Appropriate Attire

Some of you have noticed a couple of additions in our new bulletin format. One feature is a brief description of the pattern of Presbyterian worship: Gathering, Word, Eucharist (when we have communion), and Sending. Each week the bulletin reminds us that this pattern is more or less present whenever we worship. If we compare worship to a dance, it’s a little bit like reminding ourselves of the steps: one, two, three; or one, two, three, four. When we know the steps by heart, we can dance — or worship — more joyfully.

A second new feature emphasizes disciplined reading of the Bible, either by reading the lectionary-assigned texts each week or reading through the Bible in a year’s time. Each week we list the appropriate scriptures to help us faithfully read the Bible. To lead into today’s lesson I want to say a brief additional word about the lectionary.

There are many lectionaries and they have existed from most ancient times. A lectionary simply assigns passages to be read on a specific day. The Presbyterian Church follows what is called the Revised Common Lectionary, “common” because it is followed by many denominations besides ours: Episcopal, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, Roman Catholics (United States), and Methodists to name a few.[1] Having a common lectionary means that all kinds of Christians all across the country are reading the same texts on the same Sundays.

For each Sunday of the year and other important holy days like Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday the lectionary assigns up to four texts: typically there is an Old Testament text, a psalm text, a gospel text, and a text from the rest of the New Testament beyond the gospels. Furthermore, there is a three-year cycle to the lectionary and each cycle begins on the first Sunday of Advent. The “A” year features readings from Matthew’s Gospel, the “B” year from Mark’s Gospel, and the “C” year from Luke’s Gospel. Readings from John’s Gospel are spread throughout the other three years. We are nearing the end of the “A” year and will start the “B” year when Advent begins seven weeks from today.

Most of the sermons preached here are based on one of the lectionary texts. The exceptions to this, generally speaking, are when I preach a sermon series organized around a theme or subject, and even then I most often work with lectionary texts although not always on the Sunday to which they are assigned.

Two benefits result from all of this, one for the preacher and one for the congregation. Preachers benefit because so many churches are working with the same texts at the same time, lots of resources are available to help us study. Congregations benefit because preachers who take the lectionary seriously won’t just ride their favorite hobbyhorse scriptures all the time. They are prodded by the lectionary to preach on a wider variety of texts and that blesses the church. Which brings me, at long last, to the scripture for today.

I don’t like it. It’s a painful text, a difficult text, a confrontive text. Were it not assigned by the lectionary, I probably would never preach it. But it is, and I must. You may not like it either, but there is a word here that we need to hear. So let’s turn to a parable of Jesus as we find it in Matthew 22.

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Let’s think for a moment about the context of how Matthew’s Gospel came to be. During Jesus’ life and ministry, no one wrote down verbatim what he said. Certainly his teachings and actions were remembered. Traditions developed, first orally and eventually in writing. And those traditions were what the gospel writers had to work with when they sat down to compose their stories of Jesus long after he lived on earth. This fact explains a lot about why today’s text is so difficult for us.

Most New Testament scholars feel that Matthew’s Gospel was written sometime between 80-90 of the first century, in other words, a half-century after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.[2] The gospel writer wanted to tell the story of Jesus in a way that would help Christians living 50 years after Jesus. So in this text, he took a parable of the Lord from the tradition and with a couple of additional sentences transformed it into an allegory.

Every detail in an allegory symbolizes something else and Matthew’s original audience would have known how to decode the details. One scholar expresses the details this way.[3]

Reading the text as an allegory goes a long way to explaining why it sounds so strange and harsh to us but why it would make sense when Matthew wrote it.

When the invited guests, without any legitimate excuses,[4] refused to come to the wedding feast for the king’s son, the king sent his army to kill them and burn down their city while the food for the wedding was getting cold. Now, that doesn’t make sense either on the lips of Jesus or in terms of the real world. But when the gospel was written it was at least ten years since Jerusalem had been burned down by Rome. Both Jews and Christians saw Jerusalem’s destruction as God’s judgment against Israel. Christians who heard Matthew’s Gospel heard the allegory as a sign of that judgment.[5]

Why would Matthew want to make that point? Almost all of the first Christians were Jews. By the time of the mid-80s when the gospel was written, they were increasingly gentile and there was a growing rift between church and synagogue. Matthew was probably living in a community where there was both a Christian house church and a synagogue. Some, perhaps even the majority of the Christians there had started out as Jews. The gospel writer needed to show why they should come to church and not the synagogue down the street. So making the text an allegory of judgment against Israel helped the writer make that point.[6]

Another part of the allegory seems harsh to us but made sense in Matthew’s context. In the allegory, after the original invitees didn’t come and were killed, the king still wanted to have the wedding party for his son. So he sent his slaves to invite anyone and everyone, good and bad alike. Then the king went to look at the guests and he saw one man who was not dressed appropriately. “Friend,” the king said. In Matthew’s Gospel the word “friend” always has a negative connotation. It’s more like the king was saying, “Hey, Buster, how did you get in here dressed like that?”[7] So he had his servants tie up this man and throw him out. That seems a little unfair, when you think of it, because the man was invited off the streets. He had no time to prepare for a wedding. How could the king expect him to dress appropriately? Even more unfair is what the king said: “Throw him into the outer darkness.” That means that instead of tossing the poorly dressed man into the streets again, they tossed him into hell.

Why would Matthew want to make that point with such hyperbole? Because some of the gentiles coming into his church were taking God’s grace for granted. They thought God had judged Israel but graciously welcomed them and they were not willing to change and grow. When God invites us into his kingdom, he expects that we won’t stay like we were.[8] As one writer puts it, “God expects his people to show up for the wedding banquet of his Son.… [We] had better appreciate the invitation and show it respect.… [We] don’t need to kill any prophets to rouse the king’s wrath. Taking the invitation lightly and showing up in [our] cut-offs may get the same reaction.”[9] In other words, we are saved by grace but God expects our lives to change because of that grace. Christians need to wear attire appropriate to grace. We need to wear the garments of righteousness. That wasn’t happening enough in Matthew’s church and he shaped the allegory to make that point.

So what about us? What is this hard text saying to us today? I’ll answer the same way I answer when I am occasionally asked what led me to become a minister. I normally say my mother did and my pastor. I was blessed to have one pastor from age seven all the way through seminary and beyond. There were also some youth group leaders and an older friend who were very important. But I’ve come to realize that I seldom mention Mary Jane Hawley and in some ways she was the most important of all.

Miss Hawley was my high school English teacher. She got permission from the school board to teach our honors English class all three years of high school. She worked us harder than any teacher I’ve ever had and held us more accountable. And what little I know about preaching, I probably learned mostly from her even though preaching was the farthest thing from what she thought she was teaching.

You see, Miss Hawley taught me to write. We learned to write by writing sentences over and over and over and over. Then we went on to paragraphs. Miss Hawley would make us write and rewrite paragraphs five, six, seven times. A good spoken sermon begins always with a good written sermon. It’s not for me to say whether my sermons are good or not. They usually fall short of my own standards. But I do the best I know how with them and they always begin with writing. Miss Hawley deserves the credit for that. She made a difference for me, a difference that continues to this very day.

Good teachers always make a difference. I read somewhere about a dinner party where the guests were talking about “the way things are.” One man, a CEO of some corporation, decided to explain the problem with education. He argued this way. “What’s a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher? You know, it’s true what they say about teachers. Those who can do, do, and those who cannot do, teach.”

To bolster his argument he said to another guest, ”Hey, Susan, you’re a teacher. Be honest, what do you make?”

Susan had a reputation for honesty and frankness and here’s how she replied. ”You want to know what I make? I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could and I can make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall in absolute silence. I can make a “C+” feel like the Congressional Medal of Honor and an “A” feel like a slap in the face if the student didn’t do his or her very best.

“I can make parents tremble when I call home or feel almost like they won the lottery when I tell them how well their child is progressing. You want to know what I make? I make kids wonder, I make them question, I make them criticize, I make them apologize and mean it, I make them write and I make them read, read, read. I make them show all their work in math and hide it all on their final drafts in English.”

She paused a moment and then added, “I make them understand that if you have the brains, then follow your heart. And if someone ever tries to judge you by what you make in money, you pay them no attention.

“You want to know what I make?” she said finally. “I make a difference. What about you?”

Friends, this is why we need to hear this text as uncomfortable as it may be. This gospel text is like Susan getting in our face when we think we’ve got it all figured out. If we hear this text like a good teacher, it will make a difference. It’s saying what we do matters. It says quit taking God’s grace lightly. Grace needs to make a difference in our lives just like a good teacher always makes a difference.

For some reason I remember a story from another teacher — my band director told when I was in junior high. I think he was upset because someone kept missing his cue. So he told us about the days when many towns had their own bands and they would play on the bandstands in the parks at the center of town. One particular town didn’t have anyone to play the cymbals. They were rehearsing a number that just had to have a cymbal player. The cymbals had only one note to play but it was right near the end if it was missed the whole piece was spoiled. So at considerable expense and effort, the band director hired a cymbal player from another town to come and play this one note during the concert. The hired player wasn’t able to rehearse with the band but he assured the director that he knew the music and exactly when to play.

The day of the concert finally arrived. The cymbal player also arrived just in time to take his cymbals and slip into place on the bandstand as the performance began. It was a grand performance. The townsfolk were smiling happily, commenting that the band had never sounded better. The band played on and the music was reaching its climax. The director was pumping away furiously, and at the right moment he turned to cue the cymbal player for his all important note.

He woke up when the director’s baton hit him right in the middle of his forehead.

I don’t know why I have remembered that story but it impressed on me never to miss my cue. It’s probably the only thing I do well and I am a one note guy. I always preach the grace of God. Cue me and I’m going to bang the cymbals for the grace of God. I’m a one-note preacher and many who hear me say they are blessed by it.

But just like Matthew’s allegory, my band director’s story cuts the other way too. When God cues us, we need to play. We cannot think about playing. We cannot wish we were playing. We cannot intend to play. We cannot plan to play later. We must play. And we cannot play generally. We must always play specifically. In other words, for this church to play the music God gives us to play, everyone of us has an important part even if it is just one note. If one of us misses God’s cue, all of us suffer. When God cues us, you and I must do many specific things. There is no escaping it. We must give specific dollars. We must give specific time. We must pray and study specifically. We must serve specifically and we must worship specifically. Our response to God cannot be general. God expects us to play the right note when we are cued.

And if we are not doing that, to change the metaphor back to the text, then we are not dressing appropriately. We are not putting on the garments of righteousness that God expects of us. And I urge you as I urge myself, for the sake of our souls, to take this seriously. In the name of Christ.

[1] The Revised Common Lectionary: Consultation on Common Texts (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992) 9, 11.

[2] “By way of overall judgment on the ‘Matthew’ issue, it is best to accept the common position that canonical Matthew was originally written in Greek by a non-eyewitness whose name is unknown to us and who depended on sources like Mark and Q.” “All this makes ad 80-90 the most plausible dating; but the arguments are not precise, and so at least a decade in either direction must be allowed.” Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997) 210-211 and 217.

[3] Thomas G. Long, Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997) 246.

[4] Gundry contrasts Matthew’s allegory with what may have been the original version of Jesus’ parable as found in Luke 14.15-24. In Luke’s version the invited guests’ excuses appear legitimate and unavoidable. They are made politely. But the refusals in Matthew are brusque and the excuses are without any merit. This intensifies the guilt of “Israel” in refusing the grace of God. Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1982) 435.

[5] “The insulting and killing of the messengers is a startling allegorical feature; so is the surprising Blitzkrieg in which the king, before the feast can cool destroys the city and its inhabitants for not coming. (Has a saying of Jesus about judgment on Jerusalem, expressed in war terms, been combined with a parable about a wedding feast?) Then, amid the smoking ruins, the messengers go to where the roads leave the city and find people (refugees from the destroyed city, or outsiders?) to fill the banquet hall.” Floyd V. Filson, A Commentary on the Gospel According to St. Matthew (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1971) 233.

[6] “Devotees [Jews, Christians, Jewish-Christians] attending each were close enough for mutual comparison and contrast. Matthew’s Gospel seems to demand something like that sort of situation: the Christian sect not only was aware of the older and better-established Jewish tradition but also found itself required to explain and understand — first of all for itself — why it came to worship here and not in the synagogue down the street.” Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999) 191.

[7] Long, 247.

[8] I didn’t have time to make the following point although it is most apropos. “Finally, the pericope is profoundly moral. God’s people are expected to be obedient to God and his prophets. Jesus and the Pharisees do not disagree at this point — only about the nature of such obedience. The inclusiveness of the Kingdom of God is not an easy tolerance. It is not antinomian, as it is so often misinterpreted among more liberal Christians these days. Nor does the invitation of God leave the status quo untouched, as more conservative American Christians might be tempted to think. The invitation is generous and it is broad, but it is not an invitation to a come as you are party, and it does not make the colossal error of the contemporary self-esteem movement. It does not pretend that ‘you are just fine the way you are.’ You are not — you are troubled, confused, sinful, mortal, perhaps sick or in deep distress. The Gospel is not the announcement that any of is just fine the way we are. Rather, God loves so much that he will not leave us unchanged.” Roger E. Van Harn, ed., The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts, The Third Readings (The Gospels) (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001) 128.

[9] Van Harn, 127, 128.