*Sermon on the worst parable ever. from SARCASTIC LUTHERAN 10OKT11

NOW I actually understand this parable! Thank you Rev Bolz-Weber.

**

Matthew 22:1-14
Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying:  ²The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.  ³He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come.  ⁴Again 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.'  ⁵But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business,  ⁶while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.  ⁷The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.  ⁸Then he said to his slaves, 'The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy.  ⁹Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.'  ¹⁰Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
¹¹But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe,  ¹²and he said to him, 'Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?' And he was speechless.  ¹³Then 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.'  ¹⁴For many are called, but few are chosen."

When my mom and dad returned from visiting Israel and Palestine, they told me that sometimes nice unsuspecting Christians from the West fall for a little scam.  Apparently they buy tours of Biblical sites that include a visit to the very road where the Good Samaritan helped the man beaten by thieves.  This seems like it would really complete a trip to the Holy Land until you realize that the Good Samaritan was a parable. It would be like selling tickets to see the childhood home of the Billy Goats Gruff. 
But our desire to believe that there is an actual road we could visit where the Good Samaritan helped the beaten man points to our desire to domesticate parables into something understandable and unchanged that we can take snap shots of ourselves standing in front of while on vacation.

But that’s not what parables are – they are metaphoric speech, part riddle, part joke, part fable and totally unsolvable.  And they can be maddening which is why throughout Christian history people have tried to define what each one means and neatly allegorize them so they are less mysterious – which, for the record is like trying to nail jello to a tree.

But I understand wanting to simplify parables into something small and understandable - preferably with a moral lesson tacked onto the end. Yet what makes Jesus’ parables so powerful is that they are endless sources of meaning… but we have to be willing to keep tilting our head in different directions to see them anew.  And this week, with this parable I just couldn’t seem to tilt my head enough.
Because our parable for today is a real doozy.  Here’s how I heard it: A king throws a wedding banquet and invites the other rich, slave-owning powerful people. Seemingly unimpressed by the promised veal cutlet at the wedding feast, the elite invitees laugh at the invitation and proceed to abuse and then kill the slaves of the king.  Well then the king kills them back.  But he doesn’t stop there, not to be outdone, he burns down the city… and it is there amidst the burning carnage of the newly destroyed city he sends more slaves to go find whoever they can to fill the seats. After all…the food is ready and he has all these fancy robes for the guests. All he cares about is having every seat filled at his big party.  But who is left?  He burned the city. The rich and powerful have been murdered so it’s the regular folks wandering the streets looking for their dead, picking apart the charred debris of their burned city who are then told that they have no choice but to go to the party of the guy responsible.   and it’s already been established that he doesn’t respond well if you turn him down.  So the terrified masses show up and pretend that this capricious tyrant didn’t just lay waste to their city.  Out of fear they all dutifully put on their wedding robes given them at the door and they pretend. Slipping on a gorgeous garment was what you did for a king's wedding feast. And the guests got to keep the outfits, just a little souvenir of the king's generosity - and a reminder to keep in line. You don't get anything from the empire without it costing you a bit of your life. 
Well, our story ends with these well dressed survivors looking on as the King spots the one guy at the banquet who isn’t wearing a wedding robe.  And when the innocent man has nothing to say for himself the king has this scapegoat hogtied and thrown into the outer darkness. Many are called but few are chosen he says.
         Now, that is clearly the Nadia International Version of the parable but I think my hearing of it is really influenced by what’s happening in the world right now.        
Because this week- months after the Arab Spring,  and after weeks of the growing wall street occupation well,  – in this climate of discontent and dissent as we all begin to wake from our consumer induced coma to see how multi national corporations control so much more than we can imagine, in a season when tyrants are being over thrown, I simply could not preach a sermon in which I say that God is like an angry murderous slave owning king. Maybe there is a way of finding good news in that but I just couldn’t do it. 
Instead, I started to wonder:  why is it that we want to think that in parables God is always the rich man, the ruler, the slave owner, the tyrant.  Maybe its because we’ve been told that God is on the side of victory and winning and power and empire.  But that’s just not the God we see revealed in Jesus Christ.  St. Matthew – whose gospel this parable was taken from, well, Matthew is always contrasting the kingdom of empire with the kingdom of heaven.

So what if the hero is the guy who wouldn’t don the king’s wedding robe?  What if kingdom of heaven is like someone who shows up and says no to empire.  Who stands speechless before his accusers…what if the kingdom of heaven is like someone who is made a scapegoat for others because we are too scared to speak the truth?  What if the kingdom of heaven is like someone who is hog tied for not participating in the charade of pretending God is OK with the powerful victimizing the weak.  What if the kingdom of heaven is like someone who is thrown by the empire into the outer-darkness and what if the name of that outer darkness is Calvary.
Because If there is a king in the Gospel that looks anything like the God that we gather to worship, it looks like the King called Jesus; the one who came not to be served, but to serve and to offer his life in exchange for our death. If there is a king in the Gospel that looks anything like the God that we gather to worship it looks like the King called Jesus; the one who was the unexpected embodiment of truth – the kind of truth that disarms the powerful.

All of the promises of empire - jobs, security, national strength, economic prosperity - all come with a cost.  I cannot even begin to examine the ways in which I am both victimized by and complicit in the ways of empire. But Jesus doesn't play the games of empire. He choses a way that looks like complete failure through the eyes of empire, but which is the way of forgiveness, mercy, peace and life. Jesus takes on the brutality of the empire and defeats it. He defeats it for us, so that we can live in the way of life even amidst the rubble of empire – even amidst all the ways we suffer on account of empire and all the ways we benefit from it. Because the kingdom of heaven is like: a first century Jewish peasant who laughed at the powerful, kissed lepers, befriended prostitutes and ate with all the wrong people and whom the authorities and the powerful elite had to hog tie and throw into the outer darkness.  What if the kingdom of heaven is like Jesus.  And what if it is from this place of outer darkness that everything is changed?  In the outer darkness of Calvary where death is swallowed up forever.
Listen today to the words that will introduce the passing of the peace  later in the liturgy:
He will not command legions of angels
nor ride the machine of holy war;
he will become a slave,
take our hate into his heart
and win us with forgiveness,
for he is God’s unexpected peace.
AMEN

*I would be remiss were I not to acknowledge how much Debbie Blue's post this week on The Hardest Question inspired this sermon.  As did my sermonating conversations with Paul Fromberg from St Gregory Of Nyssa in San Fransisco.
 **image from St Cecillia Catholic Church in Detroit

Sermon on Forgiveness on 11SEP11 from SARCASTIC LUTHERAN

THE most powerful statement on the evil of 9/11 I have ever read, from Sarcastic Lutheran......

Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

When I was growing up, there was a house down the street from us which had slightly tattered window coverings and the front lawn was like a graveyard of broken things.  Posted on the fence was a “No trespassing” sign.  I remember asking my mother what trespassing was so I could be certain not to do it to anyone who lived in that weird house.  When she explained that it meant going into their yard uninvited I thought no problem.  Soon after that when I first learned the Lord’s Prayer I thought it was weird that out of all the sins that Jesus would suggest we ask God to forgive it would be our trespassing.  I pretty much made it a policy to stay out of strange yards and no one seemed to wander into ours uninvited so I thought I was covered.  Only later did I realize that trespassing was only one of countless was to trespass against others.  And now I get it – kind of. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.  Jesus always seems to be pairing God’s forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others.
         But why?  why is he always pairing them together?  I kind of always  thought that it was a way of guilting us into forgiving others – like the parable from today – hey, I forgave you 3 trillion dollars and because of that you should feel not just bad, but tortured if you don’t then in turn forgive the 200 bucks that other guy owes you.  Like Jesus was saying hey, I died for you and you can’t even be nice to your little brother?  As though God can get us to do the right thing if God can just make us feel bad about how much we owe God. But that just doesn’t seem to me to be the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  That seems like a manipulative mother. 
And these questions about what forgiveness really is and why is it so important that we do it was all happening for me this week amidst all the remembrances of 9-11.  I kept reading and re-reading these Bible passages about forgiveness and every time I’d take a break my tv or computer was filled with images of burning towers. Which made me wonder…can evil be forgiven?
Now that I’ve mentioned evil here’s a disclaimer: this sermon will in no way answer the question of why a loving God allows evil and suffering.  But mark your calendars because That’s the topic at theology pub this Tuesday.  which brings me to disclaimer #2: it won’t be answered there either.
Our human culture would say that evil is fought through justice and might.  The way we combat evil is by making sure that people get what they have coming to them is.  An eye for an eye.  You attack me and I’ll attack you. Fair is fair.  And there are times in my own life when I’ve been hurt that I’m sure retaliation would make me feel better.  But then when I can’t harm the person who harmed me I just end up harming the people who love me.  So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to us or living in fear of it happening again doesn’t actually combat evil. It feeds it. In the end we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level become endangered of even becoming them. Because it would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm that we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain through which we absorb it. And we know that our anger, fear or resentment doesn’t free us at all…it just keeps us chained.  And evil persists.  Sin abounds. Brokenness prevails.
Of so it would seem.  But Richard Rohr reminds us that we can tell a lot by what a person does with their suffering: do they transmit it or do they transform it. So while it’s true that God may not prevent evil and we may never fully understand why… God does have a way of combating evil.  It’s not punishment and it’s not retaliation, fear or anger.  It’s forgiveness.  Forgiveness is God’s way of combating evil. 
Of course this offends our impulses for justice or retaliation like mercy always will.  But that’s the God revealed in Jesus for you.  Like it or not this is what we see at the cross.  At Calvary God allows our human system of scape-goating, fear, and retaliation to play its natural course, which ended as it always does: in the suffering of God.  And then in turn, God shows us God’s  system by not even lifting a finger to condemn those who put him on the cross but instead proclaiming, of all things,  forgiveness.  In doing so he cuts the world loose from our own sin because Jesus can’t stand to see us chained to it. At Calvary we see our God entering deeply into the suffering caused by human evil and saying this. ends. here. - I will not transmit it.
We are cut loose.  God’s forgivness is like giant bolt-cutters.  And then God says go and do likewise.  Forgive as you have been forgiven. Cut others loose too.  Jesus commands it.  He commands us to forgive just as he commends us to love.  It’s not actually a suggestion.
But the problem with this is: doesn’t forgiving a sin against us or an evil done to many come perilously close to saying that what they did was ok?  Isn’t forgiving over and over just the thing that keeps battered women battered?
This week as I was thinking about these passages I thought that maybe forgiveness is actually the opposite of saying that what someone has done is ok…it’s saying it’s so not ok that I am not going to absorb it any more. I simply won’t be tied to it.  What happened on 9-11 was NOT ok.  That’s why we need to forgive.  Because we can’t be bound to that kind of evil.  Lest it find the evil in our own hearts and make it’s home there. 
Now, in all fairness I should say that I myself don’t naturally have a forgiving heart.  I love a good resentment as much as the next gal, and if I can go on a rant and get other people to see what an ass that person is then all the better.  Holding onto a grudge or a resentment can feel like a big delicious feast that I can return to again and again until I realize I am the main course.  Our refusal to forgive can eat us alive.
So if there is someone who you feel you just can’t forgive think about how much that resentment is continuing to tie you to them and know that God wants you free from what was done to you.  So here’s what you do…. reach for the bolt-cutters.  Because, when we forgive someone, it’s not an act of niceness, it’s not being a doormat,  it’s an act of fidelity to God’s evil-combating campaign.  Forgiveness is an act of fidelity to the kingdom of God and a defiant stance against the forces of evil – even the evil in our own hearts. And in turn when we are forgiven by someone else we are set free because they are saying they will no longer be bound to the harm we did them. 
In all fairness I should say that this is just the kinda thing that got Jesus killed -that he was going around telling people they were forgiven.  He went about freeing people, cutting them loose. And that kind of freedom is always seen as threatening.
The world doesn’t always like this kind of thing.  Just ask my friend Don – the Lutheran Pastor who lost his job for doing Dylan Klebold’s Funeral.  Dylan Klebold was one of the Columbine shooters and Don had the gall to think that the promises committed to Dylan by God at his baptism were more powerful than the transmission of evil committed by the teen. I don’t see that as saying what Dylan Klebold did was ok.  I see that as a defiant proclamation that evil is simply not more powerful than good and that there really is a light that shines in the darkness and that the darkness can not, will not, shall not overcome it. 

September 11, 2011 | Permalink