Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sa.
Hallelujah.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: The holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ according to Matthew.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Glory to you, Lord Christ.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: 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, mistreated 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?
[00:02:26] Speaker A: And he was speechless.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: 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.
The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:03:17] Speaker C: Children between the ages of 3 and 10 are invited to go with Courtney this morning for a story.
And they will come back and join us at the peace.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and redeemer. Amen.
Please be seated.
1,000 years ago in 1004, there was a great feast planned in Venice, Italy.
Maria Rpolina, the Greek niece of the Byzantine emperor Basil ii, was to marry Giovanni, the son of the doge of Venice.
But a riot broke out. Instead, Maria carried with her an item of great importance, a cultural artifact that set her apart, a rather small piece of equipment that would change and unsettling, settle the highest courts and the most esteemed clerics of her age.
So new was this piece of technology, it hadn't yet received the common name New then. It is not new now. In fact, nearly every person in this place on this rainy Sunday morning will likely use it before you go to bed tonight.
It's the fork.
You know, that utensil on the left side of the dinner plate. The Evolutionary history of the fork is the wealthy for a long time had spoons and knives. But something else was needed. A spearing utensil safe for guiding food into the mouth in a process that would take more than 500 years. The knife was significantly shortened, divided into two prongs, rounded a bit for scooping, and then finally split into three prongs.
Maria had her artisans forge enough of these early forks for the entire court to use.
But the good people of Venice were were outraged.
One local cleric wrote, and I swear to you, this is true.
God in his wisdom, has provided man with natural forks, their fingers.
Therefore, it is an insult to God to substitute artificial metal forks for fingers when eating.
There are some accounts sprinkled throughout Europe of the church outlawing the fort as a fundamentally immoral object, a disfigurement of the world God intended.
That's all true, more or less. That really happened.
In both the reading from Exodus and the reading from Matthew, we have descriptions of a group of people who had been charged with guarding the feast.
And I'd like to think of today unofficially as guard the feast Sunday.
We see in these readings an invitation to guard that holy moment when the people gather together not only to share a meal with one another, but to do so together, united in fellowship, inviting the very presence of God to dwell with them.
Aaron was to guard the Hebrew people from straying as Moses conversed with God face to face on the mountaintop.
And in the parable in Matthew during the reign of the king, the servants were to guard the feast by making sure the banquet Paul was filled.
In both these stories, the wheels fall off.
What was to be a solemn time of waiting in Exodus and what was to be a great wedding celebration in Matthew turn to carnivals of mayhem.
But they're united in this way.
God invites both into a new feast, a feast that places the goodness of God at the center of their identity. In Exodus, it's expressed through the ten Commandments we heard read aloud last week in Matthew, the table and banquet represents the place where new wine and unleavened bread of Jesus might be consumed and taken with us.
A place where mercy and forgiveness and love replace the old masters of dominance and gamesmanship.
Both of these stories should trouble us.
Not only are they filled with violence, but God himself plays some organizing role in that violence.
Step back with me one more time and look at these feasts. We are to guide, are to guard.
It's so easy for our society to agree to be places of goodness at the heart of who we are. We easily reach for this language. We commit to it and willingly embrace it.
And then in just a blink of an eye, we find ourselves arguing about forks.
We find ourselves condemning each other. When something new and undefined enters our social world unannounced, we only see how silly it is when we have a full thousand years to reflect on it in the moment. It feels profound and pressing, gives us license to be extreme, to feel self satisfied when we cast others out.
Think about what causes controversy today, the arguments we have in our families, in our places of worship, our politics.
How do we guard ourselves from falling into the mayhem we see in today's scriptures?
In Exodus and in Matthew, we find a shockingly simple tool for guidance.
For Jesus, we must always ask if our rules as a society, as a church church.
Do they bring about goodness and healing or do they bring about chaos and death?
Put even more simply, when we turn to the worship of God, when we turn our worship of God into an idol, that's when we place the rigidity of rules over decency towards people.
Even great well meaning rules can spoil and rot, can ruin the feast.
What was meant as well intentioned table manners in one moment of time can turn into the foolish defense of fingers against forks.
We fall into the love of idols when we replace the vision of God with for the vision of humanity divided and armed to the teeth.
This is the feast we guard day after day. We must ask ourselves, are we making this place, our church, into a place of justice and peace and kindness?
As St. Paul writes this morning, are we a people that puts whatever is true, whatever is honorable, just, pure, pleasing and commendable at the center of who we are?
That is the feast we guard.
If not. If we don't do this, we can easily find ourselves as the first guest of the banquet.
Those who made light of what they had been given and began to mistreat those around them.
Part of what troubles me in this passage is its realism.
Even in the most well intentioned groups, we can all lose perspective.
One moment defending something created for goodness, and then in the next falling into the mindless defense of a system that no longer makes sense.
Defending it even with violence.
That violence itself is always at the edge of our feasts, even feasts meant for goodness.
This is the choice before us to either find communities that put everything they have towards creating and sustaining the great feast of God's goodness, or risk those things once meant for goodness falling into chaos.
In my experience, it takes deep commitment and vigilance for this work.
It's not something easily done online or by merely keeping track of the news or posting on social media.
These communities are hyperlocal.
They need us to show up in person again and again, willing to walk and listen and worship with people of all ages, from all backgrounds, to preserve what is well meaning into the needs and fresh confusions of the now.
To be a people with forgiveness on their lips, willing to see Jesus in the eyes of the stranger, to proclaim the goodness of God ever beyond us, ever calling us forward, that even beyond God is in our midst.
God is that body of our feast. Guard it at home with your family, out with your friends and co workers in this place, our church.
May we feast on the goodness of God.
Amen.
