Sunday, March 24, 2019 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

The Wedding Garment

Lenten Sermon Series: Following Jesus through the Gospel of Matthew

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 63:1–8
Matthew 22:1–14

Jesus’ love reached people where they were, but his love refused to let them stay as they were. Love wants the best for the beloved. Their lives were transformed, healed, changed.

N. T. Wright

Do any of you remember a month or so ago when many of us decided we would much rather sit in a pew in the Gospel of Matthew’s church than in the Gospel of Luke’s? At that time we were looking at Jesus’ beatitude sermon, and we realized that Matthew only had blessings while Luke also included woes. That day the pews in Luke’s church started off as uncomfortable, and they became increasingly so throughout the sermon.

Today we find ourselves in the opposite predicament. For while both Luke and Matthew include Jesus offering a parable of a wedding banquet, Matthew ups the ante in all kinds of significant ways. First, this isn’t just a parable of any wedding banquet; this is a parable about the wedding banquet for the king’s son. That change imbues the banquet with even more political and social cache and power. Second, in Luke the people initially invited as least have flimsy excuses as to why they could not make it. Here in Matthew they don’t even bother trying to excuse themselves. They simply refuse the king, an act that amounts to treason. Furthermore, some of them even violently go after the servants themselves. And what does the King do in response to both their treason and their expression of violence? He burns down their city. It is a vivid detail, for sure.

Finally, Matthew adds a whole other scene at the end that Luke does not tell us about: the scene about that guest who gets tossed out for not being properly attired. As Sally Brown writes, when the king spotted him, the guest was not simply ushered out as if it were merely an oversight on the guest’s part. No, he was thrown out as if his action was considered a deliberate and planned insult against the king (Sally Brown, Feasting on the Gospels: Matthew, Volume 2, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, ed. p. 187). Matthew ratchets up the tension as he preaches Jesus’ story for all of us on this third Sunday in Lent.

But to understand why Matthew relates Jesus’ parable in this way, we have to know the story within the story. Jesus tells this parable during the last week of his life, on his last visit to Jerusalem. Furthermore, Matthew places this parable within the context of very intense debate between Jesus and the religious elite of his time. The crux of the debate is that regardless of what the religious leaders had seen or heard about Jesus, they still refused to recognize Jesus’ authority.

Therefore, the story within the story is that in the last week of his life, on his last visit to the city that would make him weep, Jesus chooses to tell this parable to those in the know—those used to being in the room where it happens. In the last week of his life, on his last visit to Jerusalem, Jesus chooses to offer this parable to keepers of the tradition, to those who have both the political clout and the power to mete out judgment. It was a dangerous decision for Jesus to make. That is the story within the story. Knowing that, then—knowing that Jesus was telling this story to religious insiders, to those with power, to those who very well might have been on that first invitation list—let us concentrate on the presence of the wedding garment and the guest who either did not know or who just did not care enough to put one on.

It is a strange detail that Matthew includes, and it might prompt us to ask why the king would even care about what the guy was wearing. After all, the poor guest had been going about his day, trying to get from one place to another, walking on the main streets of regular daily life, when he unexpectedly received the exceptional invitation to come to the royal party. Given all that, of course he was not dressed properly. He had no way of predicting that his day would end this way!

And yet from the way Matthew tells the story, it seems that everyone else figured out how to show up for the royal party in appropriate ways. They, like that underdressed guest, had also just been going on about their days, traveling the main streets of regular daily life, when they, too, received the invitation. But somewhere on the journey from where they had been to where they ended up—the royal wedding banquet of the king’s son—they had all managed to change, all except for that one guest.

It is not like these other guests were perfect people. Not at all. Jesus wants to make that point in bold, for as he tells the story, Jesus goes out of his way to make sure those who were listening to him realized how scandalously broad the guest list had become. After being turned down by all of the city’s elite class, the king had sent his servants out to gather not just some, but all. Everyone they could find—both the good and the bad. According to the way Jesus tells the story in Matthew’s church, the Sovereign believes that everyone is worthy of an invitation.

As a matter of fact, as scholar Sally Brown writes, there were only two ways for a person to end up on the outside of this extravagant party: either you disregarded the invitation completely, like the first group did, or you imagined that an invitation this broad must not be worth all that much in the first place. I mean, it is one thing if you know it is the hottest ticket in town and only a very select few are chosen to get in. You’ll get your tux cleaned or have your hair and makeup done for an exclusive event like that.

But since there was clearly nothing exclusive about this king’s guest list, one could assume it would be just fine to stumble in still dressed for the gym in the off-chance that the party ended up being a total bore (Sally Brown, p. 187), and you decided to go back home. It might be that the main difference between all of the other guests and the one who stayed underdressed is that he decided that regardless of the king’s exceptional and unexpected invitation, he didn’t really need to put forth any extra effort to change. It very well could be that his apathetic response is why he found himself being tossed outside.

In other words, even though the king was clear that everyone was invited to come just as they were, after they responded to the invitation, the king also expected that none of them would intentionally remain unchanged, as if the inclusive and grace-filled experience of the feast never happened. As my former professor Shirley Guthrie used to teach, let us trust the truth that God loves us just as we are. And let us trust the truth that God also loves us too much to let us simply stay just as we are, unchanged. The theological word for it is sanctification. It is the process of letting God’s refining grace constantly change us into being more deeply faithful each and every day, a process that unfolds over the entire course of our lives.

You see, it could just be that the sanctification process is what the wedding garment stands for. The wedding garment stands for the change that happens in us when we are claimed by faith. We see that metaphor vividly in early Christianity, as well as in the liturgy of baptism. The language of changing clothes was often used to express the giving up of the old way of life and the putting on of the new Christian identity. New clothes meant new life, or at least they marked the beginning of a journey into newness. This metaphor is all over the New Testament. Ephesians speaks of clothing yourself with the new self. Colossians speaks of “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” And this is where I think the underdressed guest got stuck, for while he responded to the invitation to come to the party, he did not take that invitation seriously enough to think he needed to change anything as a result of being at the party. What about us?

This is a question we have been asking together for a few years now. We have been calling it discipleship, but we could have called it new life. We have been asking, How does what we believe about God change us? Are we living our lives differently because of what happens when we are together as church? How does my baptism affect the decisions I am making on Wednesday night? Are we wearing the wedding garments we have been graciously given, marking our journey into newness? Or are we still wearing the same old clothes, doing what we have always done, living like we have always lived?

This weekend your elders, deacons, and trustees experienced a leadership and visioning retreat here at the church. At the end of our time yesterday, our facilitator remarked that she hoped that perhaps one day a Fourth Church member might say something like “I am glad I am a part of the life of Fourth Church because it makes me a better attorney.” Or “I am glad I am in worship at Fourth Church because it helps me be a different kind of supervisor at work.” Or “I am glad I wrestle with my faith at Fourth Church because it helps me be a more effective parent or a deeply creative writer or a kinder barista or health-care aide, or a more joyful presence in my office” or whatever our vocation might be the other six days of the week. The point is that while our faith doesn’t change God’s opinion of us—God loves us beyond our imagining and nothing we do or don’t do will change that—but when we take it seriously, our faith does change us.

For example, this change is why Christians and people of other faith traditions have spent this past week going to vigils with our Muslim siblings and standing outside of mosques in a sign of solidarity and protection. It is why some Christian leaders, including me, are becoming more vocal in speaking out against the evils of white supremacy and the white nationalist movement. This change is why we at Fourth Church are being more intentional about the hard, yet critical, work of becoming an anti-racist institution. This change is why we are beginning to do what we can to decenter the idea that whiteness equals what is normal and everything else is somehow other. We are doing this kind of soul-shaping work because we have put on the wedding garments and we cannot remain unchanged.

Now, let me just add one more thing. While putting on this garment changes every single one of us, for those of us who are white, when it comes to issues of race, we have some additional work to do. For instance, we need to do some deep soul searching about how often, deep inside, we feel like we belong at the center of power, that we deserve to be at the center of all decision-making. For those of us who are white, putting on the wedding garment means we have got to do the challenging work of actively becoming anti-racist people. It is one of the changes the wedding garment requires.

Here is how preacher David Buttrick put it:

What does [this parable] mean for you and for me? Nothing but a new life. If you come into the kingdom of God, do you think you can wear the same old prejudice you wear now? . . . And do you really think you can get away with occasional charity? No, dress up. You will want to match God’s own unlimited generosity with an extravagant love for others, particularly those in need. Anything less would be out of place in the kingdom. Anything else will seem old and shabby. Put on the new—new attitudes, new compassion, new loves. Your old life doesn’t belong at God’s great party. (David Buttrick, Speaking Parables: A Homiletic Guide, p .164)

Remember the story within the story. Jesus wasn’t telling this parable of warning to those who had no idea about God’s claim on their lives. He wasn’t telling this parable of warning to those we might call unchurched or seekers. No, Jesus was telling this parable of warning to the insiders, to those who never missed a Sunday service, to those who volunteered to teach Sunday school, to those who served on the Joint Finance Committee, to those who made sandwiches each Saturday morning. Jesus was challenging those who thought they already had it figured out as well as those who had put their discipleship on cruise control.

In this last week of his life, in his last visit to Jerusalem, Jesus wanted to wake them up, to shock them into remembering that a life following him could be so much deeper and fuller and more liberating and transformative than they had ever imagined. He wanted them to see that they were barely skimming the surface of what could be. But he also wanted them to know that that kind of transformation and newness would require work on their part. That kind of transformation and newness would require openness and the willingness to be uncomfortable. That kind of transformation and newness would require a commitment to change. It would require nothing less than a whole new wedding garment.

For as my friend Tom Are has preached, while God’s grace is absolutely unconditional, it is not without expectation (Tom Are, “We Just Wanted a Simple Wedding,” 3 July 2016 sermon, Village Presbyterian Church, Prairie Village, Kansas). This parable of Jesus told in Matthew’s church claims that the question is not whether we can manage to fit this unexpected yet amazingly extravagant party into our schedule and our lives. The question is, as Sally Brown puts it, whether we will let this party change our schedule and our lives (Sally Brown, p. 187). For the party has started. What will we wear? Amen.