A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, October 11, 2020, Year A, 19 Pentecost, Proper 23

Exodus 32:1-14
Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

In the portion of Matthew’s gospel we read this Sunday, Jesus shares a parable with the chief priests and elders who have accosted him in the temple in Jerusalem.  He begins the parable by saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.”  But before we dig into the details of Jesus’ story, I want to pause here at its introduction.  Jesus says the kingdom of heaven “may be compared to…”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I read the word “compared,” I tend to start looking for similarities between two things.  If you said that you were about to compare Thankful to St. Paul’s, Chattanooga, I would expect you might tell me that they are both Episcopal churches, that they are led by vestries, or that they worship using the Book of Common Prayer. 

So, when I read Jesus saying “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to…,” I expect to find a lot of similarities between the kingdom of heaven and the story Jesus is about to tell.

But we have to be careful here, because Jesus rarely follows our expectations.  Plus, if we get right down to it, to “compare” things doesn’t necessarily mean to look only for their similarities.  Among Merriam Webster’s definitions for “compare” are “to examine the character or qualities of, especially in order to discover resemblances or differences[i]” or, simply, “to view [something] in relation to [another thing].” 

So when Jesus asks his listeners to compare the kingdom of heaven to a king throwing a wedding party, he may be challenging us to look for the differences as much as the similarities.  We are being asked to set down Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven alongside the picture painted by the story Jesus tells and wonder, open-endedly, what we might learn.

And if we fail to do so, if, instead, we make some pat analogies, then we will find we have interpreted ourselves into a pretty horrifying corner.  If we assume that the king of the story is clearly meant to stand for God, well… I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t like where that assumption leads us.  Because the king in Jesus’ story is so unloved by his subjects that they flat-out refuse to come to his banquet.  And in recompense, the king burns down the city!  And then, when he forces those left on the streets to come into the hall, he promptly kicks one of them out (into the presumably burning city where there likely really is a lot of “weeping and gnashing of teeth”) for wearing the wrong clothes. 

So, by the time we reach the end of the story, if we have been imagining God as the king, we will be left terrified of such an abusive and impossible-to-please deity.

In her powerful reflection on this text, blogger Debie Thomas confronts the problems with such an interpretation, arguing that we are wrong to draw an analogy between the king and God.  Instead, she focuses on the wrongly-attired guest as one of the better places to read Jesus into his own narrative.  She asks, what if we saw the incarnate God as “the one brave guest who decides he’d rather be ‘bound hand and foot,’ and cast into the outer darkness of Gethsemane, Calvary, the cross, and the grave, than accept the authority of a violent, loveless sovereign?”

And yet, Thomas wonders, how often do we accept the authority of such violent and loveless rulers?  And then, so used to living under such sovereigns, do we learn to assume that God behaves in similar ways? 

Thomas writes: “What if the king [in Jesus’ parable] is what we project onto God?  What if the king embodies everything we’ve learned to associate with divine power and authority from watching other, all-too-human kings and rulers?[…] Do we — consciously or not — present to the world a God who is easily offended, easily displeased, easily dishonored? A God whose holiness rests on the foundation of an unyielding and even violent anger? A God whose need to save face finally trumps his own graciousness and hospitality? A God whose invitation to salvation has strings attached to it?”  And, do we need to hold on to such an image of God because “we have a secret stake in seeing some people end up in the ‘outer darkness’?”

These are hard questions to hear, but I think we can’t answer “no” too quickly.  The painful truth of our human experience tells us that we often fall prey to the temptation of creating God in our own image because such a god is just easier to grasp.  Capricious, maybe, but also not so demanding of our just action and abundant love, a god with a small-g who’s easier to comprehend and much easier to manipulate for our own selfish desires. 

It is this idolatry of our man-made image of God that we see taking place in the text from Exodus for this Sunday.  Having wandered for months in the wilderness, the Israelites have stopped, for the moment, at the foot of Mount Sinai and Moses, their leader, has been in conversation with God at the top of the mountain for forty days and nights.  And the thing about these Israelites – the thing about us humans – is that we tend to start getting anxious when we don’t have frequent and obvious signs of our own belovedness.  We are so forgetful in this way.  The abundance of God’s grace we have known in one moment is quickly forgotten in the next. 

And so, the Israelites demand some visible, tangible idol of God upon which they can lay all their anxieties, something more concrete, something more comprehensible than the transcendent deity on top of the mountain.  And Aaron gives into their demands, creating the notorious golden calf for the Israelites to worship. 

Paraphrased, St. Augustine once defined idolatry as “worshiping what should be used [and] using what should be worshiped.”[ii]  Surely, that is a good description of what happened at the foot of Mount Sinai, when the Israelites worshiped a man-made statue.  And it is what happens whenever we abuse God by cheapening God’s grace and goodness into something that more closely resembles us.  Such idolatry is what happens when we imagine a god that is as fickle as human rulers and use that image to manipulate others to serve our needs, to keep us in power, to speak or act or vote in the way we want them to. 

And that, ultimately, is what Jesus’ parable reveals to us: that our own capriciousness, our own tendency towards violence and lovelessness in how we relate to others is vastly different from the divine realm, from the kingdom of heaven where the sovereign God gathers us all in like a mother hen over her chicks. 

That is the God we are called to worship.  And, to do so rightly, let us make proper use of what we have been given: our hearts and hands, our money and our minds, yes, all of our very selves, in service to the mission of the one true God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

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[i] my italics here

[ii] Quoted from Colin S. Smith in https://www.ucc.org/worship_samuel_sermon_seeds_october_11_2020