Many Are Called, but Few Are Chosen

09 October 2011 Many Are Called, but Few Are Chosen Matthew 22:1-14

We now have our third parable in as many Sundays. The Marriage Feast we read this morning is the last. Knowing there is that moment when the whole story turns we may not have expected to consider Jesus’ immeasurable blessings are only for those who wear the wedding robe.

A few years ago, at the Nashville Festival of Homiletics, Tom Long, an author of many books about preaching, told this story. He, Fred Craddock and Barbara Brown Taylor, who also have written extensively on preaching, were sitting in the stands at a baseball game in Atlanta when suddenly the ushers descended on a man seated a few rows in front of them. They argued back and forth with him for a few moments, and then, to the surprise of everyone in the vicinity, took the man by the arms and frog-marched him out of the stadium. No one knew why the ushers had targeted this man; no one had ever seen anything like it. Everyone just sat in stunned silence, our three preachers among them. Then Fred Craddock shook his head, gestured at the empty seat, and said to his friends, “Must not have had a wedding garment.”

Perhaps we consider a text like this morning’s and we feel like one of the onlookers at that baseball game: speechless. We may wonder, what do those in charge of the wedding crowd know that we don’t know?

On the surface the story seems simple enough and then that turn. The king’s son marries and the king throws a party. He invites many guests: anyone and everyone it seems. But, the invited guests snub the king and his son and the wedding

banquet. The king is rightly enraged and radically changes the guest list. He starts over and invites more guests: anyone and everyone. This time, to his surprise, the guests come. Perhaps they heard what happened to the original group.

The king begins to inspect his guests and discovers one inappropriately dressed. Again he is enraged and orders his attendants to “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Then we hear the final decree; “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

If we consider this parable as representing entre into the kingdom of God we may be somewhat taken aback that our salvation comes down to a dress code. We may be like those at the baseball game.

No one knew why the attendants took this man out of the wedding feast. Surely he did or said something insulting or threatening or rude. This cannot be about what he wore. Everyone must have sat in stunned silence. Has the king not heard of what happened in Matthew 6 with the lilies of the field and not worrying about what we wear?

Perhaps we have this parable because the parents of teenagers in Jesus’ time asked him for help. Perhaps this surprise that God now expects proper dress in a proper place is Jesus’ way of giving parents a dress code and the weapon of profound biblical truth to help carry the day.

We just might expect a parent say, “Why am I worrying about clothing, you ask? Well, after you’ve considered the lilies of the field, how they neither toil nor they spin, consider the wedding guest who forgot to wear a coat and tie. My suggestion is that you ditch the flip flops this minute, march back upstairs, and find something decent to wear to church unless you would like to spend the rest of the day in outer darkness, where I promise you there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Good response aside, nothing Jesus says gets to be taken in isolation, without at least remembering his other words and teachings. We can’t decide once and for all which is more important: Matthew 6 or Matthew 22? We have to read them both, which is daunting when you think about it. Consider the lilies and consider the wedding guest!

We just as well consider the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree. They are all expressions of extremes, of times when Jesus seems to go almost overboard in his reaction to something. A fig tree that doesn’t produce fruit? Wham! Curses to it! A wedding guest without a wedding garment? Wham! Off with his head! Indeed, all are important, all matter, they all save. But how?

What may strike us about these stories is that Jesus is making a point about integrity: Be who you are. Let your life express whose you are. Otherwise, you are as welcome at the tables as a termite and about as useful.

Jesus is lifting us up to be who he has made us to be. If we are a fig tree, by golly, then be a fig tree! Make figs! If we are a wedding guest, for goodness sake, then let’s look like we are at a wedding instead of going to the dentist. No offense to dentists, but take off the long face, change the droopy attitude, put on your party clothes and celebrate – because this is a celebration! And anyone who is not happy to be here – and happy to see who else is here – is officially uninvited!

We have been in worship at other churches, never here at Genesis of course, where it looks like people are about as happy to be in church as Eeyore. We might never guess, to look at them, that salvation is a good thing. We would never know, to hear them tell it, that Christ has made a difference. They have no wedding garment – no outer sign that this really is a party, that we really are, as David Buttrick puts it, “being saved,” that the gospel is really and truly good news!
Maybe the reason for their reserve has more to do with upbringing and custom than stinginess our sourness; maybe. Or maybe they find it hard to put on a wedding garment that everyone else, like taxpayers, sinners, and prostitutes are wearing, too.

Sometimes I am like that. Sometimes I have a hard time celebrating when I look around and notice who else has been invited to the party. Especially when they so clearly don’t deserve to be there. Sometimes I deliberately under dress, or choose to sit and pout in my flip flops while everyone else is dancing in their party shoes. Sometimes I don’t put on the wedding garment that Jesus has already laid out for me, freshly laundered, on my bed. On those days, just send the ushers in after me.
The free character of God’s grace is extended to all who God calls. The free character of God’s grace, however, does not mean that grace is ‘bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed. The grace of God remains costly and is never “cheap grace,” that “mortal enemy of our church.” “Above all,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “grace is costly, because it was costly to God, because it costs God the life of God’s Son…and because nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God…Costly grace is the incarnation of God.”
Matthew’s version of the parable opens the doors of God’s kingdom wide, but it does not forget that this kingdom has a king and that this kingdom cannot be converted to conform to our own expectations. While many are called, few are chosen.

About this passage Emil Brunner asks, “But what happens to God’s invitation?” For Brunner it’s not refusals but excuses given by people who are preoccupied and allow other things to interfere. In this context Jesus pronounces the word of judgment and has the servants go into the street “where the gypsies live” and invite people to the banquet.

Guests arrive, but there is an intruder, an individual without the wedding garment. Brunner sheds light on the passage by explaining the oriental custom of the host providing each guest with a wedding garment that the intruder, out of laziness, had not put on. It serves as a severe warning to those Christians who don’t discard their rags. “They want to believe but not to obey,” argues Brunner, “to enjoy and rejoice but not to change their ways.” As Brunner explains, they want both God’s love and to keep their self-love, God’s mercy and their own self-centered hearts.

Brunner consoles listeners by reminding them that Jesus is not expecting perfect obedience overnight, but that divine forgiveness calls us to forgiveness as well. In the closing words of Brunner, “The wedding garment is laid out; all we have to do is to put it on.”

We are to put it on because we are called. The wedding garment, Jesus Christ is laid out for us. All we have to do is put him on. All we have to do is put on the life of Christ, to cloth ourselves in God’s costly grace, Jesus Christ.

But we know that sometimes we follow another way. We pay no attention and go off – one to his or her field, another to his or her business. Some seize the king’s servants, mistreat them and discard them. The king is enraged. He sends his army and destroys our other way.

But we are wedding guests. So be wedding guests. Be who you are, accept the invitation. Accept the body of Jesus Christ to be the wedding garment. We should take off the long face, change the droopy attitude, put on our party clothes and celebrate.

Kim Peavey, who writes and farms in New Hampshire, tells of never being smote on the head, or anywhere else, for that matter, with religious conviction. Yet, after years of milking cows, traveling, graduate study in poetry, teaching college writing, shoveling horse manure and stints as a researcher and writer, she found herself applying to theological schools. This despite, as she says, she can’t even say the word prayer out loud, much less the J-word (Jesus, that would be).
All during first-week orientation, she alternately cries on a rock outdoors by herself and tries not to cry during meetings, worship service, and getting-to-know-each-other games. There are many people at seminary, a great diversity of people, some of whom are friendly, and who look as alarmed at this churchy situation as she does. There are also other people, people who do not choose the vegetarian entrée, people who drink out of Styrofoam cups, people who look like they think she should go forth, be fruitful and multiply, or at least cover her head.

She decided to stay, maybe through her first class. Then, slowly, she discovers she is a wedding guest and she graduates and funny things happen. People think she knows things. They ask her the words to “Amazing Grace.” They ask her about church history, they ask her for a bible, and people ask her to perform wedding ceremonies. She finds herself being who she is.

Then a friend who is dying of cancer asks her to lead her funeral service. She is so terrified by this that she realizes she must do it. A poem comes to her. She sends it to her dying friend. She says, “Read it at my service, please.” When she dies, she does.

In the final paragraph she writes. “In the end, I do not become an ordained minister. Neither do I imagine that I will ever find myself at peace with the complexity, difficulty, and luminosity of the Christian Church. But I have come to a truer, more fruitful engagement with religion, with my work of writing, and with the world, complete with all its non-vegetarian non-feminist non-environmentalists. I have become less afraid, more willing, more open. I have become myself, or more myself; and I have come to know that this in itself is good. And right. And holy.”

Be yourself, or more yourself, a wedding guest. Accept the invitation to life in Jesus Christ. Put on the new person of Jesus Christ and celebrate the good news – for this is a celebration!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever, Amen.

Additional helps:
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Discipleship, Barbara Green and Reinhardt Krauss, tr. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 43, 45.
“Image: Art, Faith, Mystery,” Spring 2011, Number 69, Pgs. 87-98.
“Lectionary Homiletics,” Volume XIX, Number 6, pgs. 14-23.
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