Welcome to the Banquet

One of our folks said to me this week, ”I just don't like the gospel lessons that we have been having the past month or so. They seem to be so much bad news!”

So what have we heard?

--the vineyard workers grousing because they all were paid the same wage

--then the two sons who didn't want to work in the vineyard.

--and last week it was the tenants who didn't want to give the landowner the result of the year's crop.

Yes, they are all unsettling, aren't they?

And the it is topped off with today's stories about the banquet that follows the harvest.

Yes, God's vineyard has not been a happy place, and we do wonder what kind of wine can come from grapes grown in such bitterness.

We start off with the vision of the great banquet from the prophet Isaiah:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear....

And our passage concludes: Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

There is a problem, though.

That is where we stopped reading, but the passage actually continues this way:

But the Moabites will be trodden down in their place as straw is trodden down in a dung-pit.

Though they spread out their hands to swim, their pride will be laid low despite the struggle of their hands.

The Moabites, traditional enemies, don't rejoice in Isaiah's vision; they are in misery.

And so the great banquet has a bitter taste in our mouths,

just as it does whenever we celebrate at the expense of someone else who is getting what we claim to know they deserve.

We just cannot leave things like this; we cannot rejoice fully when someone else is in the dung-pit.

That cannot be the completeness of God's intention for his people; at most it is only one step along the way.

The questions which we always need to be asking are:

--where do we locate the crucified and risen Lord Jesus in the story?

--where do we locate ourselves?

Think of what Jesus does again and again in his ministry.

--Jesus does not chastise the ill woman who touched the hem of his robe, but commends her faith and raises her up.

--Rather than ignoring the crowd as the disciples had urged, Jesus feeds them after a long day of teaching, using a few fish and pieces of pita bread.

--He calls tax-collectors and other outcasts like Zacchaeus.

--He regular commends those whom the world rejects such as the woman who anointed his feet after washing them with her tears.

--He refused to take the easy way to power when Satan offered the whole world to him.

He is just not going to be celebrating while some are left out.

So where is Jesus in Isaiah's vision,if it is not at the table of the great victory banquet?

The one place left in the story is the dung-pit, swimming with the Moabites.

We protest: No, not there, not that!

But Jesus insists.

Remember that Jesus' ancestor many generations back was Ruth, a woman of Moab.

Matthew made a point of saying that in the genealogy at the beginning of his gospel.

Would Jesus want to turn his back on part of his family tree when it is time for the celebration? Certainly not!

And there are some other strange ones in that family tree:

--Rahab the unsavory Cannanite woman

--Solomon, son of a stolen wife.

--Menassah, an evil king if there ever was one, who killed his own sons in sacrifice to other gods.

So who should be at the banquet table and who should be in the dung-pit gets quite confusing.

In today's gospel, the guests make all sorts of excuses as to why they can't come to the banquet.

We know them well; they are our friends and neighbors who should be in pew beside us.

The excuses are many: the weather, the time, the people, the pastor, or whatever...but they are still just excuses, because an invitation to the banquet has been extended and should be answered.

Shall they all be consigned to the dung-pit?

Then we won't have to think about them anymore...or will we?

Because if Jesus keeps thinking about and reaching out to and healing and welcoming all the unsavory ones, should we be doing any less?

Oh, and did it occur to us that quite often we are the ones in the dung-pit as well.

We, too, have often spurned the invitation,

or taken the easy way and not extended the invitation in the name of Jesus,

or complained about the table arrangements or the guest list,

or haven't bothered with a wedding garment, thinking that our lives don't need to be changed when we encounter Jesus...

and deserve the dung-pit ourselves.

It makes one wonder who is left at the banquet table?

One of the purposes of a parable is to afflict the comfortable, and this parable has certainly done that!

Just as the happy verses we heard from Isaiah were not the whole story, and we needed to hear the additional dung-pit verses, so too we need to hear the rest of the gospel that follows this parable of judgment and destruction.

He came into our midst, experiencing every emotion, hearing every excuse we can fabricate, enduring every action we foist upon him including crucifixion on a garbage pile outside Jerusalem

so that we can know that he is determined that nothing shall stand in the way of the final success of the banquet.

Whenever we are ready to consign someone to the dung-pit, Jesus shows up beside that one, in the person of one of his disciples.

I suppose we in the US are ready to dump the entire nation of Iran in the dung-pit these days,

but then I heard just this week about a woman by the name of Padina.

She was so distraught about her miserable life in Iran that she wanted to commit suicide.

She overheard an illegal broadcaster say: “Our God is so powerful that he can change your life. Give Jesus one week.”

So she came up with a plan: “I will pretend to invite Jesus for one week into my life. I can embarrass Jesus and Christianity.

In one week I will call that television program and kill myself live on the program. That will disgrace the God of the infidels.”

But the next morning, her life truly was changed.

Her mother, formerly an invalid, was up and walking. The doctors were astounded.

“To what imam did you pray?”, they asked her.

“Jesus,” she whispered.

And that was the first step in her becoming one of the most wanted women in Iran.

She faces the possibility of imprisonment and death every day in Iran, but she continues to witness to Jesus despite the threats.

Her hardships no longer matter because she knows she will be a banquet guest with the Jesus to whom she gave just one week.

And how many more persons has she reached and influenced in the name of Jesus since that fateful day?

We have heard the bad news of the parable and the good news toward which it should drive us.

No excuses for inaction are good enough.

The banquet invitation has been made, and needs to be made again and again.

Each of us may be completely surprised whom it is that we are to reach, but the task is in front of us, so that

A multitude shall come from the east and the west to sit at the feast of salvation.

The heavens shall ring with an anthem more grand than ever on earth was recorded. {LBW#313)

In humble confidence we sing: Have mercy upon us, O Jesus.

Let all say: Amen

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.