Rejoice!

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
October 12, 2014

23 Proper A

I have a new appreciation for parables about wedding banquets now that one of our sons has married.  While I may deal with weddings fairly regularly on a professional level, I deal with marriage preparation, not wedding preparation.  I had no idea what goes into all the preparation for a wedding banquet-choosing flowers, coordinating colors, tasting all sorts and conditions of food, deciding on the cake, icing and filling flavors, how many layers and what shape the cake should be, what food should be served, how the room should be decorated, what kind of flooring is needed for the dancing and on and on and on.  Then, of course, I had to figure out what I was going to wear.  The mother of the bride said she would wear something she would wear to church.  The mother of the groom did not find this a helpful option.

When the big day finally arrived, all the planning and preparation came together to say to all the guests "Come, rejoice with us."  Come, enter into the feasting, the toasting, the laughing and the tears, and the dancing.  The hard work of preparation was done so that everyone who came could enter fully into the joy of the occasion.

This morning we hear about a king who throws a wedding banquet for his son.  But once the king, or more likely the king's servants, had made all the preparations made for the wedding banquet and the great day arrived, no one showed up.  Not one single guest.  Perhaps the guests did not understand that the feast was ready and the food was getting cold, so the king sent more servants to repeat the invitation.  But the guests still did not come.  The situation escalates when the guests who were not too busy with their farming or business took the time to seize the slaves, mistreat them and kill them.  That is a rather drastic way to send back an RSVP with regrets!  In a further escalation, the king sent his troops, destroyed the murderers, and burned down the whole city.  By now the banquet must be either stone cold, or burned to a crisp.  But the king is determined to throw a wedding banquet for his son.  So the king sends the servants to bring people in off the streets to feast at the wedding banquet and soon the hall was filled with guests.

If the parable just ended there, we would have a bizarre parable with a clear message.  If we don't come to the table when God calls, God will call someone else.   We would have a fairly happy ending to a rather violent story since the story would end with the wedding hall filled with guests.  But the parable does not end there.  The hall is finally filled with guests, who have put down whatever they were doing and come at the very last minute.  The king can finally relax and enjoy his son's wedding banquet, even though the son does not have so much as a cameo appearance in the parable.  But instead, the king confronts the one poor soul who somehow got into the wedding hall without wearing a wedding robe.  "Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?" The poor guy is speechless. The under dressed guest had just come in off the street and is probably stunned by the inquisition.  So the king says to his attendants "Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.' There is no pleasing this king!

Moses has to deal with another party this morning that does not go much better than the king's wedding banquet.  When Moses is on the mountain with God longer than the people expected, the people think Moses has disappeared forever and they need a new plan.  They convince Aaron, Moses' brother, to make them a god they can actually see.  So Aaron takes makes a golden calf for them out of their jewelry.   Once the calf has been completed, Aaron calls a festival for the Lord and the people spend a whole day offering burnt offerings and sacrifices of well-being to the calf, and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.

God's anger in the story of the golden calf rivals the anger of the king in the parable of the wedding banquet.  God tells Moses to step aside so that God's wrath may burn hot against the people and God can consume them.  In the case of the Hebrew people, Moses is able to intervene on their behalf and God relents, but the party is over.

God is angry because the Hebrew people have made and worshiped a golden calf, when they are to have no other gods but the God who brought them out of bondage in Egypt.  That anger makes sense.  But the king in the parable burns with anger because a wedding guest is not wearing the proper clothes.  That anger does not make sense since the guest had no time to prepare for the occasion.  But a proper wedding garment would likely have been offered to the guest before entering the banquet hall.  By failing to wear the appropriate wedding garment,  the wedding guest has failed to enter fully into the king's joy at the marriage of the king's son.  The wedding guest has not surrendered himself to the sheer joy of the occasion.  The Hebrew people have incurred God's wrath by rejoicing in their own creation.  The wedding guest has incurred the wrath of the king by failing to enter into the joy of the king.

The apostle Paul says "Rejoice in the Lord always.  Again, I say, rejoice." Paul is stating a requirement, not offering a suggestion.  God calls us to rejoice with God, not because life is always pleasant, but even when life is hard, because God is always with us.  God calls us to rejoice, not just when all our work is done and rejoicing is convenient, but in all time and in all places.  God calls us to rejoice, not half-heartedly like the under dressed guest in the parable, but with our whole selves.  When we fully surrender ourselves to rejoice in the God who created us, the apostle Paul tells us that we will know the peace of God which passes all understanding.

Amen.