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Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost – October 15, 2023
Isaiah 25:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
When my wife and I got married, in the days leading up to the wedding there was a question hanging over the preparations: “What would Uncle Dan wear?” You see, Amy’s Uncle Dan has a history of showing up to family events looking like he just stumbled out of a deer stand, which, oftentimes, he had. He is notoriously anti-suit and tie. Before the wedding he told everyone, “I’ll come, but I am NOT wearing a suit. I don’t wear suits, and I’m not going to start now.”
To Amy and me, the question of what Uncle Dan would wear was more of a joke than anything else. We didn’t really care whether he wore a suit or not. While our wedding ceremony was quite formal with a full communion liturgy, held in an Episcopal church in Bellingham where Amy’s prim and proper Grandmother was a member, even so we had plenty of college friends in Bellingham who would be attending in more casual attire.
But it was not a joke to my father-in-law. He didn’t want his brother showing up to this formal affair in camo or denim. This was his daughter’s wedding! This was her special day. This would be a sacred moment in the life of the family. And so my father-in-law brought an extra suit, met his brother at the church door and said, “Put it on.” Which he did.
In the parable we hear today Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a wedding banquet given by a king. The king sends out servants to call those who had been invited, but they wouldn’t come. The king sends out his servants again, this time with a glimpse of the menu – “Look, the fattened calf has been slaughtered! The prime rib is almost ready! It’s going to be great!” But they made light of it. They still wouldn’t come. So, in what might be seen as just a bit of an overreaction, the spurned king sends in his troops and burns down their entire city. Then the king sends out his servants again. This time they go out into the streets and invite all different kinds of people – both good and bad. And soon the wedding hall was filled with guests.
But there’s one last plot twist in the story. One of these guests who had been so graciously welcomed into the wedding banquet wasn’t wearing the right clothes. He didn’t put on the traditional wedding robe. When the king noticed this, he said, “How did you get in here without a wedding robe?” When he gave no reply, the king had him bound and thrown out into “the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Yikes. Talk about a strictly enforced dress code!
This parable, like the one we heard last week, is an allegory. And like the vineyard parables we’ve been hearing the last few weeks, this parable makes use of a common image in the Bible. The prophets, including Isaiah in our first reading for today, had been saying for centuries that when the Messiah came, it would be like a great wedding banquet. God and God’s people would be joined together as one forever, and a great feast would be held to celebrate – a feast of rich foods, a feast of well-aged wines strained clear.
This is important background in understanding this parable. Like the parable we heard last week, Jesus is telling a story which describes his coming into the world. It is a story which convicts those who are rejecting him.
The king in the story is God. This might make us uncomfortable, with the king’s short temper and violent lashing out, but the prophets often spoke of God’s wrath using such stark imagery. It should be taken seriously. It is meant to get our attention.
The servants are God’s prophets, sent again and again to prepare the way for the Messiah. Again and again they are ignored – or worse – by the religious authorities.
The wedding banquet represents the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the promised Savior. The chief priests and the Pharisees were the original invitees. They ignored the invitation to receive Jesus as the Messiah, and in so doing they rejected the king. The people on the street who are invited into the wedding banquet are all the people who were receiving Jesus with joy, all the people Jesus was bringing into the kingdom – the foreigners, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the sinners.
So far, so good. So far, this says almost the exact same thing as the parable of the tenants in the vineyard last week. But then there’s this plot twist at the end. There’s this odd scene at the end where one of the people brought into the banquet is kicked out for not wearing the right clothes. He isn’t wearing a wedding robe and so he gets the boot. What is Jesus trying to say here?
We often talk about God’s invitation into his kingdom as being unconditional, open to all. And it is! Remember, Jesus specifically said both good and bad are welcomed in! However, what Jesus seems to be saying here is that while the invitation is universal and unconditional, this invitation will also require a change of clothes.
What exactly is this change of clothes? Parables are like poems in that they can be interpreted in different ways, and this parable certainly has had various interpretations over the years. In the early church it was taught that the wedding robe represented holiness of life. In the fourth century, St. Augustine taught that it represented love. Martin Luther insisted that these new clothes represented faith. C. S. Lewis suggested that the wedding robe represented joy.
I don’t think we have to pick one of these interpretations. I think they can all be right. I think they are facets on a diamond, collectively pointing to the fact that being invited to the wedding banquet brings with it a change of clothes! In other words, this invitation will change us, and if it doesn’t, something is wrong! This invitation means leaving behind the dingy clothes of the old life, soiled as they are by sin. It means putting on the new life. It means putting on those qualities St. Paul encourages us to put on in our reading from Philippians, putting on what is true, what is honorable, what is just, what is pure, what is pleasing. It means putting on what is commendable to our king, our host, our Lord. Too many people come into the church wanting to change it rather than to be changed by it. But this invitation, open to all, changes us! There are old garments, old morals – or lack thereof, old ideologies, old worldviews, old attitudes, old behaviors, which need to be left behind in order to be clothed in the new garments of holiness and love, faith and joy.
Thomas Long, a Bible scholar at Emory University, summarizes this point in his commentary on Matthew with a real zinger. He writes, “To come into the church in response to the gracious, altogether unmerited invitation of Christ and then not conform one’s life to that mercy is to demonstrates spiritual narcissism so profound that one cannot tell the difference between the wedding feast of the Lamb and happy hour in a bus station bar.”
Yes, all are invited, but what we wear matters. I’m not talking literally about what we wear to church. Dressing respectably when attending worship is a good practice, but this goes deeper. This is about clothing our lives in the qualities that give honor to our king.
When my father-in-law met his brother at the door with a suit and said, “Put it on,” it was a command, no doubt about it. But it was also a gift. My father-in-law brought his own suit and gave it to his brother. He knew that his brother didn’t have a suit of his own and so he provided it for him out of his own closet.
Similarly, this word we have from our Lord Jesus today is both law and gospel. It is both a command and a gift. You see, just as my father-in-law gave his brother the suit he needed for the wedding, so too does Christ give us what we need to be properly clothed. Knowing that we don’t have the right clothes ourselves, he gives them to us as a gift. Out of Christ’s own closet, he gives us his holiness, his love, his faith, his joy. This is what God, our King, does! As Isaiah writes in another passage which would be fitting for today, “God has clothed me in the garments of salvation and covered me with the robe of salvation.” This is what God is doing in Christ! This is what God has done for you! As St. Paul teaches us in Galatians, in holy baptism we are “clothed in Christ.” We are dressed in his righteousness.
Just like the suit, this wedding robe is a gift. The proper clothes we need are given to us as a gift of grace.
We have pictures of Uncle Dan at our wedding. He looks funny in the suit given to him by my father-in-law. But you know what? In the pictures, he’s smiling. He’s holding his plate and grinning. He left his old clothes in the bathroom of the church hall and entered into the joy of the occasion.
You are clothed in Christ, and so you have a place at the wedding banquet. It is here at his table that he feeds you with rich food, with well-aged wine strained clear. Leave the old garments behind and come. Enter into the joy of this occasion. Let us all be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church