us through Jesus Christ.

If we can rely on that then we have a chance of finding our way through the clutter.

We have a chance of seeing God in each other, in our world, in Jesus.

We have a chance at seeing what really matters.

Because I think the world needs the people of God to stop arguing about the color of the advent candles and to start sharing the good news.

The world needs the message that we are able to lay down the things that divide us and come together.

The world needs the message that there is another way to be in the world.

There is a way to find love, acceptance, and forgiveness.

So let us go to Jesus, and find rest.

Let us dance with Jesus, let us mourn with each other.

Most of all let us never forget that God has come and lived among us, and shown us the way.

Amen