Preached on Sunday, October 9, 2011 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. The lectionary readings this gospel is based on can be found here.
I don’t know if you guys keep up with these sorts of things, but in case you haven’t heard, vampires are out -- and zombies are in. If you pick up today’s New York Times, on the cover of the Arts & Leisure section you’ll see a fairly gruesome zombie and you’ll find a story about the critically acclaimed ‘TV series The Walking Dead which will have its season premiere next Sunday night on AMC. This relatively new series is already one of the most watched cable TV shows with twice the audience of the networks other big hit Mad Men. And with good reason. The show is really good; it’s very well written, well-acted and its production values are up there with major motion pictures. Its story is a classic, with elements that appear in our gospel reading today.
The main story in The Walking Dead centers on a faithful remnant of humanity who are trying to survive after an end-of-the-world event. Most of civilization has been wiped out in a zombie apocalypse. Now, zombies roam all the earth, it seems; and what’s left of humanity must struggle to survive. What’s great about the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre is that for all the fantastical story elements, and the seemingly impossible plot developments, the creators of these works must come up with a logical, plausible, unified world in which the incredible events of the narrative will seem, in fact, credible. Be it vampires, Star Wars or zombies, the more plausible must be the invented universe in which the narrative takes place. The fictional world of these sci-fi and horror works has to make a kind of interior sense if we’re to engage with it.
In which case, as you might expect, there are zombie rules and regulations, and if you’re working in the zombie genre, you need to play by them in ways that the fans of zombies will accept. As everyone knows, zombies are reanimated corpses that eat human flesh. Zombies are created when an extant zombie takes a bite – and not too much more – out of a living human being. Destroying their diseased brains is the only sure method of killing a zombie, something the human survivors in The Walking Dead do in a stomach-turning variety of ways.
So, if you missed season one of The Walking Dead, you’ll want to bone up on your zombie lore before season two begins next Sunday. You’ll need a lesson or two in Zombie 101 if you’re going to keep up the hip and happening zombie craze. See me at coffee hour.
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Jesus is engaging in a bit of fantastical story telling in our gospel reading today. And has been doing so for the past two Sundays as well. Today’s parable from Matthew is the third in a series. Each is concerned with the history of salvation and the future of humanity. As with The Walking Dead, there is an apocalyptic vision being articulated, a new understanding of the past, and new ideas of how we should conduct ourselves in the strange world of the present, and the often frightening world to come. Two Sundays ago, Jesus recounted the parable of the two sons, one who refused to do his father’s will but eventually did, and one who promised to honor his father but ultimately abandoned him.
Last week, we had the parable of the Lord’s Vineyard, in which tenant farmers not only dishonor their commitment to the landlord, but actually kill those sent on his behalf to collect the rent. With the telling of each of the parables, Jesus becomes a little more fantastical as he goes along. It was not the custom for people to kill the rent-collector in ancient Israel, just as it isn’t today, much as we rent-bound New Yorkers might wish it were so. That’s a bit of hyperbole on Jesus’ part in the telling of that second parable. And that gives way to today’s parable, the third in the trilogy, where we have even more improbable twists and turns.
In this morning’s parable, a king is giving a wedding feast. He’s sent the ‘save the date’ card, gotten lots of positive replies. But when the actual invitations are sent – hand-delivered, no less – mayhem results. Guests simply ignore the invitations or they actually kill the messengers. Again, not a common occurrence in the ancient world – sometimes messengers delivering bad news were killed, but not those with wedding invitations. The story is getting a little implausible here.
The king is so enraged by the lack of respect his invitation is treated with and the murder of his servants, that he sends his army to destroy the entire city in retaliation, all while the wedding feast waits to be served. Now, here plausibility is stretched to the breaking point. No one wages a successful war while dinner is waiting on the table. As anyone who’s ever planned a wedding will tell you, no caterer is going to put up with that.
Then when the war is over, the king sends more servants out to invite in anyone they can find, just people off the street, no matter how good or bad. The rabble, the street people, the hoi polloi are brought in and served a sumptuous meal. Except for one poor, hapless fellow who happened not to have on his best going-to-the-royal-wedding suit when he was pulled in off the street. But how could he? He’s just been pulled in off the street! He’s had no chance to dress in his wedding finery. Again, this plot twist seems unbelievable too. Here the incredulous story begins to violate its own already improbable logic – or so it seems.
But there is an interior logic, a context, in which this somewhat implausible parable makes sense. It’s one that is less clear to us, here nearly two millennia later, but it would have been quite clear, overly apparent even, to the first hearers of these tales. Each of the three parables, we’ve heard recently from Matthew are concerned with a history, ancient and contemporary, that first century residents of Palestine would quickly recognize.
Last Sunday’s parable of the Lord’s Vineyard and this Sunday’s parable of the King’s Banquet in particular recount and update the history of salvation. Israel understood itself to be hard on its prophets, that was part of the national lore. The Hebrew Scriptures tell of prophets sent to Israel time and again to recall God’s people to their duties to God and to God’s law. And time and again, these prophets were poorly treated by the religious and civil authorities; they were ignored, imprisoned, threatened and even killed by those whose hold on power they challenged. That the writings and messages of those prophets have survived to come down to us today is due to the tremendous impact they had on the powerless, the poor, the downtrodden, on whose behalf the prophets so often advocated.
What Matthew does in this set of parables of the vineyard owner’s son, and the king’s son at his wedding, what Matthew does is to update that history to include the similar mistreatment of Jesus and the Christian missionaries that followed in his footsteps. As we know, Jesus and his followers received the same treatment from the religious and civil authorities, as did earlier prophets. Matthew makes a claim for Jesus and his followers as rightful heirs to that sacred history.
Often those prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and their ilk, interpreted historical events in terms of God’s wrath being visited upon his unfaithful people. In their turn, the Hebrew prophets saw the Assyrian captivity, the Babylonian captivity, the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem by the Egyptians as God’s punishment upon the people of Israel for failing to keep faith with God, failing to honor God’s commandments to act with justice toward widows, orphans, foreigners and those in need or trouble.
Matthew makes a similar interpretation. As history tells us, the Romans took their ignominious place in this history when they sacked and destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. In today’s parable, Matthew uses the king’s destruction of the city as a parallel for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. For Matthew, Jesus belongs squarely in the stream of Jewish salvation history and his rough treatment and the rough treatment meted out to Jerusalem in the years following his death more than prove his point.
But Matthew isn’t solely concerned with ancient history; he’s concerned with a dangerous present and the apocalyptic future as well. As with the survivors of the zombie apocalypse in The Walking Dead, Matthew is trying to figure out what current events mean and what lies ahead, what can the survivors of the execution of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem expect from the world left behind, and the world yet to come.
Matthew interprets Jesus’s message and the events surrounding his life and death to mean that the old rules have been reconfigured. New rules, new understandings are now being placed before God’s people. But ones that are consistent with the commandments of the past. Matthew understood Jesus’s preaching and teaching to mean that the invitation once made to the people of Israel was now offered to all humanity, and that all conditions of men and women, good and bad, were offered a place at the King’s table, the holy banquet of God.
But the acceptance of that invitation carried with it some responsibilities. That fellow without the proper wedding robe, he’s our key to the particular point of Matthew’s. It’s a curious detail in the parable. There was no requirement in ancient times for a special robe for guests at a wedding. One would trot out one’s best for such a feast, of course, but the failure to do so wouldn’t result in expulsion from the party. What’s the context in which we can understand the king’s rather overwrought interest in wedding fashion?
The context for this part of the story is found in previous Christian scripture. In the Pauline letters that preceded the composition of the Gospel of Matthew, in Romans, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians, the changing of clothes was the metaphor used to describe the giving up of one’s old way of life and the putting on of a new Christian identity. That Christian identity comes with some requirements. Christians must love one another as Christ has loved us. We are to forgive 7 times 70 times. We are to seek to feed the hungry, comfort the lonely, visit the imprisoned and fight for the victims of injustice – we are to act as if whatsoever we do for the least among us, we are doing for our Lord himself.
We are to be a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, as Isaiah puts it in our Old Testament reading this morning. Or to use Paul’s own words from today’s reading from the Epistle to the Philippians, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable… Keep on doing these things… and the God of peace will be with you.”
In our parable today, the ill-dressed wedding guest is one who has heard the gospel of Jesus but has not let it change him. He has resisted becoming a new creation in the baptism that is meant to engender in us a new life of holiness and righteous living.
He has come to the King’s table come to this table for solace only and not for the strength to carry out the Christian mission, for pardon only and not for the renewal of spirit. So, he is cast out. He is expelled from the sumptuous banquet laid out for us by God, our king. The banquet we expect to await us after the destruction of all the cities and the end of this world.
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There is a logic to today’s parable and one that makes sense when we understand the context in which it was first told. It’s not in the cover story in today’s Arts & Leisure section; instead we find it in the historical and scriptural scholarship that we Episcopalians have always sought out as we make our inquiries into the meaning and wisdom to be found in God’s word. Matthew claims for Jesus a place in Jewish salvation history along with Israel’s most illustrious prophets. He shows in today’s parable how Jesus and his followers were mistreated, just as the true prophets of God were in the past, which Matthew sees as confirmation that Jesus is God’s son, and his missionaries are sent from God.
And Matthew tries to give us an indication of what we are to do to survive in the new world, the new, perhaps frightening, creation brought into being with Christ’s death and resurrection, a world that might be as hostile to us as it has always proved to be to all those who seek to preach the gospel and to call society to account on behalf of the values that our Scripture extols.
We are to accept the now expanded invitation of God to take our place at the table, a table where we will be fed with holy food, bread and wine that improbably become the very body and blood of the one who died and rose again. But in accepting the invitation, in accepting the new identity that we take on in baptism, we are to act as those who have been made new, clothed in a new set of values, a new sense of right and wrong, and new understanding of how we are to honor God by loving and respecting one another.
And watch out for those zombies – the powers of the world that seek individual gain over the good of all, those that seek to oppress rather than serve the poor, those that would have us forget our call to seek after God and God’s righteousness, those forces that would have us place ourselves first, and our brothers and sisters, and even God, last in our priorities. They are truly the walking dead, and we are not called to that path. We are called to new life in Christ Jesus, a new life of service, a life of justice, a life of love and respect for every human being, a life ultimately of glory everlasting. Amen +
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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