Speaking to the Soul: Sermon for the Feast of Pentecost

There is a viral video that is making the rounds right now. A young woman decides to tell a story to her dog, named Zeus. But this story uses all of his favorite words, including “park,” good boy,” “handsome boy” “I love you,” and, the big one, “snacks.” Apparently at the sound of the first favorite word, her dog gets very excited and attentive.

But as the story goes along—and it’s not a long story—the dog realizes that these words are not promises, but instead are, from his perspective, a cruel joke. You can see the dog sitting there, thinking, “Park? We’re going to the park? Wait-- why are we not going to the park?” 

“Good boy? WHO’S the good boy? I am the only good boy! Who is this other good boy, because it can’t be me; she’s not petting me. Why does she keep sitting there and talking and not following through on her promises?”

With each new favorite word woven into the story of her imaginary trip to the park saying “I love you” to some unknown “handsome boy” and munching on “snacks,” the dog gets a stunned, shocked look on its face. The words lack any follow-through, and the dog realizes he’s been had. He finally stalks off in disgust as his owner keeps prattling on, and snickering at his response. As she ends the story with lots of uses of the word “snacks,” the lowest blow of them all, the dog has had too much, and starts barking—which in his language obviously means, as a toddler I once knew would say when she was disgusted with someone, “Shut up, you crazy lady. You’re drunk.”

In our story from Acts today, through a gift of the Holy Spirit, Jews from all over the Mediterranean and Middle East, gathered for an important Jewish festival in Jerusalem, suddenly hear the gospel of Jesus proclaimed in their own languages. Even though the people talking obviously are not native to their homelands and languages. These complete strangers, natives of dozens of lands in which Jews had been scattered during their many exiles, hear about a story of incredible power, filled with wondrous words, words of promise. And just like poor Zeus, when some of them hear this amazing gospel, itself filled with wonders too great to keep in, some of the listeners react in disbelief and suspect, despite the early hour of the morning, that those who are speaking to them in a frenzy of joy, are drunk.

In the reading from Acts 2:1-21, we are reminded of the power of words in the response of the disciples after the power of the Holy Spirit comes over them, giving them the gift of language. In a blink they are outside, in the streets, doing exactly what the disciples were told to do in our gospel reading—they are out in the world, testifying to the power of God as revealed in Christ to the people they encounter there. It’s probably the most excitement you and I have ever heard coming out of a church meeting.

In a kind of reverse of the curse of the Tower of Babel, now these disciples, many of them simple country folk, have just learned to speak other people’s language. I think that’s an important point for us too in the Church today: we are called to speak to people in their own languages first, rather than expect them to immediately understand the language of Christianity.

But the disciples’ first new language came as a challenge even earlier, for them as well as us. As soon as those early disciples answered Jesus’s call to follow him, they had to learn the language of Jesus—a strange language, then and now, awash in a grammar of grace rather than a grammar of vengeance.

This language, this grammar of grace, was filled with strange ideas, in which the greatest is the least, the least is the greatest, in which forgiveness and grace are more important than being right or self-righteous. Even after Jesus’s life on Earth was done, we can see that the disciples were still trying to make sense of that language. And we are too. We ourselves as Christians 2000 years later also continually work at acquiring that same language-- and it’s still just as alien and difficult for us as it was for them. The power of the Holy Spirit is here to help us continue learning Jesus’s counter-cultural grammar of grace and reconciliation.

The Holy Spirit, Triptych by Filippo Rossi

The Spirit hovered over the waters at creation, and God spoke goodness into the world. The Spirit breathed the Church to life at Pentecost, and blew those disciples out into the streets with the explosive power of love and truth to proclaim the good news to those who most needed to hear it—and in their own languages. The Spirit hovers over us even now, hoping to reinforce the goodness in our hearts. The Spirit is always trying to speak to the soul, using a language that we understood instinctively in childhood, but often have allowed to slip away as our hearts sometimes harden and we become more “worldly-wise.” That’s why the language of love that God imprinted on us at creation, during Jesus’s ministry and again at our baptism, often seems like a foreign tongue. It’s hard for us to trust in words like “grace,” “mercy,” and “forgiveness” for ourselves as being real, much less for us to speak and live them out to others.

As we were discussing these readings in Bible study this week, we reflected with a sense of wonder what it would be like to have those around us really understand what we are saying. Too much that we say gets lost along the way from one person’s mouth to another person’s ear. And the more people become different from us, the worse that lack of understanding often becomes. And yet here are these followers of Jesus, seized by the Spirit, pouring out into the streets and speaking and being understood by people who come from vastly different cultures from those of the disciples.

But that’s exactly what we are called to do as the Church. We are called to speak to the soul of each precious person we encounter, and hear the echoed whisper of that goodness and love vibrating from them—especially when it’s hard for us to do so, when we allow our differences, our fears, or our suspicions to divide us rather than strengthen us. Words do matter when we are speaking to the soul, and the word is Love.

As I talked about last week, story is one of the most powerful forces in the world—and story is bound up in language—language that can hold nothing back, or language that can attempt to limit access to the good news. And we have to give up the idea that we can domesticate Jesus for our own purposes, or that we should hold the Holy Spirit at arms’ length because we fear being seized by love and sent out into those streets just like those disciples all those years ago.

Language is powerful—just as the wind that is often a symbol for the Spirit is powerful. Language can help span divides, soothe grief,-- and spark conflagrations too. Especially when language is used to divide, to wound, to taunt, or to assault the very basis of the truth, as we have experienced these last few years.

We are called, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, just like those disciples, to the proclamation of the power of love.

Willie James Jennings, in his commentary on the Book of Acts, call this moment, “The beginning of the miracle of Pentecost, the revolution of the intimate. This is the beginning of a community broken open by the sheer act of God, and we are yet to comprehend the extent to which God acts and is acting to break us open. Indeed it will be a community created by the spirit precisely in the breaking open.”(1) The gospel launches a revolution of the intimate, because in speaking of the love of God, we are called to be vulnerable and unguarded in sharing the story of God’s unifying love in a world that only profits by division and turning us against each other in competition or downright hatred.

The story we hear today is the story of the first great promotion of the gospel of Jesus since his execution and resurrection. These last 50 days, they had been an insular little community, locked behind doors, afraid even though the assurance that Jesus most often gave were assurances to not be afraid and instead be at peace. He said those two things—don’t be afraid and peace be with you—so that the disciples would be able to share in Jesus’s work, and he offers us the Spirit to help us now. 

Sharing in Jesus’s work of redemption, reconciliation, healing, and salvation in the here and now is, after all, the entire point of being a follower of Jesus. It’s not just to hoard away the gospel or cut off people from its promises. Our work, just like those disciples, is to go out and speak the good news to all we meet in language that they understand. It’s to let the Spirit lead us without fear.

Let’s face it—we are very much like those disciples locked away in that upper room. We too have been locked away out of fear for a very long time—it seems like forever—as this pandemic has come in waves and surges at us. Yet take a step away from this most recent scenario, and you could say that the institutional church is very much in the same spot.

Too often, we in the big-C Church sit back and wait for seekers to come to us, ignoring the fact that most of those who have turned their backs on religion have heard its practitioners using language that scapegoats others, or that emphasizes selfishness over mission in the world. Too often some who claim the name of Christ try to lock away the gospel. They talk more about who is not allowed in, about who is NOT allowed to be treated as full members of the Body of Christ. They even talk about withholding communion from people. They talk in the language of control and power, rather than in the language of good news about Jesus.

But on this birthday of the Church, we are being asked to take seriously our call to allow the Holy Spirit, as our companion in the Way of Jesus, into our hearts and then send us out into the streets.

To go out into the streets seek out those different from us. We are called to share our story—the story of how Jesus has changed your life and mine through his love, his healing, his transformative welcome of all. We are called not just to use beautiful words, like that poor dog heard from the lips of his owner, but to follow through with fulfilling the promises those words offer. Because the best words always are tied to actions.

We are called to meet people where they are, and speak the truth of love, especially in the face of hatred, paranoid division, and falsehood. We are called to care for the vulnerable—even the vulnerable ones we do not know. We are called to talk about mercy and grace, remembering the mercy and grace we ourselves know have received repeatedly, from God and others. Full stop.

If we talk about forgiveness, and we must, we ourselves must model forgiveness and mercy, bringing it to life in a world too given over to anger, suspicion, and nurturing grievances until they swell and explode like road kill in the summer sun.

If we talk about salvation, and we must, we have to model the kingdom values of Jesus—the grace that doesn’t keep score, but instead gives freely and generously to everyone, whether the world would count them as among the “deserving” or not. We must not look for the least we can do, but the best we can give.

If we talk about love, and we must, we must embody love. This is especially important in this time of division and hate, and in this time when too many openly scorn any idea that we have obligations to each other to act in ways that protect each other, even at our own inconvenience or sacrifice. The church, of all places, should be a place of concern for those we encounter, a place that strives to protect the weakest and most vulnerable, a place where we maintain our parishes not as locked rooms but as launching points to go out and proclaim the gospel in a language all will understand, however long that take.

We may not be perfect at it. We ourselves are still learning Jesus’s language of love, community, and reconciliation today. But it is the language that alone can unify creation as God intended from the beginning. It is the language of salvation, but not salvation for selfish ends. Rather, this language calls all disciples, them as well as us, to find the vocabulary for helping to repair the world and our relationships within it, with each other and ultimately, with God. This idea of responsibility of faithful people to repair the world is what our Jewish brothers and sisters call tikkun olam—the repair of the world.

In a world that focuses on the temporary, we are called to speak of the eternal. In a world that focuses on transaction in all relationships, we are called to transformation and embrace. As disciples, we are called to embrace rather than shun the power of the Holy Spirit, and speak to the soul. Let us dedicate ourselves, this Pentecost Day, to speaking—and embodying-- the miracle of love.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on the Day of Pentecost, May 23, 2021.

Readings:

• Ezekiel 37:1-14
• Psalm 104:25-35, 37
• Acts 2:1-21
• John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Citations:

1) Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible), p. 27.

Prayer, day 1940: The Day of Pentecost

For Pentecost
Almighty God, You give us a Spirit of Wisdom, Power, Healing, & Truth: guide and inspire us by your Spirit in all we do. May we as your people sing out the glory of your Name and all your wondrous works, and give thanks for the bounty you provide. Enflame us by your Love, that our lives may be a testimony to your saving power and abundant grace. Let us always turn to your Advocate and seek to be led by Holy Wisdom, that we may be open and forthright in all we do. Knit us together in faithfulness, that we may be able to speak the Truth and live the Love for which all hearts thirst. Strengthen your faithful people to be your hands, heart, and hope in the world, to bring your good news to the wide world. By your Spirit, bestow your grace, blessing, and benediction upon those for whom we pray.

Amen.

Don't Look Up-- Look Within: Homily for Ascension Day, 2018

Last week as I was mucking about online, this statement caught my eye when I saw it posted somewhere: “We will never change the world by going to church. We will only change the world by BEING the Church.”

In response to this statement, a friend of mine asked me about a claim she had heard from one of her friends, who is an evangelical pastor, saying that the Church needs to be more wide awake than ever so that it can continue to “run things” as it has supposedly done for the last 2000 years, to make America great again. 

That pastor’s claim to a very specific wedding of national political power to the message of Christ is particularly interesting as we celebrate Ascension Day—the day when Jesus launched the Church out onto the vast sea of mission. And it was a question that was on the minds of the apostles too, especially after Jesus’s resurrection.

It’s right there in our reading from Acts. After his resurrection, Jesus appears to the disciples several times, urging them to stick close to Jerusalem and wait. The disciples, with their heads still spinning from the events they have been through since Jesus’s arrest, once again show that their heads are still in the same place as my friend’s friend: they ask when Jesus is going to assume political power and make himself an actual king, restoring the fortunes of Israel to become the pre-eminent power in the world. They want to know when Jesus is going to make Jerusalem great again.

And Jesus shuts that down, and once again reminds them what he’s been about all the time they’ve known him: he has been about making disciples for the life of the world, about awakening us to our potential to act as God’s beloved friends in the ongoing establishment of the shalom—the peace, justice, and integrity of all things living in relationship and mutuality-- that God wove into the universe at its beginning. And now he entrusts that mission to us. Especially today.

As disciples of Jesus in the year of 2018, our situation is this: after Jesus’s bodily ascension, until Jesus’s coming again, we ARE the Body of Christ in the world. As Christ's Body in the world, we are not meant to "be in control" in an imperious, political sense any more than Jesus was "in control" in an imperious political sense. (Hint: that means "not at all.") Indeed, Jesus's refusal to be a political or military leader may have been the reason why some of his followers, including, famously, Judas, became disenchanted with him. We are meant to love, not compel. we are meant to be the Beloved Community-- a community that transcends national borders.

No, as Christ's Body in the world, we are called to literally embody his greatest commandment, which is repeatedly made very clear to us: to love all persons, and to love God, who dwells in all things. And loving one another is not about "lording it over one another," as Jesus reminded his disciples in Matthew 20:26.

Jesus promises the apostles the power of the Holy Spirit, and then he ascends into heaven, and that’s often where we get distracted. Right there with the apostles, we tend to focus on the image of Jesus flying up into heaven rather than think about what that leave-taking means. It’s a scene that has been depicted in art thousands of times over the centuries, by everyone from Donatello (the sculptor, not the teenage mutant ninja turtle) to Salvador Dali, in icons, and paintings, and reliefs and stained-glass windows. One of the weirdest ways to depict the scene shows only Christ’s feet dangling at the top edge of the scene, as if he were doing an Olympic high dive in the wrong direction.

But even the angels who suddenly appear at that moment remind us that focusing on looking upward is pointless, a hindrance to getting about the holy charge that Christ has placed upon us of witnessing to his truth in the world. It’s an awesome responsibility and an honor. It's a sign of how very much Jesus loves us that’s every bit as breathtaking as his laying down his life for us on the cross. Jesus loves us so much that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he commissions each and every one of his followers to carry on his holy work of redemption, reconciliation, and healing into the world: to carry him and bear his image within ourselves for the sake of the world.

The question those angels ask is one that we need to hear today, too: "Why are you standing there looking up toward heaven?" And that may sound harsh—I imagine the apostles were once again feeling a sense of loss, and like most of us, didn’t want to tear their eyes away. But the Ascension does not represent Jesus’s leave-taking from the world. Rather, it represents a placing of the mantle upon our shoulders, and reminds us to redirect our orientation from receiving to giving.

Because we are not called just to watch and wonder. We are called to witness, and to love, not bully, as we do it.

Through our love—the love that we live, the love that we speak, the love that we advocate for the powerless and the marginalized—we are Christ in the world. Why are we looking up to heaven? Look within ourselves—Jesus is alive and well in our hearts and minds and souls whenever we live into the commandment to love and serve and honor each other.

Jesus speaks to all of us right here: “You will be my witnesses in St. Louis, in the hearts and the minds of our neighbors, and to the ends of the earth.”

What if we lived our lives as if we were the only representation of Jesus that others could know?

Because, often, we are.

Jesus’s ascension into heaven is not an end, but a beginning. It enables the true beginning of the Church being called to its mission to BE Christ’s body in the world.

The ascension of Christ into heaven does not mean that Christ is gone, or that Christ is remote, sitting enthroned in heaven and now aloof from our earthly concerns. Christ does not ever cease being incarnate, fully human as well as fully God. Yet his earthly ministry at the Ascension is translated into an act of true faith and trust in us as his followers. As the incarnate Son of God, Jesus reminds us all of the divine image that rests within us, and all that he teaches us is meant to call us into living into the beauty of that image, to remember God’s ongoing acts of creation within us.

The gift of the Ascension is the gift of true discipleship. It’s the gift of living into the image of God planted within us. It’s the gift of Christ placing the yoke squarely upon our shoulders--in proclaiming the life-giving gospel, in healing the sick and the sick-at-heart, in revealing God’s love visibly and tangibly in the world, through who we are and what we do as Christ’s representatives.

As Christians, we can’t spend our lives gazing upward to heaven- we've got things to do.

And we don’t need to, anyway. Christ is right here, within the hearts and spirits of those who seek to do his will in actions and words and attitudes both great and small. By his earthly example, Jesus modeled for us God's love and mercy that we all can emulate, even to our enemies, to those who set themselves against us. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, at his ascension Jesus empowers us to be a testimony to justice and peace, and to band together in the name of love, amity, and charity.

Take heart, Beloveds: Jesus, our Shepherd and Savior, is not gone. He abides in us and invites us to abide with him. He calls us to share in his priesthood by proclaiming mercy, reconciliation, and love throughout the world by our words and our deeds, and to serve the oppressed and the outcast for the glory of God.

“We will never change the world by going to church. We will only change the world by BEING the Church.”

Don’t just stand there, looking up. Look within—Jesus is there, sanctifying us to be his Body in the world. Alleluia!

Preached at Christ Church Cathedral on May 10, 2018, at 12:10 pm.

Readings:
Acts 1:11
Psalm 47
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

Transformed by the Banquet: Sermon for Proper 23A, the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Readings:

Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23 

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

Long ago, in a poor country far away, a young woman once approached the wise woman of her village with a question: “What are heaven and hell like?”

“Come, let me show you,” replied the wise woman, and the two walked into the forest, until they came to a house. The wise woman opened the door, and there they saw dozens of people all gathered around a huge table piled high covered with enormous steaming tureens of delicious soup. Yet the people gathered around the table were so malnourished they couldn’t even muster the strength to look in the direction of the door. Then the young woman noticed that the only utensils in the room were spoons with handles that were eight feet long.

“That,” said the wise woman, “is hell.” The young woman’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Now let’s journey a bit further,” said the wise woman.

They walked deeper into the forest, and up to another house. The wise woman opened this door, and there again they saw dozens of people all gathered around a huge table piled high covered with enormous steaming tureens of delicious soup. Once again, the only utensils in the room were spoons with handles that were eight feet long. Yet the people here were laughing and joyous. “Come in!” exclaimed one of them. “Dinner is about to start!”

With some trepidation, the young woman and the wise woman sat down. After saying grace, half the people took a hold of one of the spoons, and then filled it from one of the tureens. Then, in a staggered rhythm, each spoon-holder reached across the table and fed the person across from them. And then each person who was just fed picked up their own spoon and fed the person opposite them. Those who held the spoons chatted merrily with each other while they fed their companions. The young woman and the wise woman, too, were fed until they could eat no more. Eventually, the wise woman took the young woman by the hand and said it was time to leave, and they bid their new friends farewell.

The young woman was stunned. “That was heaven, wasn’t it?” she asked the wise woman, and the wise woman nodded. “I don’t understand! Why was it so different? Both houses had exactly the same tables, the same food, the same spoons!”

“Ah, my child,” said the wise woman. “Heaven is where we feed each other.”

Today, we get the third story Jesus tells to answer the questions the Pharisees and leaders of Jerusalem demand of him to determine his authority to act and teach and heal as he does. Here he uses the image of a wedding feast as a metaphor for God’s kingdom, which Matthew prefers to call the “kingdom of heaven.” I’m going to start right off by being frank: I think our parable from Matthew today has been misused historically when it has been about smugly trying to determine who gets fed and who doesn’t, and who is thrown out into the outer darkness.

But, as this parable makes very clear, that’s not up to us which of those around us get thrown out—it’s up to God.

When we concentrate on the expulsion part of this story, we also get our heads turned around and focus on the wrong things. We forget that gospel values aren’t ever about taking pleasure in the torments of others. We also end up glossing over the images of abundance and welcome that are embedded in this story. We overlook the fact that the king invites EVERYONE in, and that the focus of this parable is a joyous feast where we should hope that everyone welcomes each other, and where everyone invited in is fed and cared for.

Yes, here’s the good news: God calls everyone into God’s kingdom.
And here’s the bad news: God calls EVERYONE into God’s kingdom.

Because “everyone” means everyone: notorious sinners by the standards of Jesus’s time were the people he most hung out with, and when he was questioned about that, he pointed out that doctors don’t go work only among those who are well if they are true to their purpose. God doesn’t just call the godly.

God calls all to the heavenly banquet: prostitutes, con men, drug dealers, thieves, as well as the so-called good and upright folk of the world. They get a place alongside everyone, too. No matter how much that makes US nuts. No matter how much WE want to see these people get thrown into the outer darkness. We want a God who keeps score. Who punishes. Who looses thunderbolts and lightning that are very, very frightening at those we consider to be beneath us.

But that’s not who God is. The writer Anne Lamott once wryly remarked, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” And she’s right.

In our first reading, we see what happens when we make gods for ourselves, and in this gospel we are warned, in a way, against making gods OF ourselves. We don’t get to decide who’s in and who’s out. In this parable, one of the many things Jesus is trying to tell us is that God’s grace is there for everyone—not just those who are just like us. It’s at the table that we learn how to love and care for each other, and the healing power that that love can have for all the wounded, sinful places we all carry within us.

Unlike us, God doesn’t hold grudges, and God’s love extends beyond the hurts we so often inflict in our relationship with our Creator and Sustainer, as we see in our first reading this morning. Because we are also those people who make the Golden Calf, as well as those who are called to the banquet. If grace and mercy are there for us, no matter how many times we stumble, grace and mercy are there for everyone.

But this parable also tells us that this banquet brings about transformation on our parts. God expects something from those who accept the invitation: conversion of life to live according to a gospel of abundance. This is hard for most of us, because we live in a world dominated by scarcity—even sometimes, the illusion of scarcity. If we truly give our lives to Christ, though, we give ourselves over to a different vision for how to live together, a vision not based on selfishness or dominance but on mercy and empathy. And there are some who may reject something that alien to our default way of living. It’s so counter-cultural, so mind-blowing, that most of us have to re-dedicate ourselves every day to Christian living.

We want to think that we are among the “elect,” the ones at the top of the mountain, and to buy into that there has to then be people beneath you. But constantly striving and jockeying for position amongst each other is no substitute for real living. It’s also no recipe for loving each other.

As Matthew’s parable reminds us, coming in to the banquet—acknowledging ourselves as Christians, in this case-- is just a preliminary step. Once you’ve come in to the feast, you are expected to put on the garments of love—the same characteristics that Paul lists as necessary to living the faithful life: whatever is true, honorable, just, and pure—and this is about internal purity in the sense of allowing love, not condemnation, to shine out of us. And those characteristics only matter if we honor and celebrate our connectedness with all the others offered a place at the banquet, too.

Here is the connection with our epistle. Simply going to the banquet isn’t enough. To be disciples, we have to also put on the right mindset, the right attitude, and engage in relationship with God and with each other through worship and prayer, and wear it until it is as familiar to us as our skin. The kingdom of heaven is not made according to our own rules, our own calculus of winners and losers. In the kingdom of heaven, we recognize each person as having just as equal a claim to God’s mercy as everyone else because we ourselves have been remade by that abundant grace.

What this means, friends, is a frank assessment of how we answer Jesus’s call to discipleship, healing, and forgiveness, and to repentance and conversion where we have failed to put on the clothing of mercy and love. If we truly want to call ourselves “Christians” in word and deed, we realize being Christian is not just a label, but a way of life. It means looking into the abysses of our hearts and souls and not blinking or excusing away our moral weaknesses, inactions, or failures or taking delight in the failures of others. It’s not possible to be saved by ourselves: salvation comes in the beloved community where we all feed each other, and feel each other’s pain and struggle as deeply as our own. As Anglican theologian N. T. Wright puts it in his commentary on this parable, “God wants us to be grown-up, not babies, and part of being grown up is that we’ve learned that actions have consequences, that moral choices matter.”

Yet Wright resists the interpretation that many evangelicals place upon this parable in their willingness to turn this into what we could call a “clobber passage.” He points out that Jesus’s great gift was meeting people where they were and loving them without condemnation and reservation from the start. Love, not legalism, is the point of the gospel, as both Jesus and Paul insisted, for love has the power to heal where legalism does not. Yet once each person heard Jesus’s invitation of love from God, they still have the choice to accept that invitation or not.

Once we come in to the feast, we are still not done. We are then called to change our lives so that we live according to gospel values rather than our own values—and those values are not turned inward but outward. We are expected to put on the clothing of abundance—both as individuals and as each congregation and as the Big-C Church. After all, a banquet is not a solitary event. A banquet is only a banquet if it forms a community—which is exactly how common meals were understood in the time of Matthew. As the Church, we are called, specifically, not to exclude others from our banquet but live so that we help those around us want to put on their own robe, too.

The Church may bill itself as the representation of God’s banquet—the kingdom of heaven in Matthew’s terminology--on earth. That’s beautiful—except for the times when the Church falters in living up to the ideals espoused in the gospel. The fact that we sometimes fail as the Church should surprise no one, since the Church is made up of fallible human beings who do not shed their pain, wounds, or sins at the door, but bring them right on in. After all, this community is where the healing can take place. Jesus’s healing of people’s physical ailments throughout scripture was all about restoring people to relationship. And that is necessary work today as much as it was in Jesus’s time. 

There are times when the Church surrenders to the economy of scarcity on which so much of our world is based. It is at those moments that we have to remember that we as the Church are called to embody that economy of abundance that is the foundation of the gospel of Christ. It means not using our money or power or influence to bludgeon others—whether in our daily lives or in the Church itself. We as the Church can start to embody the kingdom of heaven rather than mirroring the wounds of our society-- IF we’re honest about recognizing the woundedness within ourselves, and become very mindful about how we respond to each other and treat each other as we learn this new language of love and life to which Jesus’s gospel calls us.

Luckily, we can get lots of practice in experiencing the joy of the heavenly banquet. The heart of our weekly lives as Christians centers around a feast we are called to keep together, a joyous lavish feast of thanksgiving we call “the Eucharist.” IF we start by constantly examining the way we treat each other here within our communities of faith, and try to change the ways we relate to each other so that we put on those wedding garments.

Our gathering together at this table is a chance where we get to feed each other by our love and acceptance, by being tender with each other even when we disagree, in realizing that the suspicions that make us miserable out in the world will stink up the place if we drag them inside with us and don’t address them and let love heal them. Instead, by being eager to serve each other, we are called to clothe ourselves in Christ’s love, knowing that it is in community that we are nourished and strengthened to bear that same love out into that darkness until no one is left behind, until the whole world is a banquet, and no one is hungry or lost or discounted.

The demands of love and empathy placed upon us by discipleship should not make us dour or resentful. This yoke is easy, and this burden is light, as Jesus reminds us in a famous passage elsewhere in scripture. This banquet table symbolizes a new community, filled with grace and mercy and abundance, just as a wedding symbolizes the creation of a new household and a new family. God asks only that everyone who answers the invitation realizes that that means not just coming in from the cold, but then putting on the clothing of abundance and true grace and wearing it with joy, and then feeding each other in loving care.

Amen.

(Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, at 8:00 and 10:15 am on October 15, 2017.)

Here is a different version of the opening fable, based on the same concept, which has variations in numerous cultures. This one was created by Caritas International: