Proper 23A
Exodus 32:1-14
Matthew 22:1-14
October 9, 2011

A Tale of Two Parties

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

We are in the midst of our annual stewardship campaign. We are “Telling the Story” of our congregation and the work that God is doing in and through it.

I usually get at least one assignment from the stewardship campaign committee: “Pastor,” the committee says, “we’d like you to preach the stewardship sermon.”

I will do this, but only on the condition that, since stewardship is an all-the-time spiritual issue, not a once-in-a-year for the campaign sermon topic,I can preach more than one. And maybe even at times other than the annual campaign.

But now is a good time to begin and with that in mind I turn to the texts for the day. And what do I find but a story about the very first capital fund campaign. This looks promising!

Here’s what happened. Moses went up the mountain and disappeared into a cloud. The Israelites waited at the bottom. And waited. And waited. And waited. Israel waited but Moses never showed. So they went to Aaron and told him they had given up on Moses and would he please make them some gods.

And that’s when Aaron preached his stewardship sermon. “Bring your bling!” The world’s shortest stewardship sermon, but wildly successful. The text tells us, “So all the people took off their bling and brought it to Aaron.” I don’t imagine anyone was more surprised than Aaron. Yes! The church budget is entirely underwritten.

Aaron took the bling, cast an image of a calf and presented this calf to the Israelites. Then it was time for a celebration—party time! Life is good!

But as it turns out, things were not as good as they seemed. Yahweh was not at all pleased about this whole campaign. In fact Yahweh flew into a royal snit. It turns out that a bold summons—“Bring your bling!”—and an equally bold response—“Here it is!”—are not all that there is to the stewardship story. The cause of the campaign was not worthy of the campaign itself. Extravagant generosity can turn out to be idolatry, as in this story.

Well, that’s kind of disappointing. Maybe there’s something in the gospel lesson I can use. I turn to it and it’s a story about a wedding reception. Hmm...weddings—gifts—that might turn out to be a stewardship sermon. Let’s see.

We are told right away at the beginning that this will be a parable, so somewhere along the way we can expect to get whupped upside the head. That’s just the way parables are.

This one is about a king. At first he behaves the way we expect kings to act. The king is throwing a feast to celebrate the marriage of his son. His guests are strictly A-list. These are the people who will be able to do him a favor sometime in the future. One guest sits on the zoning board and can be counted on to approve certain waivers to the building code. Another is a highly place customs official who will look the other way when certain shipments come through port.

So far, it resembles the social reality of Jesus’ day, but from here it starts to get weird. First, when the feast is ready and the king sends out his slaves to summon the invited guests, they all snub him. They don’t want to come. Another wave of slaves gets the same result.

Some of the invitees seized the slaves. Our translation says that they “mistreated them,” but the Greek is far stronger, something more like “committed outrages against them.” And then they killed them. This seems excessive. If they didn’t want to go, why didn’t they just say, “No, thank you!”

The king is angry but he, in turn, engages in extreme behavior. He sends his soldiers. They kill “those murderers” and burn their city. Well, that’ll teach ’em!

But this still leaves a problem—the feast is prepared and there are no guests and the king was raised to believe that you don’t waster perfectly good food. Here, the king does something very strange. He decides to invite anyone and everyone—hoi polloi or, as we say in English, the hoi polloi, “the (probably unwashed) many.” Who needs the stuffy rich and powerful anyway, when real people are just so, well, real?

We’re feeling pretty good at this point, since this is just the sort of warm fuzzy story that we like, the sort of story that might serve as a plot for a Hallmark Special. We are, after all, United Methodists, and we’re all about inclusive. “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” Absolutely. Open seating, too. So come on in, grab a plate and head for the serving line.

But, then more weirdness. The king decides to visit the banquet hall to see his guests. While there he spies a man who is not wearing a “wedding garment.” Wait a minute! There’s a dress code?! Apparently so. The king says to the man, “Friend (never trust a really powerful person in a parable who calls you “friend”), friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” The man replies, “Huh?” “Bind him hand and foot,” the king orders, “and throw him into the outer darkness where there is wailing and the grinding of teeth.” Apparently the king has suffered a psychotic break.

The part about the outer darkness is weird, but weirder still is that, as far as I have been able to determine there was no such thing as a “wedding garment.” Unless you were very wealthy you had one set of clothes and you wore it everywhere. Nobody at the feast had “wedding clothes.” But here’s this poor schmuck and the psycho king walks up to him and says, “How did you get in here without a reezenmizen?” No wonder he couldn’t say anything in reply. “Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness where there is wailing and the grinding of teeth.”

This is all rather unnerving. And the “moral” at the end doesn’t help. “Many are called, but few are chosen.” How do you get chosen, anyway? And do you want to be? As far as I can tell, there is only one person chosen in this story and he’s chosen to get thrown out of the party for breaking a rule he didn’t know existed.

What this man needs is some reliable, first-century version of Emily Post. Where was Miss Manners when he really needed her? We sympathize. We want to know what the rules are. We want to know that if we do “A,” we can count on “B” and if we do “C” instead, we can count on “D.” We want to know what’s expected of us. Imagine if you got grades in school but no one ever told you why you got the grades you got. Imagine if you got an annual evaluation at work, but you never had a job description. Imagine if every paycheck were different, but you had no idea why.

We want to know. We want some predictability. We want to know what we have to do to make our spouse happy, to get our parents off our backs, to satisfy God. We want, for instance and in case you thought I had forgotten that this is a stewardship sermon, to know how big a pledge is “enough.” We want a rule. How much is enough? And the story won’t tell us. In fact, nothing in the Bible will tell us.

So we figure it out on our own. Let’s see I’ll give ten percent. Now is that after or before taxes?

Or we figure, Let’s see: the total budget is about $247,000 and there are about 560 members of the church so that means, hmm, 560 times 4, carry the 2...$441 a year, divided by 52 weeks, that comes to $8.48 a week, but I know most of the members have more money than I do, so I’ll round off $8.48 to the nearest ten dollars and make that $5 a week.

Or we say, Well, it’s a pretty good show. It’s not as good as what I see on Pay Per View, but I’ll give five dollars a week. I’m only here about half the time, maybe less, but I’ll be generous and pledge $200 a year.

O, we say, Well, we’ve been giving $12 a week. Maybe we can squeeze out three more and make it fifteen.

O, we say, I’ve been giving a dollar week since the Great Depression and it’s not my fault if that doesn’t buy as much as it used to.

O, we say, five or even ten dollars a week, okay, but twenty starts to feel like real money.

We come up with our rules and make our decision. But when we get to the party in the story, we’re just as liable as the next guy to hear, just when we thought we were in the clear, the voice of the psycho king, “Bind her hand and foot and throw her into the outer darkness where there is wailing and the grinding of teeth!”

We want some predictability. That’s what’s offended in our reading of the parable. The parable has an entirely arbitrary outcome, so it can’t be unraveled, made applicable, solved. Instead it just whups us upside the head. If that’s the way it’s going to be, what good are the rules? And if it’s not about rules, what’s the alternative?

The alternative might be trust in and maybe even the imitation of the goodness of a generous and gracious God who, as we all know, is nothing, nothing at all like the psycho king in the parable. When God invites us to a wedding feast, it is a come-as-you-are party. God’s not going to summon the fashion police. And maybe the alternative is that as we trust in and imitate the God whose joy it is to give us what we need, we discover that it is our joy to give as well. We discover that we don’t need a rule. Like everything else in the life of the Jesus follower,giving isn’t about rules. It’s about joy, wedding joy. And we’ve been invited.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.