Free Tickets; Expensive Event
(Matthew 22:1-14)

21st Sunday after Trinity (Proper 23), 12 Oct. 2008
Homily delivered at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

In addition to being a cathedral chaplain here at St. John’s, I have another job where I regularly have to plan and organize, and often attend, big events. Here in Hong Kong, people often go to dinners, eat breakfasts, attend parties, and go sailing on junks with people they barely know, and we call these things “social.” But we are more accurate when refer to them as “obligations,” as in, “Sorry, I can’t attend. I have a prior obligation.” We are obliged to go to them because of our jobs: to network, to develop contacts and relationships, to grease the skids of our business. We all know these events-- some of us as guests; some as hosts or organizing staff; some as support staff, actually preparing or serving the food and drink, providing the entertainment, or cleaning up afterwards.

Make no mistake -- in a place like Hong Kong, “social events” are about power and money. How many of us find ourselves at events we might not have attended had the event not involved our boss, a possible major contributor, or a client? How many of us have dutifully served for hours as “party stuffers” – props to make the event look lively, full, fun, and attractive? How many of us have had to scramble to get more guests to come when we get an unexpectedly high number of “regrets” to an RSVP? How many of us have had to wear uncomfortable but stylish clothes, or funny-looking uniforms serving at such events, simply so that they “look right”?

Occasionally the events work and we actually enjoy them, which is, after all, the whole point—you make what might be an otherwise unpleasant task or adversarial relationship into something more pleasing and conducive to cooperation.

It is about just such a “social” event that today’s Gospel reading from Saint Matthew is about. Jesus recounts a parable—a comparison that tells us about our relationship with God by drawing a parallel with something from regular life—a detail, practice or story—sometimes mundane, sometimes unusual.

The parable as told here has a real edge, and at first blush appears to be about a bunch of seriously disturbed people. A king orders the senior members of his court to the prince’s wedding banquet. This provokes serious insubordination by some, who simply blow the invitation off, and outright rebellion by others, who proceed to kill the king’s messengers. At this the king flies into a rage and sends in the troops to wipe out not only the rebelling nobles but their city as well. He then orders his staff to scramble to find someone—anyone— to serve as party stuffers. Once the random passersby are seated at the party, the king notices that one of them isn’t wearing just the right attire for an event of such dignity. He again goes a little crazy, and orders his people to tie the poor man up “hand and foot” and throw him outside into the darkness, where there is nothing but “weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.”

Matthew ends with a moral to the story: “Many are called, but few are chosen” that is, “the invitation may have gone out broadly, but only those who accept the invitation and come in proper clothes can stay for the whole party.”

Now over the ages there has been no shortage of capricious, erratic leaders who behave in ways that encourage rebellion, murder whole villages, abuse their staffs, and change their minds about guest lists and appropriate evening dress at the last minute. But Matthew is not trying to say that God is like one of these sadly familiar characters. His description of the original invitees’ bad RSVPs, both insubordinate and rebellious, and the bit about the poor man in the wrong clothes underscores that the story is about how the guests behave, not the king. It is about how we respond to God’s invitation and then act at the event.

The Gospel of Luke, written about the same time as Matthew, tells an earlier form of the parable, one that is also preserved in the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

Here is how the original parable probably went:

A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many guests. When all was ready, he sent his servant to summon the guests. But one by one, they all began to give excuses for not coming. The servant reported this to his master, who in a rage commanded his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here anyone you find. I want my home to be filled for the banquet.’

When Jesus originally told the story, everyone knew that one of the great images of the Hebrew scripture for God’s saving act at the end of time was that of a great banquet. Even though there were plenty of passages that said, like today’s Old Testament reading, that this banquet would be for people of all nations (Isaiah 25:7), many of the religious teachers around Jesus taught that this would be an exclusive event limited to God’s people only.

Jesus replies to such a stingy image of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45). He says this tells us about God’s love for all and should be a model for us in how we treat others. Jesus points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people that his religion told him would make him unclean. He had dinner parties with drunkards and prostitutes, much to the horror of Jesus’ “righteous” opponents. “It is the sick who need a doctor,” he would say, “not healthy people.” (Matt. 9:12)

But not everyone wanted a God as generous as the one Jesus described. They would quote scriptures that “proved” God was picky and exclusive. Jesus would reply by quoting other scriptures, where God looked more loving. He reserved his deepest anger for people he accused of “refusing to enter God’s door, and also barring the way to others” (Matt 23:13). He told other parables to explain why it was that despite God’s overwhelming goodness and generosity, some people were right with God and others were not.

One is the story of The Pharisee and the Tax Collector: a “religious” man goes to the Temple and prays, “Thank God I’m not like the sinners around me.” Beside him stands a traitor—a collaborator with the occupying Romans, a man who profits from the sufferings of God’s people. The traitor stands far off due to his shame. He won’t even lift up his eyes to God because he fears that God might give him what he deserves. “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” he prays. And Jesus says that the traitor went away right with God while the so-called religious man went away as stone-cold-hearted as he came (Luke 18:10-14).

It is in this context that Jesus tells the parable of the Great Banquet. His point is that God’s banquet is open to all, not just those originally invited. Some people, thinking they’re too important, may actually turn aside God’s love. Jesus, as a Palestinian Jew, loved and respected the Law that set his people off as God’s chosen ones. But he knew that the Law was not enough. Human beings could take even something as holy and pure as God’s Law and twist it into something ugly and oppressive. That is why he is so insistent, in his stories and deeds, on what St. Paul later calls grace and how we must be aware of our need for it.

The writer of the Gospel of Matthew is a good Jewish Christian who follows Jesus in all of this. But he is also lives in a world where the Church has already been opened up to gentiles, and trying to understand how God could have let Jerusalem and the Temple be destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. Matthew tends to blame this national catastrophe on the rejection of Jesus by the religious leaders—that is probably why he adds the nobles’ murder of the king’s servants and the destruction of their village. Matthew is also afraid that some Gentile Christians have taken liberties with very basic things that should not be taken advantage of. His detail about the proper wedding attire underscores that regardless how broad the Church has grown, there are still be standards for the gentile late-comers to God’s banquet.

There is nothing so holy or good that we human beings, left to our own resources, cannot manage to mess up. In his day, Jesus stressed that we can twist God’s Law into something ugly and oppressive. Matthew, in his, said we also can misuse God’s grace, and twist it into an excuse for cheap self-will. You know what I’m talking about. How many of us haven’t wondered at some point whether we might go ahead and do something we know in our heart is deeply wrong thinking “it’s O.K., I’ll repent later. God will accept me back.” Phillip Yancey, in his book, What’s So Amazing about Grace?, calls this twisting of grace into an excuse for sinning as “the loophole of grace.”

Just before and during World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship used the term “cheap grace” to describe using God’s grace as an excuse for spiritual laziness or mediocrity in following Christ. He argued that we should dutifully and joyously follow Jesus out of gratitude for his grace. Such gratitude for expensive, precious grace on Jesus part requires a lifelong commitment to the way of the cross: self-sacrifice and service. Bonhoeffer had been studying and working in the United States but then returned to Nazi Germany in order to serve his fellow German Christians and witness against the wrong that was overtaking his country. Unrelenting in his witness, he was ultimately executed brutally by the Nazis.

It is precisely “cheap grace” and the “loophole of grace” that St. Matthew condemns in his image of the man caught without proper wedding clothing. This celebration can have no party poopers, no half-hearted acceptance of free tickets, no cheapening of the event by haughtiness of the original invitees or inattention by latecomers.

To summarize in other words: in order to accept the invitation, we have to be open to receive it. St. Augustine says, ‘God gives where He finds open hands.’ You can't receive the gift if your hands are already full, or are clenched tight.

In yet another parable, Jesus compares God’s kingdom to a narrow path and a tight gate, which at any given time only a few can manage to squeeze through (Matt 7:13-14). This is because in order to get through such a tight fit, people have to be willing to abandon all the baggage they are carrying, whether riches, resentments, self-will, sins, or even what appears to be good things if they are getting in the way.

This is a far cry from the loophole of grace, from “cheap grace.” Yancey tells of a friend who asks, “will God forgive me of the really bad thing I’m about to do?” After a lot of thought, Yancey answers, “Of course [God can forgive you.] . . . Forgiveness is our problem, not God’s. [But] what we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God—we change in the very act of rebellion—and there is no guarantee we will ever come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later?”

Likewise, C.S. Lewis said that asking God to forgive our sins without also sincerely wanting to amend our lives is like asking God to change us without changing us. Cheap grace, the loophole of grace—these simply misunderstand what is at issue in grace, and what is at issue in sin.

What does accepting grace, freely offered, look like in practical terms? It looks like me admitting that I am helpless and hopeless. It sounds like the sincere phrase “I am sorry and I humbly repent.” It feels like a heartfelt cry, “I throw myself totally on the merits of a merciful Jesus.” None of these are payments in a transaction, or actions that merit God’s favor. None of them provide excuses to cheapen the price with which we were bought. They are simply acceptance of grace offered. In the long run, a life lived in that grace starts bearing what St. Paul called the fruits of the Spirit: we begin to follow Jesus in self-sacrifice and grace toward others.

I myself have known God’s grace. At a particular time in my life, all was hopeless and helpless, through my own “thoughtlessness, weakness, through my own deliberate fault.” Marriage was unraveling, health was fading; career was careening. I found that I had to surrender to God, and accept my own powerlessness. Then gradually, steadily, God worked wonderful changes. I am still far from what God wants. But I live each day in gratitude that I am not what I was.

I suspect that many of you have had similar experiences. If so, continue in faith and gratitude, and share the invitation to the party through your actions and words.

If you have not had such an experience, then please listen to this call to God’s banquet, you random passerby. The tickets are free. But they are not cheap. And neither is the celebration. The banquet is priceless, the bread the finest, and the wine, a vintage that makes our hearts gladder than any other.

Come to the banquet, and let’s try to wear the right clothes.

In the name of God, Amen.

Be of the Same Mind that was "in Christ"

Paul Gaugin, Le Christ Jaune. 1889

Be of the Same Mind that was “in Christ”
Philippians 2:1-13
20th Sunday after Trinity (Proper 22), 9 Oct. 2008
Homily delivered at St. John's Cathedral, Hong Kong

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

My second son David was a very precocious child, and occasionally would ask questions that in their simplicity and naivety actually revealed profound problems. When he was about nine or so, he once asked me, “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us? Besides that—didn’t he forbid human sacrifice?”

I tried answering him by citing the normal “Law versus Mercy” and “the need for an eternal atoning sacrifice” arguments we usually hear from people quoting snippets of scripture, here and there. But David would have nothing of it,” “Look,” he said, “if God is really in charge of everything, he can make things the way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son?”

It took me several years before I fully realized that the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the incarnation mean that in a real sense God the Father did not have to “kill off” his Son to satisfy some law he had set up. Rather, the death of Jesus on the cross “for our sins” was in fact God giving himself freely to heal us and rescue us from our failings and shortcomings and all their effects. My nine year old son’s image of the child-abusing, murderous Father-God set on obeying the constraints of justice at all cost is common. But it is wrong. It is a twisted and wrong image, seen through the narrow and distorted lens of human limitation. The birth, life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus after his death is actually the Great Mystery of Love Himself descending below all things to save, redeem, and heal his pitiful creatures from the nasty fix we find ourselves in.

This Great Mystery was the subject of an early Christian hymn that Saint Paul quoted when writing to the saints in Philippi. Since it comes from before Paul, the hymn in today’s reading is one of the oldest parts of the New Testament, from the first couple of decades after the death of Jesus. Paul quotes the hymn, probably one that his audience in Philippi would have sung in Greek in their small Church services, in order to argue that Christians should be humble, not stuck up, and should always try to serve one another. It does not call for a fawning and fake “I’m no gooooood. I’m worse than everybody” false humility. It says we should have the mind of Christ.

I think perhaps a better translation of the first verse of the hymn would be that, “though he had the form and substance of God, Christ was not of a mind to see equality with God as something to be grabbed at and held onto tightly.” Rather, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave by being born in human likeness. “ But the hymn goes on to say that in addition to this great stooping down of Christ from the eternities to our pitiful mortal life, there was a second stage of humiliation. “Once he was found in human form, he further humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.” The point is that Jesus died such a horrible and shameful death—the Roman Imperial punishment for political rebels, bandits, and terrorists, being slowly tortured to death publicly to set an example– that he died such a death unjustly, but willingly.

Now this passage expresses the idea of Christ’s emptying himself with the Greek word kenosis. This later became an important point of departure in Roman Catholic and reformation theology on the relation of the persons in the Holy Trinity, the “occultation” of the Divinity, and its abasement and making itself subject to the laws of nature in the incarnation. The great Anglican theologian Charles Gore developed the idea of kenosis as a means of understanding the limitations of the human consciousness of the historical Jesus. The traditional Christian hymn “Te Deum” expresses this in the phrase, “Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.”

But Paul’s point here is that the “mind” that was in Christ—indeed, that all who are “in Christ” already share—was one not of grasping, but of emptying, not of dictating, but one of obedient servitude or slavery.

This is the great point of the idea of kenosis in the Mind of Christ.

The Christian Church has a shocking doctrine, one that throughout its history has been repeatedly oversimplified by pious people: the doctrine of the incarnation expressed in the line in the creed about our One Lord Jesus Christ who, “became flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became a human being.” Many church members think they are giving a highly orthodox answer when they define the Incarnation solely in terms of "The Divinity of Christ." But this is really heresy, and was so branded by the early Church. What the Incarnation actually affirms is that the man Jesus of Nazareth, known to his disciples as a fully human person, sharing the limitations and temptations of ordinary men, was also in a unique sense the self-expression of God.

This became clear to them when after his horrific and unjust death, he reappeared to them in bodily form—they knew that whatever it was they were seeing, it was not a ghost. They also knew, as St. Paul elsewhere says, that it was by raising Jesus from the dead that God revealed just who this Jesus actually was (Rom. 1). The clearest expression of the idea in the New Testament is in the Gospel according to St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The idea has been put in many other ways over the centuries: Jesus was truly man, and at the same time truly God, is "God living a human life," "the manifestation of God in human terms," and "the fullest expression of Divine personality that is possible under the conditions of human life."

D. M. Baillie, a distinguished Scottish theologian, argued that this “100% God and 100% man” idea is perhaps best explained this in by what he calls the "paradox of grace." We Christians since antiquity have been aware that we possess what appears to be a genuinely free will of our own, that we are "not marionettes but responsible persons." At the same time, we are equally sure that whatever good there is in our lives comes from God acting in us. And we feel that we are never more truly free, nor more truly human, than in those moments when we are most dependent on and most open to God.

"This is the deepest paradox of our Christian experience, and it runs right through it, woven into its very texture," said Dr. Baillie. "I suggest that it . . . points the way to an understanding of the perfect union of God and man in the Incarnation." In the New Testament, Jesus is seen "surpassing all other men in refusing to claim any¬thing for himself independently, and ascribing all goodness to God." Yet his disciples felt that when they were with him, they were in the presence of God. And he told them they were right in believing that. "If the paradox of Divine grace is a reality in our poor imperfect lives at all," asked Dr. Baillie, "does not the same or a similar paradox, taken at the perfect and absolute pitch, appear as the mystery of the Incarnation?" [[Preceding four paragraphs are adapted from Louis Cassels, Christian Primer: Adult Answers to Basic Questions about the Christian Faith (Doubleday: NYC, 1964; rpt. FMP 1981) 24-26.]]

But this is all the more the case when we talk about the mind of Christ and its emptying itself of all self-seeking, self-will, and even instinct for self-preservation. Especially in the second stage of humiliation described in the hymn-- Jesus Was a Palestinian Jew and let God lead him where God would. He ended up standing in opposition to the “religious” and “righteous” people of his day, and siding with traitors, drunkards, and whores. “For they,” he said, “recognize their need for God.”

Jews of all sects at that time had expectations for what a Messiah would be and do; God had another idea. Jesus, when faced with the prospect of his death by torture, prayed in Gethsemane that “this cup” would pass from him. The allusion is to Psalm 75:9 that refers to a cup brimming with “foaming, spiced wine” in the hand of God the dregs of which are punishment for “the wicked” of the world, an image called in Isaiah 51 “the cup of the wrath of God.” Despite his fear and desire for another outcome, Jesus says, “nevertheless, let what you want be done, Father, not what I want.” In the end he empties himself even further and, as Saint Paul quotes the hymn, “was obedient unto death, death upon the Cross.”

It is only in such surrender to God that we can find ourselves. It is only is such admission of total dependence on God that we can find a way out of our hopeless situation. Self-will is a great fraud. How can we talk to God face-to-face when we don’t yet have faces? We are pretty pathetic creatures, but ones that God loves nevertheless. He loves us foolishly. He’s “crazy about us.” That’s why he emptied himself, showed us the way, and paid whatever price our failings had set.

Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God had for him, we must accept who we are and what we must do to amend our lives. But this requires an open-ended listening. This requires total trust in God’s good intentions for us, in knowing, with Lady Julian of Norwich, “that all is well, and that all manner of things shall be well” in God’s intention.

Such openness is the difference between true humility and its cheap counterfeit, the pride that demands that we either be the best of all or the worst of all.

The Latin word from which we get the word humility is “Humilitas”, that is, close to the humus or the earth. Another way of saying it is “Down-to-earth.” It does not mean self-abasing or playing the drama-queen in thinking oneself as the least valued person on the planet or the worst of its sinners. C.S Lewis said that humility is the golden rule—treating others as you would be treated--applied to self-esteem. Charles H. Spurgeon, an English preacher in the 19th century, said, “Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self.”

In our meditation today, I want us to think about emptying ourselves of self-will and self-grasping. Think of how to make real in our own feeling and thinking the mind that is “in Christ.”


Here are two prayers, both from African Christians, that we can reflect on as we seek to empty ourselves.

O thou great Chief, light a candle in my heart, that I may see what is therein, and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling place.

God in Heaven, you have helped my life to grow like a tree. Now something has happened. Satan, like a bird, has carried in one twig of his own choosing after another. Before I knew it he had built a dwelling place and was living in it. Tonight, my Father, I am throwing out both the bird and the nest.

In the name of God, Amen.