"Free, But Not Cheap"
October 9, 2005: 21st Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, co-pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

Sermon:
We've talked a bit about parables in sermons past. We've talked about the twisty quality of parables, how they bend in on themselves, inviting the hearer to share in the story from multiple points of view. The Parable of the Prodigal Son, for instance, is more properly called the Parable of the Father and the Two Sons, because we can read ourselves into each of those roles—younger son, older son, and father—in turn or even all at once. Or the Parable of the Good Samaritan: are we the one in need of care, those refusing to care, or the one who crosses boundaries to care in God's name? Parables are like gems held to the light, catching and refracting meaning in multiple facets.

Only what we have in front of us this morning in Matthew 22 is not a parable. It may be mislabeled as such in your Bibles, but technically speaking it's not a parable but an allegory. Both are kinds of extended metaphors, but where a parable is an open-ended story that by its nature encourages multiple readings and interpretations, an allegory is something else entirely. It is a closed system designed to tell one particular story in metaphorical language.

In this case, the author of the Matthew's Gospel has taken a parable that was already out there in the early Christian tradition in the pre-Gospel Q source and the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, a parable comparing the reign of God to a wedding banquet where the host throws open the invitation to all comers, and shaped it to his particular time and place and purpose. It's told very differently here than in those earlier versions or the version that eventually made it into Luke's Gospel, too.

For one thing, Matthew's story is much darker. In his version the reluctant guests don't just make excuses. Some of them actually kill the king's messengers, and in retaliation the king sends soldiers to burn the murderers' home town to the ground. And there's another difference: Matthew's version is less realistic, or are the soldiers really sent to carry out their bloody orders while dinner waits on the table getting cold?

No, Matthew is less interested in creating a parabolic teaching tool, a story to elicit a surprising spiritual "Aha!" from the listener, than communicating to his audience a particular reading of their historical situation as a community of faith. Here it's clear the king is none other than God, and his son, the bridegroom, is Jesus. The first servants sent with the invitation are the prophets sent to the unreceptive Jewish people. The second wave are Christian witnesses, ridiculed and killed by Jews and Gentiles alike. The city burned to the ground is Jerusalem itself, destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. as part of their campaign to put down a Jewish uprising, a tragedy that helped to drive a lasting wedge between sibling Jewish and Christian communities.

Matthew's audience has experienced all this and is trying to make sense of it within the context of their faith with the Gospel's help. Even these terrible events, the author says, are part of God's plan; in fact, contrary to appearances, they help reveal God's grace in inviting all people to share in the banquet, in the life of God's reign. Despite all that has gone before—the denials, the rejections, the violence—in the end the king sends his servants out with instructions to gather in everyone they find in the streets, "both good and bad," without regard, so the wedding hall may be filled with guests to enjoy the king's gracious hospitality.

But here's another place where Matthew's author diverges from his source material in his retelling. To this already tricky story, the author tacks on an even more difficult coda. Listen to it again:

But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, "Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?" And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, "Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Well, ok. Um. What to say?

First, notice again the unreality of the details. If the hall has been filled with random passers-by from the city streets, why would any of them, much less all-but-one of them, be wearing fancy-dress clothes appropriate to the occasion? Then there's the language. The offending individual isn't just put out of the party, he's thrown out into "the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." That last bit is code in Matthew's Gospel that let us know the author is definitely not talking about simple party etiquette at this point.

Rather it's all about the coming Day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment, when, as the author puts it later on in the Gospel narrative:

the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him... [to] sit on the throne of his glory... [when] all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. (Mt 25:31-32)

But that's hardly helpful. "Weeping and gnashing of teeth"? "Sheep from the goats"? That's ol' time religion language, fairly unfamiliar to us in here our progressive congregation or, what's far worse and more likely, highly prejudicial, bringing back unpleasant memories of fire and brimstone theologies out of our personal and collective past—and present—experience. In other words, this sort of stuff sets us shaking in our shoes or running for the exits.

But if we can all just breathe through our discomfort at this point—all of us, I as much as you—there may be something helpful we can uncover or re-cover or dis-cover here. The Gospel author is wrestling with something here, really struggling. Listen to it. This story is wound so tight, it fairly thrums with the tension. I think the author is trying to hold together a belief in God's grace and also God's judgment; in other words, struggling to reconcile God's love with our human freedom to reject it.

The painful experience of the Matthean community's history clings close to the first part of the story, the allegory of the rejection of the prophets and apostles, the destruction of Jerusalem, but even so the gospel theme of grace manages to shine through when the king invites all, "both good and bad," into his banquet hall. It is the broadest possible invitation, based not on pride of place or prior good works. But notice that—exactly to the point—Matthew's version deploys explicitly moral language here, "good and bad," where Luke's Gospel instead talks about welcoming the "poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame," i.e. social outcasts, into the feast (Lk 14:21). This author wants to talk about moral choices in the context of God's grace. That is the context for the conflict that follows.

So what happens? The king is making his way through the motley crew milling about the ballroom, saying hello and shaking hands, when he comes upon one of his guests still in his street clothes and just loses it. Apparently it didn't matter what you were wearing when you received the invitation, but, please, you think he could have made an effort at least. This guy hasn't even bothered to change for the occasion.

Ahh. "He hasn't bothered to change." Now that sounds like it may be helpful.

If the author is trying to work out the intersection of grace and judgment, if the question driving this story is "If grace is free—the free and unfailing commitment of God to love, as Philip Gulley and James Mulholland put it in If Grace Is True, our current book group book (p.7)—if there truly is nothing we can do to earn God's love or to lose it, then what's to keep us from doing whatever we want, from doing anything at all without regard to the consequences?"

It's a very natural question, of course, especially if you've ever been a parent. Running a household on grace is a tricky proposition at best. Most of us can't manage it for more than a moment or two here and there. Encouraging children to their best behavior through the judicious application of rewards and punishments is simply more effective and way, way easier, at least in the short run. And as we've observed here before, the same philosophy drives our society as a whole. From the classroom to the workplace to international politics, we prefer the carrot and the stick. The unfailing application of loving inspiration just takes so much energy and so... darn... long....!

Just ask God, who's been busy with the work of grace since the beginning of the world, with only us to show for it. But, time-efficient or not, that's how God chooses to play the game: lovingly, gracefully, patiently. Even the author of Matthew's gospel doesn't dispute that. The invitation to the heavenly banquet go out to everyone, not just the select few.

And there's the rub. Everyone receives grace, but not everyone gets it. Only some understand the gift they have been given and so dress accordingly, that is, they "bother to change for the occasion." For the Gospel author is convinced, as am I, that though there is nothing we can do to earn grace or to lose it—if there were, then it wouldn't be grace, now would it?—grace calls for a response from us. God's "unfailing commitment to love" calls us to change, to repent, to stop whatever it is we're doing and turn around to face the God who loves us so very much. Grace calls us to set our feet on a new path, one we perhaps didn't even realize existed before, a way that leads past every obstacle, internal and external, toward intimate, loving relationship with God, one another, and even our very selves as God has always intended us to be.

Grace is free, but it is not cheap. We can credit Dietrich Bonhoeffer with putting the point so succinctly. Bonhoeffer was a theologian in the German Evangelical church, the parent denomination of the German Evangelical Church in this country that was one of the founding streams of our United Church of Christ. And like us, Bonhoeffer lived in morally trying times. He came of age in the 1930s just as Adolph Hitler and his NAZI party were rising to power in his homeland. In time, he became an integral part of the Confessing Church movement that opposed Hitler's successful co-opting of the German churches to support his own unholy agenda.

In 1937 Bonhoeffer published The Cost of Discipleship, in which he attacked the notion of "cheap grace," the idea promulgated in many churches, that God's freely given love may be received casually, carelessly, without any change in the one who receives it or any effort by that one to change the world in turn. Cheap grace, he wrote:

is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate (The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R.H. Fuller, rev. ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1960)], p.30).

Whoa. But Bonhoeffer meant it, and he put his money where his mouth was. In 1939, after making it out of Germany to the United States, Bonhoeffer suddenly returned home to the struggle there. In the spring of 1945, he was jailed in Flossenbürg prison for his connection to a failed plot to assassinate the Führer On April 9, 1945 Bonhoeffer was hanged, just a few weeks before the liberation of the prison by Allied forces.

Of course I am not advocating murder as a method for bringing about the reign of God. I am no Pat Robertson there. And Bonhoeffer himself struggled with his choice. But don't let that sidetrack you from the point of the story. Bonhoeffer understood that through grace is free, it is also costly. To truly receive the grace of God's transforming love in our lives, to claim that love not with our heads alone but in our hearts, in our flesh and bones, is going to cost us our lives as they are now—comfortable as they are, even in our familiar discomforts—even as we begin to receive the new, resurrected lives God extends to us in Christ. Earlier in Matthew's Gospel Jesus has said, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me" (Mt. 16:24). As followers of Christ, we are called—not by obligation, nor by threat, nor reward but by grace—we are called to lay down our lives, to set aside the ways we are living now, and simply choose again—choose again to set our eyes on the example of Christ, to follow in his footsteps even to the cross, to the grave, and to salvation here and now. We are called to live new lives in response to costly grace.

So what's new with you? If you have heard God's word of grace preached from this pulpit—and it is a favorite theme here, if you hadn't noticed—if I have preached rightly and you have really heard it and inwardly digested it, there ought to be something new about your life. You don't have to live up to Bonhoeffer's historic example... or to Christ's, for that matter. You can start small. Maybe you can choose to respond differently, from love, the next time someone antagonizes you on the road, at the grocery store, in your family. Maybe you can sign a petition to prevent a strip-mall from being built over a wetland habitat. Maybe you can work on overcoming your fear of strangers so you can be more welcoming in your life. Maybe you can speak up the next time someone in your office rails against the new civil union law. Maybe you can choose to stick with the conflict in your marriage a little longer, rather than run away. Maybe you can speak out against the war at a local rally. Maybe you can struggle a little harder to raise your child to respond better to love than to threats.

Maybe you will feel free to change the world because you understand just how much God's grace has changed you. Grace is free, but it is precious and powerful. Now, unlike Matthew, I don't really believe in one Final Judgment at the end of time. That seems too melodramatic, not to mention unfair. I'm more partial to the theology of John's Gospel—go figure. That author believes that Christ greets us here and now, so that each moment of our lives, not just the last, is fraught with potential for salvation and damnation. Salvation is finally recognizing the love of God which over and around us lies, and in which we live and move and have our being, the love which calls us deeper into relationship with God as inexorably as the moon entices the ocean tides. By contrast, damnation is living our entire lives in the same stinking set of rags unaware that a new set of party clothes is ours for the asking or—worse—remaining stubbornly unwilling to try on them on, afraid of the unfamiliar fit. Friend, you are called! You are called to the feast! What will you choose to wear?