by the Very Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson
Click here to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
What now seems like a long time ago, just as I was starting my time as your rector here, I flew out to celebrate the marriage of two of my former parishioners. It was a destination wedding, and one for which I had done all of the marriage prep, the counseling and planning, and I did not want to leave the couple in a lurch. Plus, it was a trip to a lovely location that, for the purposes of this sermon, shall remain nameless. You see, everyone in the wedding, the couple, their colleagues, and even some of the family, were the kind of people who when asked what they did for a living would simply and very vaguely respond – “I work for the government”. Which is to say, everyone at that wedding had a security clearance and a desire to keep their day job anonymous.
I did my best to make small talk and to enjoy the sumptuous meal prepared for this no expenses spared wedding. But, when you’re dressed as I was, you stand out like a sore thumb at a party. And, inevitably at a wedding, folks either avoid the priest, or, after a few drinks, approach for an unscheduled pastoral care session or confession. Trying to avoid both, I struck up a conversation on the way to the restroom with a young man who seemed to be there alone like me. And, also like me, was in uniform, wearing the telltale garb of a US Navy sailor – he was, he said, a Navy Seal. It turned out he was the plus of to a plus one, and like me, stuck for the evening, not knowing a soul, but determined to have a good time. As we walked out of the ballroom where the festivities were contained, we passed a few other similar ballrooms all with wedding receptions in full swing.
Our conversation continued to the Men’s room and as we both headed back to the party, I found myself struck by an idea that I felt would certainly add some excitement to the evening. Passing one of the adjacent wedding receptions, doors open with music thumping, I leaned over to my new friend and asked – “Wouldn’t it be funny if a priest and a Navy Seal crashed someone else’s wedding party?” He grinned conspiratorially and we veered off course. We were only in the room for a few moments when two burly men, both with earpieces curlycuing along their thick necks into dark suits, spotted us and blocked our path. As they escorted us back into the hall, we noticed we had walked right past a greeting table covered in yarmulkes. We lacked the sartorial attire for this particular wedding. While we were not bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness, I can say that we certainly failed at making it into the party. Thus is my only story of trying to crash a wedding, with or without a Navy Seal.
Of course, how could I not tell this story on the day when we hear the tale in the gospel of Matthew of a poor soul who is bounced from a wedding reception for not wearing the appropriate attire? This is a shocking parable that, while it has a similar version in another of the canonical gospels, is told here, like some of the other parables we’ve been hearing in Matthew, with far more brutal and violent imagery than the versions told elsewhere. Before I tackle the parable itself, in all its ugliness, I feel it important up front to name this violent imagery and how it has been misused over the millennia. Inside these parables in Matthew, as we heard in last Sunday’s story about a vineyard owner wreaking vengeance on tenants who rejected his son, Matthew seems to be drawing a direct correlation between some of the characters in Jesus’ stories, the ones ultimately on the receiving end of some kind of violence or retribution, as being the Jewish authorities, the chief priests and Pharisees. In today’s gospel, we hear of intended party guests who reject the invitation to the party, the party Jesus has described as somehow like the kingdom of heaven, and the king’s wrath on them is brutal. Then we see this poor partygoer, perhaps wedding crasher, or perhaps someone who just missed the memo about attire, being bound and thrown into outer darkness. And, the assumption is that we will hear in this somehow that Jesus was rejected by the Jewish people and so the gospel went to those outside the household of Israel to gentiles, to a more receptive audience. In this way, the dichotomy between Christians and Jews, and the warrant to use violence against the latter, has been established over the years, such that these parables have been used and abused for all kinds of antisemitic behavior. But, as scholars will point out, Matthew is not engaged in a strictly theological argument against Judaism. Rather, what this morning’s parable, and those like it in his gospel represent, is more like a painful family feud. Matthew is co-opting well known parables of Jesus to express animosity and grief and anger at his siblings. This is, after all, a thoroughly Jewish community that produces the gospel. Those who followed Jesus were finding themselves at odds with their cousins and kin inside the community. Real separation and pain was taking place. And so this violence we see, violence which seems at odds with Jesus’ message of love and compassion, is, best seen as the expression of family members, the community that produced the gospel of Matthew, trying to make sense of the brokenness and alienation they’re experiencing with other members of their wider community and family.
So, what are we to do with a gospel that seems so at odds with…well, at odds with the whole gospel of Jesus?
First, it is important to me to name that as we’ve been discussing recently at St. John’s, in our work with Love Out Loud, in inviting the Rev’d Angela Denker, a scholar of White Christian Nationalism, to lead us in understanding this disturbing but prevalent branch of our wider faith tradition, that our faith is in the midst of its own family feud. That the mantle of Christian is being wrestled over and debated, and in the name of Jesus, there are those inside our wider family of faith, that are endorsing the very same language of violence and vengeance, of rejection and exclusion that Matthew’s gospel seems to employ this morning. Our call, if we are to be faithful to the wider sweep of God’s love made known in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, is not to imagine some sort of punitive justice visited on those within our tradition with whom we are at great theological and spiritual odds, even when we see hurt and brokenness being done by them in the name of Jesus. Rather, our call is to be like Jesus himself, to clothes ourselves in the visible work of faithfulness to his gospel of healing a broken world, of welcoming the stranger and the immigrant, serving the poor and the hungry, visiting the sick and those in prison, the very things Jesus will preach only a few chapters after this one in his famous parable of the sheep and the goats, when he says whatever you have done to one of the least of these, you did it to me. In the words of this morning’s epistle, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise,” Jesus says, “think on these things”, or in the spirit of today’s sermon, clothe ourselves in these things. In baptism, we put on Christ, we clothe ourselves in him, putting on a life that will be readily visible to the world around us as something good and true, something lifegiving and beautiful, amidst a backdrop of violence, rejection, suffering, and pain.
My friends, what is coming and what is ahead in our country and in our world, will need the response of a community steeped not in its own grief and anger, not in a desire for vengeance against our perceived enemies, or nursing grievances against our alienated family of faith, but those who have been healed and made whole in the waters of baptism, who have put on Christ, and in him found their truest self, ready to love, to serve, to heal and to help. Our calling, dear siblings in Christ, is not to simply believe differently from those whose faith is hurting and destroying the lives of so many others. Our calling is to act differently, to be visible and public in making known the love of God who is healing the world and restoring all things, by doing the very things Jesus did when he was among us, by welcoming the outcast, serving the poor, feeding the hungry, and standing up against injustice in a world so often defined by it. Amen? Amen!
