Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, Kansas City, MO

Disturb Us, Lord

October 9, 2005 (Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 23)

• Isaiah 25:1-9
• Psalm 23
• Philippians 4:4-13
• Matthew 22:1-14

The call comes from the kitchen: “Dinner’s ready! Time to eat! Come to the table.” And the usual first response is silence. Now there are exceptions: When it is finally time to eat on Thanksgiving Day even the devout football fan virtually sprints to the table.

But most days, in most households with more than one person, once dinner is announced, we take our own time getting to the table. It is as if we have taken for granted the miracle of an abundant table, plenty of food, hands that prepared the meal, the work that produced the food, even the money which purchased it.

Today’s lessons all speak of plenty. Isaiah’s feast on the mountain of the Lord, the table spread by the Good Shepherd in the 23rd psalm, and Paul’s rejoicing proclamation of knowing fat times and lean times. Most of all is Matthew’s story of a feast.

Notice that the banquet table is set, the food has been dished up and is piping hot, everything is ready for the wedding banquet, when the king sends out slaves to invite the guests. “Dinner is served! Come to the table” the slaves announce. And Matthew writes that the guests “made light of it.” The king generously provides a feast, and the guests reject his generosity to the point that some even respond with hostility.

Jesus calls us to be thankful, to see God’s abundance all around us, to be grateful and generous.

This gospel lesson is complex, and is likely two separate parables combined into one. Rather than try to explain the story, I prefer the approach of the Rev. Kathleen Wakefield who writes: There is a way of understanding stories like this without taking them literally. In today’s Gospel, Jesus is being deliberately provocative. He challenges our preconceived ideas about what God and God’s kingdom are like. We all have our favorite ideas of what the kingdom of heaven might be like. Jesus is telling us that it will be like nothing we can imagine. In that over-used phrase, Jesus is inviting us to “think outside the box.”

Commitment Sunday is a perfect time to hear Jesus’ provocative message, because his reason for being provocative is to bring into a deeper relationship with God.

There is a prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake which reads:

Disturb us, Lord,
when we are too well pleased with ourselves;
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little;
when we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess
we have lost our thirst for the Waters of Life;
having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity;
and in our efforts to build a new earth,
we have allowed our vision of the new heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly -
to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery;
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.
We ask you push back the horizons of our hopes,
and to push us in the future with strength, courage, hope and love.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

When I first heard this prayer several years ago at a diocesan convention, I found that asking God to “disturb me” rattled my piety more than I expected. I wonder if allowing God to disturb us is in fact a way to avoid making light of the Lord’s invitation. I wonder if admitting that God needs to disturb us and rile us up is the best preparation for coming to the banquet.

Disturb us, Lord, and help us commit. In the last few weeks, two of your fellow parishioners have spoken of being disturbed by God.

One year ago this time parishioner Dave Barker said that he and Diane were going to double their pledge for 2005 and challenged us all to do the same. Three weeks ago David returned to this pulpit to share what happened. First, as I recall, he said that he panicked, wondering why he had made such a promise before God and all of us! The Barkers followed through. And David told us that doubling his pledge changed his life. (Linda Sue and I know that to be true, too.)

Two weeks ago, Robin Rusconi shared her faith journey. For her, giving a substantial proportion of her income was not the difficult issue. Her issue had to do with her motivation. And Robin says that be increasing her commitment, obligation has been replaced by joy and peace of mind.
Linda Sue and I continue to grow in our belief that God is the source of Abundance, and that as God’s people, we are to practice abundant proportional giving. That is why our household gives one tenth of our income to God’s work, with most of that amount given to the cathedral. But we have a ways to go to fulfill the Episcopal Church’s teaching that giving one-tenth is the minimum standard of giving for members of this Church.

Last year on Commitment Sunday I said that “We never retire from the practice of stewardship, so the following is not intended to excuse our seniors, but I have a special word of invitation to my fellow baby boomers as we enter our 40’s and 50’s. It’s our turn. Now is the time for more of us to give more active leadership and more generous support to the Church, so that one day, we can pass it on to our children in good condition. That means sacrifice and discipline. It means listening to God more than we listen to the siren voices of materialism and self-fulfillment that dominate our culture.” I still stand by that challenge.

This year, I wish to challenge us all to see Financial Stewardship as being primarily about our relationship to God and our need to be giving people.

God is the ultimate giver, generous to all, the bad and the good. Endlessly giving, and always giving much, much more than was asked for. It is God’s nature to be an outrageous giver.

You and I are made in the image of God. Thus, you and I are to be givers. A faithful Christian does not need to be convinced of the need to give. If we believe that God is the source of everything, then we recognize that we are trustees, responsible for the best use possible of what is God’s. Commitment Sunday is about my need to be a giver.

A final story: Some years ago a Louisiana law firm was asked to undertake a title search for some property in New Orleans. They successfully traced the title back to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. But their clients were not satisfied with that. So the search went on. Finally the law firm sent the following letter to their clients:

Gentlemen: Please be advised that in the year 1803 the United States of America acquired the territory of Louisiana from the Republic of France by purchase. The Republic of France, in turn, acquired title from the Spanish Crown by conquest; the Spanish Crown obtained it by virtue of the discoveries of one Christopher Columbus, who had been authorized to undertake his voyage by Isabella, Queen of Spain, who obtained sanction for the journey from the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Christ, who is the Son and Heir of Almighty God, who made Louisiana. [Now that is a thorough title search.]

Bishop John MacNaughton tells that story and then adds: What we are accustomed to call our own is not really ours. [Do a search. Trace it back.] It is God’s. What we do is hold it for a time, use it, add to it and then pass it on. God is the owner. We are the trustees.

My friends: Dinner’s ready! Come and get! God’s generosity is spread before us like a fine banquet. We receive countless invitations to enjoy God’s bounty, and while, as today’s gospel lesson suggests, there are times that we refuse some calls to the table, the truth is, we don’t miss many table calls, and we feast on God’s blessing until we are content, and occasionally overindulge.

There is another feast which is the ministry of the Cathedral, and together we are all hosts. We are to provide generously for one another and strangers who are so hungry for Christ’s love, compassion, forgiveness, healing, and compassion. This Commitment Sunday all of us, as members of the Cathedral are called to be givers, to be as generous as our Creator, and to spread a banquet for all who are hungry. That banquet requires our money. The Lord is inviting each of us to be generous. Let us not make light of the invitation.

Disturb us, Lord. Disturb us real good.

The Heavenly Banquet

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

One of the things that moving is guaranteed to do is get you in touch with your belongings. In our case, it meant getting in touch with our stuff AND with ancestral belongings that had found their way to our house a year earlier, but never quite dealt with. Among the treasures are several that had been my Great-Grandmother Lewis’s. As much as I value the heirlooms, I value even more the stories that my dad tells about Lucinda Mae Lewis. One of my favorites had to do with her preoccupation about the clothes she would be buried in. Grandma Lewis lived well into her 90’s but for about the last twenty years of her life, was convinced that death lay just around the corner. Periodically, she would call up Dad, and ask him to take her shopping. She needed new clothes to be laid out in. So my ever-dutiful father would get in the car and drive 60 miles, pick up Grandma and take her shopping. She’d buy new underclothes, hosiery, dress, and shoes and set them aside for her burial. Inevitably, some occasion would soon warrant her needing a new dress, she’d get out her burial outfit, and then that would be it. It no longer qualified for burial once she’d worn it, and pretty soon, she’d be on the phone again with Dad. It was a source of family amusement, but for Great Grandma Lewis, this was serious business. She knew what awaited her, and by God she intended to meet her maker in garments worthy of the king.

Being suitably dressed for the Great Banquet is one of several themes presented in today’s gospel passage. It is a parable packed with shocking and discordant details and as many times as I’ve heard it, the ending never ceases to take my breath away. It’s conjecture of course, but I strongly suspect that it had a similar effect on Matthew’s original audience as well.

It might be helpful to know several things upfront. First, whenever we hear banquet or wedding imagery in Scriptures, particularly in the New Testament, we’re generally hearing symbolic language for the heavenly banquet in the fullness of time, when God will gather all creation together to feast at the supper of the lamb. Second, by the late first century, when this gospel was written, the mission to the Gentiles was well underway. Jewish Christians struggled with the role righteousness played in salvation, now that obedience to the Law had become secondary to faith. But the Gentile Christians struggled with the opposite issue, namely, how much righteousness was expected of them. After all, if Christ died for all regardless of whether you obeyed the Law of Moses, did that then mean that anything goes? In other words, can you hang onto your Gentile ways and still tuck into that plate of barbecued ribs at the Heavenly Banquet? Exactly how far reaching is this grace anyway?

It’s an interesting question, one that we descendents of those Gentile Christians do well to ask. In the parable, the king wanted the banquet hall filled. It wasn’t a matter of who deserved to be there or how oddly mixed the group was, or how last minute the invitation was. The breadth of grace of the invitation was and is staggering.

Staggering, but not cheap.

And maybe that’s the most important aspect of this parable for us today. Like our first century forebears, we too are invited to struggle with our response once we realize we’ve been invited to the banquet. The parable suggests that two things are asked of us by way of response: showing up and changing our clothes. That is to say, having accepted God’s amazing invitation of grace by virtue of our baptism, we then commit ourselves to lives of discipleship. Both components are crucial. The invitation comes from God and is pure grace. We are loved unconditionally, unreservedly, by God AND we are invited to live the whole of our lives in a way that reflects that reality.

This requires thoughtful intention, perhaps even intentional change. We are called to love others because God loves us. We are called to forgive others because we have been forgiven. We are called to be just and merciful because God is just and merciful. We are invited to give because God gives first to us. In other words, the grace of the banquet invitation is free, but by no means is cheap. The cost to us is our response. Call it discipleship, call it stewardship – it’s all about what we do with so great a gift as each of us has been given. Don’t get side-tracked by the shocking parable imagery. Jesus is not trying to intimidate us into relationship to God, but rather show us how much our full response matters. The invitation to the great banquet remains open to all, but our only chance to respond is with the life we have been given while we have that life.

Today is Commitment Sunday. It is an opportunity for us to enflesh our discipleship each year and to give in imitation of the one who first gave to us. Ideally, each of our gifts of time, talent, and treasure to the Cathedral are but one outward and visible sign of our discipleship. Ideally, we give because it is a concrete way of enacting our thanksgiving. Ideally, we give not because we are intimidated into it, threatened with some fiery fate if we don’t, but because the invitation to participate in real time in the commonwealth of God is so compelling that we can’t imagine missing that opportunity. For us, showing up and changing our clothes may well begin by recognizing that each of us has been blessed in ways we cannot count, and by responding in thanksgiving by giving of ourselves in return.

Great Grandma Lewis read her Bible with a more literal eye than I do, but I like to think that I take the parable of the wedding feast at least as seriously as she did. We believe that God will gather all creation together at the close of the age. With that in mind, we have the freedom to decide to live each day with that promise informing our choices. May we have the wisdom to respond as God would have us, to live as stewards, responding in joyful thanksgiving.