Matthew 22:1-14

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again 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.” But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, “The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

 ‘But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he was speechless.Then 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.” For many are called, but few are chosen.’

Oh my. If Matthew and Luke had churches in the Epping-Carlingford area, and I wasn’t, you know, your minister, I would absolutely choose to go to Luke’s church. Every time I visit the church of Matthew, I feel the need to sit near the door. Things are so clear-cut for him. In his world, you are either a sheep or a goat, wheat or chaff, a wise maiden or a foolish one. If you pretend to be one when you are in fact the other, then woe to you, you hypocrite—you wolf in sheep’s clothing, you splinter picker with log-ridden eyes.

See, Matthew is what we call a fire and brimstone, Charlton Heston-voiced preacher. He gets really excited about hell, which he conceives as a burning trash heap where a lot of hypocrites are going to grind their teeth for all eternity. Luke mentions the dump once, so maybe there’s something to it, but Matthew can’t seem to get enough of it. Over and over, he puts hell in Jesus’ mouth, filling the fiery furnace with sinners of every kind: evildoers, unfaithful stewards, wicked servants, and at least one poor guy who was so afraid of his master that he did not have the nerve to invest a single talent in the financial market. Then the master had his slave thrown into outer darkness as punishment for being afraid, but at least he didn’t cut him up first. In another story, another master cuts his wicked slave into pieces before sending him to the weeping and gnashing place.

I’m not saying Jesus didn’t say these things. I’m just saying that Matthew sure seems to enjoy reporting them, the same way he seems to enjoy teling the parable of the wedding banquet. The first part is bad enough. The king invites the A list to his son’s wedding, but they don’t show up. When he sends his slaves to fetch them, they not only make light of the invitation—they kill the messengers, which so enrages the king that he puts the roast ox and the fatted calves his chefs have prepared for them back in the oven while he rallies his troops to go and kill them all, burning their city to the ground. Bad enough, right? But then he sends his slaves to bring in the B list, which also includes some people on the C, D, and F lists, most of whom were checking their e-mail, getting petrol for their cars, or just sleeping in the bushes until the shelter opened when they were summoned to the king’s wedding banquet. Cool! I must have won the lottery! So they go. And you know what happens. The king notices one of them who is not dressed appropriately, acts as if that is some kind of big surprise, and—when the guy has nothing to say for himself—orders him bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” I mean seriously, can we go to Luke’s church, please? Alas, no. We’re in Matthew’s church this morning. It’s his turn to give the sermon, and if you have a hard time sitting still, don’t forget: it’s his story, but it’s not his gospel. It’s the gospel according to Matthew, which every one of us and all of us together are allowed and encouraged to engage according to the gospel that has given us life. That’s what good Bible Study is.

I have spent so much of my life changing bandages on friends and strangers wounded by brutal Christianity that sometimes I fall into the trap of rounding off edges in my sermons that God means to keep sharp. My problem is that I really believe the gospel is good news—that even the hardest sayings, recorded by those with the angriest ears, have life in them somewhere, with truth I need to know.

In the case of this morning’s parable, I am deeply relieved that someone knows about this dream I keep having. In it, I am the guest preacher at some conference, but I have forgotten my alb and stole, and there is nothing in the vestry that fits me. My only choices are big baggy black things made for men twice my size or little angelic pink things made for choristers half my size. I keep trying them on and ripping them off again while the clock ticks the time away. The next thing I know I am standing in church in something completely inadequate when it comes time for me to read the gospel – not naked, but feeling like I am. I decide that posture is everything, holding my head high as I step into the pulpit to read the passage – only to find that the Bible is written entirely in Mandarin.

People seem to have different versions of this dream, depending on their stations in life, but the dream always comes down to being somewhere you are not equipped to be—usually without any clothes on—waiting to be exposed for the imposter you are. As hard as you have worked to prevent it, it is finally going to happen. People are going to learn the truth about you: that you are stupid, that you have no business being here, that you don’t know the language, or don’t know which fork to use, or don’t remember your host’s name, that people really are looking at you and there is nothing in reach that you can use to cover yourself up. Whatever else Matthew was up to in this parable, he got that part right. Everyone else at the banquet seems to have gotten a memo that the under-dressed guest has not. When the magnificent king approaches him, with anger still radiating from his royal person over his first, disastrously received effort at being generous, the under-dressed guest has no time to think, much less get the textbook.

“Friend,” the king says to him (a lousy translation; “OI” works much better). “OI,” the king says to him, “how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” Oh, God. It’s one of those dreams. Why do I think it’s a dream? Because real people don’t turn down a king’s dinner invitation, much less torture and kill the messengers who came to fetch them. Because once you have a whole ox and several fatted calves on serving platters, they won’t keep while you wage war on a whole city, kill its inhabitants, and torch the place. Because who really expects someone nabbed in the middle of a nap to have a clean wedding robe in the boot of the car?

Jesus called it a parable, which is somewhat like a dream. It’s not a once-and for-all story. It’s a story you can walk around in, a story that wants a response from you—hopes for a response from you—one that changes as you change, so that it is different the tenth time you hear it than it was at the first. Matthew was certainly looking for a response, but his reasons for recording the story don’t exhaust our reasons for entering it. When we read it, we could identify with the king, the banquet, the dress code, the failure—the exposure of the failure, the judgment, the free fall into outer darkness, and so on.

This morning, I want to think of this parable as one about being a hypocrite. So many of us, myself included, have two versions of ourselves going – the public you and the private you, the you you say you are and the you you act like, the you you dress like and the you you really are.  You say you’re an environmentalist but you gobble energy like an industrial factory. You say “God bless you” to the checkout chick at Coles and then pull into traffic like a demon straight from hell. You tell everyone who will listen how worried you are about the public schools, about the people who are losing their homes, about the election, but you don’t do anything about them. You come to church dutifully, pray and sing and chat, and then spend your week with very little sign that Christ is in your life.

Matthew seems to think that all this twoness is about gaining advantage over other people, but I think that’s circumstantial. When he wrote his gospel, he was dealing with religious people who were living high on widow’s offerings, who were using their theological educations and institutional privileges to climb on top of other people. While that hypocrite’s club still has plenty of members, Matthew stays so busy with them that he seems to lose sight of the people whose twoness has less to do with their inflated sense of their own worth than with their terrible fear that they are worth nothing at all. It’s just as deadly, this other kind of hypocrisy. You look all pulled together but you are really a wreck. You make a good salary but you’re on the dole in your heart. You can speak three languages, you have a degree, you know which fork to use, and still you keep waiting for someone to come and arrest you, to ask you how you got in here, to expose you as an imposter.

Based on personal experience, I would have to say that the only thing worse than living as two people is waiting for someone to find out about it. The only thing worse than showing up in your dream with the wrong or no clothes on is waiting for someone to notice. But here is the good news folks: when, not if, but when someone or something does expose you, there can be real terror in the moment, especially if the someone happens to be a powerful king – but there can also be profound relief in that moment. Now, you don’t have to pretend anymore. Someone has seen the real you.

My greatest hope in congregational ministry, whether here or wherever else God calls me, is that my congregation feels released from the need to be Sunday-best Christians. There is a brilliant quote by Abigail Van Buren, who says “the church is not a museum for saints; the church is a hospital for sinners” – and I pray that you know that you don’t need to wear your wedding robes here. May this place be a place where ALL are welcome: whole and broken, rich and poor, white and otherwise, old and young, straight and gay, strong in faith or questioning. May you feel welcome to come and belong here, just as you are. Amen.