God’s Claim on Us
THE TWENTIETH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Exodus 32:1-14 • Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23 • Philippians 4:1-9 • Matthew 22:1-14
A crowded hall lined with lockers, a crumpled schedule I cannot read, a classroom to which I arrive late for an exam already underway . . . this was a familiar stress dream before I began church work. A friend of mine recently shared one of her dreams and asked others about theirs. Not surprisingly, clergy colleagues shared their church-related stress dreams–showing up for service unprepared, not having The Book of Common Prayer, or not knowing whether it’s a funeral, wedding, or Eucharist. In our waking and in our sleeping, we carry our anxieties.
If your heart is racing from the mere thought of a stress dream, I invite you to take a deep breath . . . and remember that you are a beloved child of God. You can lay your burdens before the altar, leaving your worries and taking up God’s love and assurance, taking to heart Paul’s letter to the Philippians, hearkening to the nearness of Christ and that the peace of God would guard your heart and mind. Claim God’s love for you, and own God’s claim on you. Rejoice in the Lord always.
That may be all you need to hear this morning.
Others, however, may still have the parable from the gospel lesson running through their mind, and a God-king who casts an innocent recruited guest to outer darkness is its own kind of nightmare, not giving much confidence in a benevolent God, let alone doing anything to calm any sort of anxiety.
Our parables over these three weeks have escalated, to say the least. The parables hinge on responses given to a person in charge–the father, the landowner, or the king, corresponding to the family, the business, and the city. All the while, in these parables, Jesus is responding to the leaders of the community he’s in. The chief priests and elders question Jesus’ authority, as Evan reminded us last week, and what Jesus says to them apparently strikes a nerve because they wanted to arrest Jesus and then set out to entrap him. We know what eventually happens.
But what is so threatening? What is so radical and revolutionary about what Jesus is saying to elicit such a response from those in positions of power? Jesus came to flip the tables, to show a new way, to bring power to the oppressed, and to lay low the oppressors. As righteous as it sounds, no one is inclined to give up their power willingly. It’s better for them to silence the voice of the dissident.
And what is so threatening to us that we are not comfortable with the parables for today? Even in the parables, imagining slavery, killing, and torturing brings to mind aspects of our history that we’re still working on telling the truth about, let alone reckoning with. I venture to say the deeper threatening Truth is similar to the uncomfortable message given to the chief priests and elders: there is an authority, and it’s not ourselves.
We would rather choose what we want to do on our terms. We arrange our priorities, and whether our idols are represented in gold or flags or any other material object or word that ends in -ism, our comfort tends to abide in what is familiar and known. We might dare anyone to tell us otherwise. And if Jesus says that the kingdom of God is where we can be cast into darkness for just showing up with the wrong garments? Forget it. I don’t need that kind of stress and judgment in my life.
Neither Jesus nor our Holy Scriptures are written solely for our comfort. For parables with such vivid images, it can be difficult to get to the deeper meaning, especially in a way that is encouraging to our faithfulness. The parables do convey a greater Truth, and for the third week in a row, we’re given the significance of doing the will of God. The violence in today’s parable carries with it tremendous energy, and in the story, the violence arises out of the dis-ordered obedience, at a larger and at a seemingly insignificant scale. Note that all guests responded with a choice in whether or not to attend and then whether or not to attend in an appropriate manner. Everyone had their own agency, and there’s clearly an authority to obey or not. If, like in an icon, we can see beyond the image before us, we can find the reign of God as one that calls us together, toward eternity, and in that community, there are expectations, expectations that demand our full obedience, our complete surrender.
Not all our stress dreams are while we are sleeping. Waking, we have the headlines detailing war, destruction, and disorder near and far. Have we so failed one another and God that there’s no hope? The more we learn about history, truths revealed met with the realities of today, we’re inclined to wonder if anything will ever change. We would rather extinguish the voice of the one calling out to choose a new and radical way than reorient our whole lives attuned to a new command given by one who claims us as heirs to everlasting life.
Five years ago, patrisse khan-cullors, co-author of When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, spoke at Crystal Bridges. At the end of her lecture, she spoke to imagination, saying that as long as we can imagine a world that is different, if we can imagine a society of love and respect and honor, then there is hope. If we can imagine, we can create a way, and essentially, we can be the change we want to see in the world (to borrow Gandhi’s words). If you’re one of those people who can’t picture a different reality in your mind, don’t worry! In our relationships with one another, we share our hopeful dreams for the future and make practical, tangible plans and steps to get there, building toward a future where we quite simply love one another.
The hard parables, like any hard truth, touch us at our greatest vulnerability, which is more often than not our ego. I navigate my life, following my agenda that brings me the most comfort, if not pleasure. Those stress dreams hit hard and heavy when my control is out of whack, when my comfort is overthrown, and I’m venturing into uncharted territory, whatever that may be. For Christians, however long we’ve been baptized, however long we’ve been believers, that uncharted territory may be following God’s will.
As the life of Jesus reveals to us, following God’s will does not promise comfort and security all the time in this world. Praying faithfully, “Thy will be done,” means for us doing the inconvenient right thing when we’d rather not, working for the benefit of others, not just for ourselves, and being prepared to show up as needed, offering our best. Sometimes it means praying without ceasing while others think we’re doing nothing.
What I continue to learn is that it’s not my made-up expectations that matter as much as what God has created and what God offers. God gives us this life. God offers the promise to be with us, waking and sleeping and for everlasting. God shows us through Jesus Christ what we can scarcely comprehend about life, love, and salvation. God guides us through the Holy Spirit, which we feel and hear and know when we get out of our own way long enough to let our guard down and allow God’s love to permeate our being. God invites us into wholeness, into holy order, where our joy is made complete. This is the God who invites us, who calls us. This is the God whose claim is written on our hearts with a dream for our lives and to whose banquet we humbly come with peace that passes understanding.
© 2023 The Rev. Sara Milford
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas