• Exodus 32:1-14 “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are..”


• Philippipians 4:1-9 “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”


• Matthew 22:1-14 “Invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet .”

O God of compassion, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.  Amen.

Love with a Capital L

Ah – it’s been a difficult week hasn’t it?  The economic and political upheaval and uncertainty seems to have reached a new level of ugliness – maybe even a whole new dimension.  Fear seems to have regained control of the wheel and threatens to drive an entire society off a cliff.  The bad news of one day pales in comparison with the next.  And to top it all off, we’ve gathered here on our Sabbath morning for a celebration and our lectionary has delivered little good news.

Well, Paul’s letter to the Philippians is lovely, but the Exodus description of God’s people forgetting who and Whose they are and reveling around a golden calf hits a little too close to home. And the parable from the Gospel of Matthew is like an embarrassing family story that shouldn’t be repeated in front of guests –and certainly not in front of children. The kingdom of heaven may be compared with what? A hideously cruel tyrannical ruler who filled his celebration hall for a wedding feast by using lethal force and terror? “He doesn’t just kill the first invitees who turned him down. No, he makes a big show of it by also destroying their city.”1 Then when the second round of invitees come (how could they refuse after they saw what happened to the first round?) he spots one who has failed to put on the proper outfit and has him tied up and tossed out –not just out of the hall, but into the outer darkness. That’ nice.

So I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thrashing around about what on earth to say to you –doing all kinds of interpretive gymnastics (that’s trickier than interpretive dance) about how to understand how the kingdom of heaven – the realm of God – might be like this terrible story. When I say thrashing, I mean a combination of prayer and library work! My prayer tells me that the king in this parable is not God. My library work tells me that I’m not the first one to figure this out! A theologian named Marty Aiken published a paper a few years ago in which he challenges the near universal acceptance of the idea that the king in this parable is to be understood as God, “and the violence the king calls down upon the unrobed man is interpreted as sacred violence levied in judgment” for the man’s unwillingness or inability to deck himself, as it were, with gladness – with the clothing of celebration.

Aiken describes the “enormous inertial pull” of the traditional reading as being like gravity that “has acquired such mass that it almost transforms Jesus’ words and Matthew’s text into a black hole that pulls into itself any attempt to read the parable differently.”2 And then Aiken moves to shed some new light. Now his move takes nearly 30 pages – so I’m going to give you the executive summary!

If we can get free from trying to see how this king might stand for God, we might be able to remember that Jesus has already taught that folks do not need to worry about what we are to wear. We might be able to remember that Jesus has already taught that everyone is welcome in God’s realm and that God’ mercy and compassion are extravagant – without measure. We might be able to remember from the stories of the Exodus, that what God has always wanted for God’s people is freedom. If we can get free from trying to see how this king might stand for God, we might see that this king has issued an offer that people can’t refuse – this king is more like a mafia boss. This king is more like a brutal dictator. More like – well – Herod. We might remember that earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, Herod the Great told the wise men from the east that he wanted help finding the child Jesus so he could pay Jesus homage (when what he really wanted to do was annihilate him) and when that plan failed, he ordered the slaughter of all of the children in and around Bethlehem. We might remember that Herod the Great’s son, Herod Antipas, imprisoned John the Baptist and when Jesus heard the news he said, “the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” Later, Herod ordered John the Baptist to be beheaded at a great banquet.

I think what Jesus is illustrating with this parable is that the kingdom of heaven – the realm of God –– suffers violence at the hand of tyrants. This is not a teaching about God being violent. Rather, this teaching is a corrective to the notion that heaven is some kind of Utopia or Shangri–la where nothing goes wrong, where there is no sadness – no badness. Jesus was teaching again and again that the realm of God, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven is very near. Jesus was trying again and again to help people see the miracle of God’s abiding love even – and especially –– in the midst of chaos and confusion and violence – that no amount of evil can blot out God, that is, Love with a capital L.

You probably remember the film La Vita è Bella – Life is Beautiful which was made ten years ago or so. It begins with the voice of Giosué telling the story of his childhood. He explains, “like a fable there is sorrow and like a fable there is wonder and happiness.” The story is of the enormous love of his parents for each other and for him and how his father, Guido, saved his life by making a game of their incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp. When they arrive at the camp, Giosué is hungry and he misses his mother, who is in a separate part of the camp. Guido tells him they are playing a game where the first person to score a thousand points wins a real tank that will take them out of the camp. For the five-year-old Giosué, points were scored by not complaining of hunger, by staying hidden, or by not crying for his mother.

It is an absurd premise – that in the midst of so much violence, cruelty and death, love could be so powerful, but there it is. And we know that this fable is true – but we forget, don’t we? And so we gather in communities of faith to remember love, to hope for love, to DO love, because it’s so hard to remember, to hope and to DO love on our own.

This morning in particular, we celebrate a baptism – the baptism of Gabriela Shore. I can’t think of a more hopeful celebration than a baptism. Baptism is not magic, after all. It’s a ceremony that recalls and hopes for God’s promise of abiding love even in the midst of suffering. As far as I can tell, God’s promise is revealed in every child – God’s promise is made manifest in every human being, but it’s often easiest to see in children.

It is our good fortune that Gabriela is with us today because through her baptism we are invited to stop the other things we are doing, to put aside our worries and distractions, and to wonder at the marvelous work of God and the expansive love of God. We are invited to participate in the promise of God by renewing our promises to be a beloved community for Gabriela and for one another. We are invited to remember and hope that Gabriela will continue to be a rich blessing to all who come to know her as she grows into the fullness of her life. We are invited to remember and hope for the rich blessing in being part of a wider community that regularly re–commits itself to the difficult and demanding work of social justice and spiritual renewal.