October 15, 2023

 The first baptism I did in my first church was for baby Leland who is now a full grown adult.  Leland’s dad Michael didn’t attend church very often and I was at that church at least five years before anyone told me the story.  Michael had a mentor he really looked up to—a guy who was kind to him and took him under his wing.  This mentor always wore a cowboy hat and boots and when this mentor died, Michael honored him by wearing his cowboy hat and boots to the funeral.  But when he walked in the door, one of the elders of the church shamed him for wearing a hat in church.  Michael never looked at church as a place of welcome again.

It was only this year that I explained to my son the arbitrary rules about hats in church and the difference when a girl or woman wears one and when a boy or man wears one.  He looked at me, completely baffled and I had to agree, the ideas of what is appropriate and respectful dress is so very confusing.

Today is another of the parables of Matthew.  Parables are never supposed to make us comfortable, but sometimes we have used this parable to be comfortable.  We have said to ourselves, I am the one in the streets that was invited to the banquet after others refused and I will always be dressed appropriately!  Too bad for those others!

If we read the parable this way, then we are doing what we often do and automatically put God in the role of the King.   The King here is violent and petty and vindictive, even though he lures us in with a moment of grace where he extends the invitation out to the unexpected people. We should be careful not to equate kings with God, because often they are quite different.

Doesn’t God invite the little people in the streets from the very beginning?  Doesn’t God invite with generosity and forgiveness and love and abundance?  Doesn’t God continue inviting when we first decline the invitation?  Doesn’t God understand when someone doesn’t have the right clothes for the party? 

Isn’t it the world that has exclusive guest lists?  Isn’t it the world that gets all excited when Taylor Swift goes to a football game, shows up somewhere unexpected?  Isn’t it the world that insists on fancy dinners meant to impress and show power and make people envious?  Isn’t it the world that lashes out in anger and violence?  Isn’t it the world that is unforgiving if someone wears the wrong thing to the Academy Awards?

What if this parable instead is supposed to make us look at the systems of power in our world?  How do the powerful decide who gets invited first and who doesn’t?  How do the powerful reward waste?  How do the powerful systems say who gets to eat or who gets to sit next to whom?  How do the financial systems make the rich richer and keep the poor in the streets?  How does the world protect those in power and bring violence to those who are vulnerable?  How do the world’s systems try to control people and keep them apart from each other?

We have different prisons for people who are rich and the rest of us and people with black and brown skin get longer prison sentences.  We have huge divides with income inequality, so that CEOs make hundreds of times what an entry-level worker makes. We have systems that keep men and women in certain jobs and out of others.  We have an education system that is income and neighborhood based, so that the rich keep getting more and the poor keep getting less. We are divided and this parable talks about division.  The rich and poor never meet.  The one is destroyed and the other takes its place, but is controlled by violence if it doesn’t meet the arbitrary and difficult to follow rules of the ruling class.

Church can be this way!  When I was on my sabbatical, I visited other churches each week and I was terrified, because I knew how many ways it could go wrong.  Would I be dressed the way I was expected to in that setting?  Would I be welcome?  Would I fit in?  Would I make some terrible offense or mistake without knowing it?  I found obstacles going into unfamiliar settings.  Thankfully, I had a 3 year old with me at the time, so that softened everything and I always introduced myself as a pastor on sabbatical, so I was one of the elite they had to be nice to!  I worried that I might have a Michael experience like he did with his hat and offend someone. I didn’t want the embarrassment of causing a scene.

We, too, at Trinity and Santa Cruz have customs and rules that we have no idea about because we’re used to it.  Stand up, sit down, sing this, read this.  We are pretty flexible in our dress, but where we sit can be a challenge.  Then we have ways we corral the kids and not everyone sees the children’s role the same way.  Now we’re about to depave the parking lot.  I sat there studying the map to see who was losing their parking spot.  I’m happy to find a new one—I have a back up, don’t worry about me.  But you never know who you might upset and if they have power to punish or if they will be hurt. I’ve seen it happen before.

Jesus came that all might have abundant life, not to impose arbitrary rules.  Whatever in the church is getting in the way of abundant life, we can identify those things and remove them.  Whatever in society is getting in the way of abundant life, we are commanded to use our voice, our power to make abundant life flow to those most in need.

If we’re not going to equate God and King, another way of looking at the parable is that Jesus may be the one who comes to party in the wrong outfit.  He refuses to play the power game of the King of the world.  He refuses to flatter anyone or follow arbitrary rules.  And so we threw him out of the party, hung him on a cross to die, because he wouldn’t play our power games.  And he rose from the dead with forgiveness and love in his heart and invited us to live a different way, to make his Kingdom of justice and peace our vision, where no one is thrown out, where violence is not the way, where each person’s gifts are important, where there is no more crying or grief or pain, , where we invite people far and wide, where we respond to the invitation, where we come together from different cultures, speaking many different languages and yet the culture of love and hope bringing us together.