October 11, 2020: May God’s words be spoken, may God’s words be heard. Amen.
Over the past several Sundays, we have been following the story in Exodus, because their long struggle with the plagues, and the desert crossing on their way to the promised land, resonates with what is happening now in this time of pandemic. So, I will touch on it a bit first, but then turn our attention to the gospel, because both are important lessons for us today.
Now, we all know about the golden calf story, but do we know why it happened? The passage begins in this way “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
Why on earth would the long absence of Moses lead them to feel the need to build a God to worship? It’s fairly simple really – they had made a God of Moses himself, and when he wasn’t around, they needed a substitute. So, they create a God that they can understand, that they can put into a box, or in this case – on a pedestal. This God won’t be difficult to comprehend, or even disappear. We have them today too, even one in the shape of a calf, or really, a bronze bull, that looms large on Wall Street, a symbol of our reverence for wealth.
And yet, the thing we can fail to see in the moment, the thing that this passage, and the gospel for today are trying to tell us, is not to be fooled, not to fear or give over ourselves to earthly Gods and Kings, to rest in the knowledge and love of God, and to resist the earthly false Gods we will encounter in our long journey of life, even when we find ourselves in difficult desert times. It is fairly easy to recognize the false God in the Exodus passage, but what about the gospel?
Jesus tells his followers that the kingdom of heaven is like a king, who holds a big celebration for his son’s wedding. He invites the usual courtly crowd…they refuse to come. Be careful here about the word invite. When a brutal dictator, which the King appears to be, invites someone to do something, it is not really an invitation is it. Instead, let’s think of these invitations as what they were – demands. The King then sends his slaves to entice them by the extravagance of the feast, they still refuse, and a few even respond violently – killing the messengers. The king gets his knickers in a twist, and orders soldiers to destroy them and their cities. After that totally over-the-top temper tantrum, he tells his slaves to go into the main street and “invite” those folks. These were the least and the last, the poor and the outcast, or the stranger on the road. They are the ones least likely to be in the court of a King. After all are assembled, the King inspects the room, notices that one person was not conforming to the royal dress code for the occasion. The King demands to know how it was that he had been allowed to be in there without the proper attire. The man stood silent before him. This enraged the King, and he orders the man to be bound – hand and foot – and cast out into the outer darkness, presumably to die.
Lovely story, isn’t it? Now, I don’t know about you, but given that last bit, I think we can all understand why the initial invitees were a bit reluctant to go to the feast in the first place, right? I have to ask you though…does this King sound like the God of love we know in our hearts? Of course not.
There is an old sermon story about “a pastor giving a children’s sermon, where every week the children anticipate him making a new point about Jesus. This particular week he begins by holding up a stuffed squirrel and asking, “Boys and girls, do you know what this is?” Silence. The pastor asks again. Silence. Finally, one little boy is bold enough to shyly raise his hand and offer, “Gee, I know I’m supposed to say Jesus, but it sure looks like a squirrel to me.””[1]
Sometimes folks, a squirrel is just a squirrel, a cigar is just a cigar, and a king is just a king. I am sure most of you have heard the interpretation that the King is a representation of God because Jesus said “the kingdom of heaven is like…” And in other gospel versions of a similar story, that may indeed be true. But, this is the gospel of Matthew, and that means we have to be cautious with using other gospels as any sort of context, but even across all the gospels you have to think about it…when did Jesus ever give you what you expect in his parables?
Jesus was always flipping our expectations, turning over the tables of our world view. Why should that change now? Yes, he has used powerful figures metaphorically to describe God, but that should also make us wary about assuming he will do that in the same way every single time. So when, through a colleague, I came across some groundbreaking biblical scholarship by Marty Aiken that challenged the usual interpretation, I opened myself to listening.
Let’s imagine for a moment that the king is just a king and not a stand in for God. What then? Ahhh, here is where it starts to make sense. Oh, we know earthly rulers like this don’t we – tyrants who abuse the people, who make everything all about themselves, who destroy anyone who does not comply with their desires? The people of Jesus’ day did too. When they heard the words “there was a king,” as Jesus began his parable, they would have thought of the kings they had known in their lifetime – the Emperor, King Herod, the local rulers, and the centurions, and tax collectors who were the ruler’s servants and soldiers.
Jesus’s followers, on the other hand, may have been thinking what we have thought for awhile, that the King has to be God, because they have heard Jesus talk in this way before. They were in for a surprise.
So what was this parable about really? Well, the kingdom of heaven, of course…but how? Marty Aiken points to an earlier verse in this same gospel, Matthew 11:12, that sets the scene for this parable: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” The King isn’t God. The King is the violence of our earthly existence that has wreaked havoc on the people of God, because, as Jesus reminds us often, the Kingdom of Heaven is here, now.
With that in mind, let’s look again: We have a brutal earthly King. Then we have those who resisted the command of the King. We have those who turned away in defiance, or perhaps in the hope the King would just disappear, or even out of total indifference. Others resisted violently. The King returned violence for violence – that is always the way. Finally we have the one who was different than all the others. He did not resist violently, nor did he turn away and ignore the King. He was among that last lot – the ones least likely to be in high places, and came with them. Yet there was resistance in this act. He stood in the presence of the King, yet refused to become what was expected. He resisted – peacefully, silently.
You know, one of the most powerful voices of resistance in the world is the sound of silence. We saw this in Tian’anmen Square in 1989, when a man stood silently in the path of military tanks. We saw this in the 1917 Silent Protest Parade down 5th Avenue by 10,000 African Americans to protest the violence against them. We see this in every candlelight prayer vigil for justice. We even see it in the Fearless Girl, a smaller bronze statue who stands defiant in front of the large bronze bull of Wall Street – she sees the smallness of this modern golden calf, and brings it down without a word. And in the Gospel of Matthew, silence plays a large role in the response of the Messiah, the Christ, to those seeking to destroy him.
The man without a wedding robe in this parable is Jesus – who enters into this violence against the Kingdom of Heaven, but defiantly resists. He stands mute before his accuser. He is bound and cast into the outer darkness to death on the cross. This, my friends, is a foretelling of the passion, and we know the rest of the story too – the King did not have the last word…death was defeated, love triumphed over hate, and the light of Christ destroyed the outer darkness into which he was cast! In the end, the real King of Heaven is Christ himself, not the violent ruler who tried to kill him.
The Kingdom of Heaven looks like the one who was found among the least, the last, and the stranger, who resisted and stood defiantly in front of the oppressor, ready to die, rather than to wear the garments of wealth and submit to the violent ways of the King. And, like those in the passage from Exodus will discover, the Kingdom of Heaven looks like waiting at the foot of the mountain knowing that their God is not some earthly leader like Moses, and is not located up “there,” but is with them every step of their journey in the desert – is in them, in their neighbor, in all of creation. And of course, the Kingdom of Heaven is here, now…and in no less a way, for we are the children of God. And there are commands on us every single day in this chaotic and often violent world, invitations by those who have earthly power – by our own proverbial Kings, and the false Gods that pervade in oppressive systems.
They are easy to see – especially today. Brutal tyrants of our making, or of our life – dictators (or political leaders who act like them), white nationalists, male dominated systems of oppression over women, those with economic power. In our own country, they walk about with assault weapons strapped to their bodies and threaten violence against anyone who will not submit to their commands. They have names like “Proud Boys,” gather as so called militias, or brandish swastikas and wave confederate flags. They can be seen in the places of power all around the world, where the leaders oppress their people. These are the ways of the weak who mask their fear in robes of self-perceived glory. They seek to kill in body and spirit all who resist them.
In the face of these tyrants, many try to dig their heads in the sand, and hope it will go away. Others try to justify their indifference to evil by saying that at least they don’t participate. These are those turn away and do nothing in the face of suffering – they are the complicit ones. They are no better than those who serve the King.
Then there are others who resist violently – who try to justify violence for violence, or who are the looters and property destroyers who claim to be protesting injustice – they are the ones who killed the King’s servants, but only succeeded in bringing about more violence, ultimately destroying themselves and others, not the King, because violence always begets violence – it is never the path of justice and peace.
But, for those who follow Jesus, we must be the other character in this story – the one who stood with the least and the last, resisting the evil, and defeating it by peaceful means – we must be Jesus, because we know that love is the only response, and it is those who resist non-violently that bring about real change, that bring us all one step closer to the vision of God for all creation – the peaceable Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
As one of those resisters from our own time, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said “Darkness cannot defeat darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot defeat hate, only love can do that.” This is not to say that peaceful resistance will be met peaceably. Oh, not at all. Just look at what happened to Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, Malala Yousafazi, Archbishop Oscar Romero and the Maryknoll Sisters of El Salvador, the protestors in Belarus, the people who defy Putin, those protestors of Tian’anmen Square, or the protestors against the tiki torch carrying thugs in Charlottesville. Yet there is no bullet, no tank, no car plowing through them that can stop what they started. In fact, like the way violence escalates into more violence, violence against peaceful protest always escalates the power of the protest.
This parable, and the passage from Exodus, are teaching us all something we need to hear in these troubling times in which we live – that no matter how things may seem, how alone we may feel, or how brutal the forces of evil have become, we are followers of Jesus, and there is no need to give over our allegiance to some other God of our own making. Rather we are called to be the fearless people God made us to be – to stand defiantly in the face of the golden calves of greed, envy, and hate born of fear and self-loathing.
We are called to resist, not run away or ignore, the oppression and violence that is brought against our sisters and brothers, or against God’s creation, and to be found among the least, the last, and the stranger.
We are called to destroy only the walls that divide, and build bridges of love.
We are called to fight injustice, not with acts of violence, but with voices of love, compassion, and peace.
We are called to let our voice be heard, and our silence be a resounding defiance of evil.
We are called to all of this, not as a people without hope, but as followers of Jesus, who showed us by the empty tomb that there is nothing that God’s love cannot defeat.
And when we grow weary in our resistance, and we will, when we are fearful at the foot of the proverbial mountain, then we need to remember these words of St. Paul in his epistle to the Philippians we heard this morning, and so I will close with them. He writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.”
Amen.[2]
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click below, or subscribe to our iTunes Sermon Podcast by clicking here:
[1] While this story abounds in sermons everywhere, Paul J. Nuechterlein used it in a sermon delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran, Portage, MI, October 12, 2008 as a prelude to this new interpretation of this gospel, as I am doing here.
[2] As others before, I am indebted to Marty Aiken’s presentation at the COV&R 2003 Conference in Innsbruck “The Kingdom of Heaven Suffers Violence: Discerning the Suffering Servant in the Parable of the Wedding Banquet.”
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
October 11, 2020
Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost – In A Time Of Separation
1st Reading – Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
2nd Reading – Philippians 3:4b-14
Gospel – Matthew 21:33-46
