A Fourth Church Sermon by Shawn Fiedler

Sunday, March 24, 2019 | 4:00 p.m.

Lenten Sermon Series: Following Jesus through the Gospel of Matthew

Shawn Fiedler
Ministerial Associate for Worship, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 22:1–14

When I was in the fifth grade, my family moved, and I switched schools. On the first day of my new school, I boarded the bus and was met with wide stares and curious glances. As I sat down, my seatmate introduced herself: “Hi! I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in July. What’s your name? Are you saved?” Perplexed, I simply nodded my head and put on my headphones and blared my Walkman. Later I would learn what my seat mate meant by that question.

She wanted to know if I had been saved, if I had committed myself to Jesus Christ and was heaven bound. She wanted to know if I had been saved, if I had taken the necessary steps in securing my place in the world the come. She wanted to know if I had been saved, if I had begun to turn away from a life of sin, of failure, to an assumed life of freedom and salvation. She wanted to know if I had been saved, if I am a Christian, a real Christian. For my seatmate, the stakes appeared high. This is eternal life we’re talking about; this is heaven or hell.

Are you saved?

We could laugh at my seatmate’s question or roll our eyes, but I think her simple interrogation, “Are you saved?” gets to the point of a really big question. “What is a Christian, really? What is a true Christian? What steps must one take? What are the exact requirements? How much water should we use? How much bread and cup should we consume? How much money do we need to give?”

Theologians and church leaders have been arguing about this question for two thousand years, and honestly, it’s well worth the wonderings.

In our Gospel reading this afternoon, Jesus speaks a parable—a story with a hidden message—to the religious leaders of his day. And it’s disturbing.

Jesus tells them about a king who gives a wedding feast and issues a summons, a call, to his invited guests. The invited completely reject the invitation and go back to their lives as normal, their work, their riches, some even counter the invitation with violence. The king too responds with more violence. Eventually the king issues a final invitation, and it goes out to everyone—even those who were not previously invited—both the “good and bad” the Gospel reads. It’s big, bold, and inclusive, and for some reason, the invitation takes. Everyone shows up. Then the king notices someone not wearing the right thing—a wedding robe—and so tosses the guest out into the darkness, where there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

If you’re disturbed or confused by this parable, then it’s working. Parables are designed to surprise and shock, prod and provoke, cause us to clutch our pearls. Parables often cause us to sit up and start paying attention. Jesus spoke in parables and metaphors to underscore the seriousness of his work.

This is a disturbing story on many levels—the violence, the king, the gnashing of teeth. But perhaps most of all—it’s unsettling because if we read this parable carefully, if we boil it down to its essentials, we begin to see its truth.

Jesus is telling us that God has invited us into life with God and life with each other, and it’s not enough to simply accept the invitation. We have to change. We have to dress the part.

Early Christians knew what that meant, for they were well acquainted with the waters of baptism.

After their baptisms, after having come up out of the water, they would be clothed, wrapped in a new robe. The robe symbolized their new Christian life. You see, in Baptism we die and rise to a new self in Christ. So these early Christians would literally put on a new robe—often white—and wouldn’t take it off, so that everyone knew they were now different, set apart, changed. It’s why so many dress their little ones in white garments for their baptisms: to symbolize their new life.

So in the parable we encounter a man at the feast who refused to change—to wear the robe, Jesus says—who gladly took the invitation seriously enough to show up but not enough to be changed.

Preacher Tom Long puts it plainly:

The other guests humbly, quietly trade in their street clothes for the festive garments of worship and celebration, but there he is, bellying up to the punch bowl, stuffing his mouth with fig preserves, and wiping his hands on his T-shirt. To come into the church in response to the gracious, altogether unmerited invitation of Christ and then not to conform one’s life to that mercy is to demonstrate spiritual narcissism so profound that one cannot tell the difference between the wedding feast of the Lamb of God and happy hour in a bus station bar. (Tom Long, Matthew, p. 1997)

The man makes light of God’s invitation and squanders it. Once we receive God’s gracious invitation, we cannot remain the same.

So what makes a Christian, Christian? Conversion. Transformation. Total change. And nothing less, because at God’s feast, it is not enough to call ourselves Christian if we only show up to church once a week for an hour. We have to change. Amen?

Because at God’s feast, it is not enough to call ourselves Christian if we remain silent when that racist joke is proclaimed or pass by the one asking for food or live lives with morals that expect the persecuted to fend for themselves. We have to change. Amen?

Because at God’s feast, it is not enough to call ourselves Christian if we do not lean into the trust that God has a hold on us and that God leads us into the hard, uncomfortable, perhaps sometimes dangerous work of the gospel. We have to change. Amen?

Because at God’s feast, it is not enough to call ourselves Christian and not expect to have our lives utterly changed, uprooted, transformed. We have to change. Amen?

At God’s feast, to be a Christian is accept the invitation, to die to the old ways of our mortal lives and rise into God’s reality and then fully live into that new life, trusting that God is there to catch us—no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

We are all—the good and the bad—invited to the joyful feast of God and that, that is the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But then it’s on us. It’s on us to accept the invitation and do the hard work, that light-breaking, dark-evading, ground-shaking, life-changing work of Christian discipleship.

On this day, we celebrated the Sacrament of Baptism. By water and promise, we welcome Quinn Joy Larson into the life of the church. By the grace of God, Quinn will grow into the garment wrapped around her this afternoon. And we, like the king’s servants, are called to remind Quinn of today’s baptism and of God’s invitation.

We all have the responsibility to raise her in the faith so that when she is ready, she can don that robe of Christian life—fit and fitted for the kingdom of God.

Quinn’s baptism this afternoon reminds us that we, too, have been through the gracious waters of baptism and have been invited by Christ to be part of the church, called to live our lives fully in and fully for the God who has set before us the joyful feast. To be clear, this Christian life is serious business and no spectator sport. It requires much of us. It can be hard and painful. But if we are willing, if we are ready to put on the robe, to change our lives, to die and rise anew, we join in the joyful feast of God—and we do so not alone, but together.

God invites. But then it’s on us. Amen?

Notes
I am indebted to the exegetical work of Kenneth E. Kovacs, Catonsville Presbyterian Church, Catonsville, Maryland, 2008.