“Come As You Are?”

Matthew 22:1-14

October 16, 2005

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John A. Fleming

On the scale of churches where people dress up and churches where people dress down, I would have to say that our church is what I might call a casual dress congregation. One member actually told me some time ago that she joined our church because we’re a bit more casual than other churches. She looked at me in the eye and said, “I like it here because I don’t have to wrestle my daughter into a dress on Sunday morning.” As a kid, I grew up in a large, downtown church, where I think that the expectation was to dress up, to put on what my mother called, my Sunday best. I can’t remember what my mother made me wear. But I have memories of going to places like Dillard’s, to buy Sunday clothes. I do not think that I would have fought coming to church if I could have worn the shorts or jeans that served me well every other day of the week.

At St. Paul, there are those of us who wear dresses and heels, suits and ties, but there are also those of us who wear polo shirts and sometimes shorts. The men can wear ties, but they will be outnumbered by the ones who do not. We dress comfortably here, which may be why the parable that Jesus tells in our scripture lesson for this morning seems so crazy. After all, what could this king expect? If the original wedding guests did not come to the feast and you had to send your servants out at the very last minute in hopes of filling up the banquet hall, how can you expect them to be wearing the right clothes? The truth is that I do not know a single person who keeps a wedding suit or a dress suitable to wear to a wedding hanging on the hook above the back seat of their cars on the off chance that someone might come and invite them to attend a wedding. To this king, I would say, “With all due respect, sir, you should lower your standards a bit.”

Somewhere this week, in getting ready for our sermon this morning, I read that in the days of Jesus, sometimes wedding hosts provided wedding robes for their guests, the same way that fancy restaurants keep a few spare jackets and ties on hand for their guests who show up without one, without really knowing that dressing for dinner is necessary.

I can remember going on a family vacation when I was ten or eleven. We were in Berea, Kentucky. I asked my mother, yesterday, why we were vacationing in Berea. She told me that that was the year that everywhere we went had a craft theme to it. I just smiled at her and said, “Some kids got to go to the beach. I got to go to Berea.” Anyway, when it came time for dinner, we went to the Boone Tavern, a place that my dad had secured dinner reservations. The tavern was a fancy place to eat. I did not see any reason for putting on the nice clothes that my mother had brought for such an occasion. I did not understand the need for khaki pants and a nice shirt, but since my mother insisted, I wore them. Apparently my clothes were not nice enough. When we arrived at the restaurant, the host saw me, excused himself, and returned with a sports coat that was just my size. My mother gave me the look that said that I had better put it on and so I did. Given half a chance, I would ran out of the restaurant on my way to McDonald’s. The Boone Tavern has a web site. I went to it while getting ready for this sermon. There is still a dress code to eat there. The web site reports that the dress is tastefully casual, whatever that means.

If it is true that wedding hosts provided garments, then the spotlight shifts from the king to the guest. Why did he refuse to put on the robe that was offered to him? What made him think that he could come as he was to such an important event without being noticed?

Either way, this is no ordinary story. It is an elaborate tale, a parable, that is full of allegory, which means that everything stands for something else, and that there are deeper meanings. Our first clue to that comes in the opening line. Matthew writes, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.” I wonder who this son might be? The second clue comes in the plot of this story; it’s definitely outrageous. After all, how many people do you know who kill the postal worker for delivering a wedding invitation? We’ve all heard the phrase, “Don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger.” Well, here the messengers aren’t only blamed, they are murdered. When the king hears about it, he mobilizes the troops, seeks out those who had killed his servants and burned down their city. All while the prime rib is getting cold and the wine is getting warm.

There is no way to handle this story without knowing what is behind it. The story comes because of Jesus’ disappointment and Matthew’s after him that so few of God’s people were responding to the invitation to celebrate with God’s Son. You will remember that the prophets had invited the people long, long ago, but some of the invitees had killed the prophets. Then in AD 70, Jerusalem and the temple inside the city, were destroyed all the way down to the retaining walls. “He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.” Then came Paul, the apostle, who said that everyone was welcome in the church and that is where the trouble began. These latecomers to the faith, the ones who had no history at all with the God of Israel, acted as if grace gave them permission to live however they wanted to live without any consequences. The old timers, the ones who had known God forever, didn’t like that and before long, the church had a real discipline problem. There were those who bellied up to God’s table with no sense of what it really meant to be there. As far as they were concerned, you showed up in God’s presence however you wanted to. The invitation simply said, come as you are. Nothing is required. You don’t need fancy clothes and reservations aren’t necessary.

Well, that’s all wrong. That is why Matthew tells this story to the church. His point is that being invited doesn’t mean that you do as you please. Being invited at the last minute doesn’t mean anything goes. Matthew is trying to say, “Look, you’ve been invited to feast with a King because of His Son. Rise to the occasion!” The guest who wasn’t wearing the right clothes was bounced because he wouldn’t do that. I don’t know. Maybe he thought that the king was

fortunate that he had a blank spot on his calendar. Maybe he thought that he was doing the king a favor by showing up and eating the food that otherwise would be thrown out. I don’t know! What I do know is that he was sadly mistaken. You see, it wasn’t the guest who was doing the favor for the king. It was the king who was doing the favor for the guest. What I know is that the man didn’t rise to the occasion. Instead he demeaned it, by refusing to change. And now I am turning a corner. Now I am not talking about clothes. Like everything else in this story, the wedding robe means something. It is like a baptismal robe that is put on you when you come up from the waters. The robe means a new way of life! So the man’s mistake wasn’t that he showed up in shorts. It was that he showed up short on a new life and thought that the king wouldn’t notice.

Now, let me bring this a little closer to home for us this morning. In one sense, this story addressed a particular situation in Matthew’s church. In one sense this story has nothing to do with us. In another sense, it has everything to do with us. It happens here every Sunday morning. This may not be a heavenly banquet. We’re not even serving refreshments this morning, but what we do here is certainly a dress rehearsal for the wedding ceremony and feast. We all get to practice our parts. Everyone within driving distance of our church was invited to be here this morning. As you can see, some of them had other things to do. Some went away for the weekend. Some went in to the office to catch up on things. Some are on the golf course, I guess. Some may still be in their beds! And here we are, not because we are better than they are. We’re just here. Like the guest in this story, some of us have rolled in here without thinking much about it. Some of us have showed up here with our spiritual shirt tails hanging out, lining up at the table as if no one could see the things that we aren’t willing to change. You see, this story ought to remind us that being a part of a Christian community should make a real difference in who we are and how we live. There is a great line in one of Max Lucado’s books. It reads like this, “God loves you just the way you are, but he refuses to leave you that way.” Maybe we have showed up here refusing to change. We have refused to change out of our fears. We have refused to take off our resentments. We have refused to take off our grudges. We have refused to share the things our resources with God and His church. Maybe we didn’t think that it mattered.

Most churches are happy to get anyone and everyone that they can get. Some churches spend a lot of money advertising the church. To be honest with you, I’d spend more of our money on that if I could. Often, churches beat the bushes in hopes of filling up the wedding hall. No wonder we thought that showing up was all that mattered. That is what the guest in the story thought. He was happy to help the King out by showing up. He was there, near the table, when the king walked right up to him and said, “Friend” the kind of way an officer of the law would say it just before he asked you if you knew how fast you were driving or if you had seen the stop sign a few blocks back. “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” Church, God is looking for wedding guests who will rise to the occasion of honoring the So. You can do that in any clothes that you have. You can do it in suits and ties, dresses and heels, jeans and running shoes, but you must do it!

The clothes that we wear, the wedding robes that we put on are fashioned out of the fabric of our lives, with patterns like forgiveness and justice and kindness and compassion; those kinds of things.. And when the time comes, when the invitation is issued, we must be ready. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to Barbara Brown Taylor for many of the ideas for this sermon and for several of it’s stories)