Feast of Christ the King, 2017

Matthew 25:31-46

One of the disturbing questions that Christianity struggles with is what you need in order to be saved. Way back in the beginning the controversy existed – you can find it in Paul and James and all through the New Testament. Augustine believed that humans could contribute nothing to their salvation because of original sin; we were so bad that even our good actions were bad. And another preacher of that time, a monk named Pelagius, preached that we were basically good although soiled a bit, and we could work our way into heaven. The Mormons believe that everyone will go to heaven except for a handful of people, Judas being one. But the highest heaven will be for those who live according to the revelation given to their founder; in other words, you could work your way into the best heaven. And the Presbyterians would say that your eternal fate has already been determined, before you were even conceived. And there isn't anything you can do about it.

The gospel you've just heard is another one of those hard gospels. There are places in the New Testament that seem to indicate that salvation depends in some way on faith in Jesus. Martin Luther said it was faith alone that mattered. Our church is a little more nuanced, saying that faith is where salvation begins, and those who have faith demonstrate this through their works. The Catholics and Lutherans decided that they weren't that far apart.

But then Jesus throws a monkey wrench into this. Here he seems to say that the only thing that matters is works, is what we do. Because the sheep and the goats have one thing in common, they don't know that what they do for the least of their brothers they do for Jesus. Where is their faith?

And when I measure myself against what Jesus is saying, I'm not sure where I am. I do know that I could do a lot more for the least of my brothers than I do. How much is enough? How little is too little? Hard questions.

Sometimes it helps to look at the whole Gospel. Matthew is always emphasizing God's mercy and generosity. When Jesus gave his new commandments during the sermon on the mount, they were not “Thou shalt nots” like the ten commandments. They were the beatitudes – How blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God. What a promise! And all the beatitudes are like that. Matthew talks about the person who sold everything he had so that he could acquire a field with a treasure in it – and a merchant who sells everything so that he can buy a very expensive pearl. Maybe these figures are not meant for us to emulate – maybe they tell us how God is willing to give up everything to find us, maybe we are the treasure, we are the pearl. And remember the parable of the king and the wedding banquet? The king threw the banquet for everyone, not just his friends. Everyone was welcome.

And then it helps to think of the two parables just before the gospel we've just heard. Two weeks ago we heard about the five wise and five foolish virgins. We focus on the foolish virgins, and lose sight of the fact that there is a great feast being held. It is ours for the taking and all we have to do is be alert. And last Sunday it was the story of the three servants who were given talents – huge sums of money. We focus on the man who buried his talent, but another message might be that God gives us everything we need in order to hear those words, “Well done, good and faithful servant, come share your master's joy!”

Jesus will tell his disciples at the end of his time on earth, according to Matthew, to go to all nations, baptizing them and teaching them. “Invite them to the party!” he says. “You are being given everything you need to do this”, he says.

And todfay it is as though Jesus is saying, “I know not everyone will ever hear the good news.” And we know that's true. It isn't that someday everyone on earth will have heard the good news, it's that billions of people have never heard the good news, through no fault of their own. And perhaps even they have a shot at the party.

These are the people Jesus is referring to – the human beings who never have the good news preached to them and never will. Even they are held in God's mercy. Jesus is saying, “Here is how I am going to judge them. If they see in even the least of their brothers and sisters someone to love, someone to be served, someone to not be stepped over and ignored, that's enough. But if they see each other as things, not worth their charity or love, well, they've lost themselves. And the apostles might have remembered the parable from Luke about the rich man whose only recorded fault was that he stepped over Lazarus every time he went out of his house, and didn't even see him.

If we read the Gospel of Matthew from the beginning to the end, it can be seen as a training manual for Jesus' followers, who are on this earth not for themselves but for the rest of mankind. They are given the knowledge they need, the graces they need, to spread his message; they are given the promise of someday participating in the great banquet. But God's ways are not like ours. God wants everyone there, and even those who never have the good news preached to them are still invited. And if they haven't heard the good news, they will be judged worthy by Jesus himself as long as they act with love toward their neighbors. Those of us who have heard the good news, however, will be held to a higher standard, for we are conscious of the fact that we are adopted sons and daughers of the Father and brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, and as such we are meant to build his kingdom here on earth.

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 25:14-30

So this parable we just heard teaches us that hard work brings success. We are meant to work, and people who don't work deserve what they get. So this parable teaches us that God always gives us what we need when he asks us to do something. So this parable teaches us that we are not all equal; some have more talents, wisdom, knowledge, money – you name it – than others. That's just the way it is in God's world. So this parable teaches us that we work for the master, not for our own selfish purposes. So this parable shows that we will all be held accountable. But let me tell you a story.

There was this unscrupulous businessman who was one of the richest people in the world. Much of his wealth came from exploiting poor people, having an army of lawyers to find all the tax loopholes, and raping the landscape. He had several congressmen in his back pocket.

He had three accountants. One day he gave one of them five million dollars, another two million, and the third one million. And then he went on an extended business trip combined with a vacation.

The first two imitated the businessman; they played the stock market, bought property and fixed it up and sold it again for twice the price, raised the rent on apartment buildings they had purchased, forcing some of the tenants out into the street – but you get the idea. They even hired their own lawyers and accountants to manage and grow the money.

The third took his million dollars and buried it in the ground. He didn't want anything to do with the kind of activities that his colleagues were carrying out. He knew that when you got rich, most of the time it meant someone else became poorer; and besides, his Jewish religion told him that charging interest was sinful, and that people who were well off had a responsibility to lift up the poor, the wiodow, the orphan – not deprive them of shelter and food.

When the businessman returned, the first accountant said, “You know that five million dollars you gave me? Well, here is five million more!” And the businessman said, “Great! I knew I could count on you. I'm offering you a partnership in my business. The second accountant did likewise and he too was offered a partnership. But the third said “I know how you make money. I can't be part of a system that allows that. Here is your million dollars back.”

The businessman fumed and threatened and finally fired the third accountant, telling him he would see to it that he never worked as an accountant again. And he gave the million dollars to the first servant, knowing that that was the best shot at making even more money. And the third accountant eventually managed to eke out a living as a day laborer.

When you read the parable of the talents, your first reaction is that the master is Jesus. But he's not merciful, he is a “hard man who reaps what he did not sew and gathers grain from fields that he did not plant”. In fact, in Jesus' day if you were not royalty the best way to become very wealthy was to loan money to people at very high interest rates, and then when they couldn't pay, you would foreclose on their land or their homes. You might then offer a farmer a job as a tenant farmer on the land he previously owned, adding insult to injury. And of course it's hard imagining Jesus throwing his servant into outer darkness. A second point. Most of the time we hear this parable and think about talents we are born with and decide this is about people wasting their God-given talents instead of putting them to good use. But to Matthew and his audience, a talent was a huge sum of money. We don't know quite how much, but if you google it, a million dollars seems in the ball park. A common man could not expect to earn a talent in twenty years of labor. Third, when Jesus tells his stories, he often has us focus on the unexpected one – the Prodigal son who returns to the Father; the Samaritan who stops and helps when the priest and the levite don't; the publican who recognizes his sinfulness as opposed to the Pharisee who revels in his righteousness; the widow who won't stop bothering the unjust judge. Here, although the first two servants are commended by their master, we focus on the third.

So the master is not God and the talents are ungodly sums of money, and the master made his fortune by dishonest means, which would mean by abusing other people in some way or another. The first two servants find worldly success by imitating the master; but the third servant can't bring himself to participate in that way of life and takes the consequences. And maybe Jesus is telling his followers that in this world those who have little will have even that taken away from them. Maybe the parable is given as a kind of warning – if you refuse to participate in a system which destroys lives and causes poverty and increasing inequality, there will be unpleasant consequences.. But somewhere else Jesus said “What would it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?”

Shadrach, Mesach and Abednigo chose to opt out of the system even if it cost them their lives. Saint Francis of Assisi spent his whole life choosing to turn his back on the way his world worked. Countless martyrs chose to die rather than compromise with unjust power.

Maybe this isn't a parable. Maybe Jesus is telling of an event that really happened in order to make his point. Maybe we need to ask ourselves whether we are unconsciously participating in an unjust system and whether we can do something about it.

Thirty second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 25:1-13

When I was young, just starting out as a father, a husband, and a physician, I used to resent people and things that took up my time. Most of the time it was just a little resentment, and I would smile and probably no one knew. Sometimes I would be more demonstrative – cutting conversations short, looking at my watch, turning my attention to something else in the presence of the one who was stealing my minutes. Because my time was precious.

But when I had a few minutes to myself, I usually cracked open a book or looked at a magazine or turned on the television. And eventually I began to realize that the worst waster of the time I had been given was myself. And I think that's still true.

And probably I'm not the only one who abuses time. I know of people who get up in the morning and launch off on a long list of things to get done. They get upset when they are interrupted and they fall into their beds at night exhausted.

Jesus tells the story of the wise and foolish virgins today. Like all of his stories, once you've heard it you can't forget it, at least in essence. But there are several little things to think about. First, the ten young ladies (which is probably a better translation from the Greek) are entrusted with an important role. They are to meet the bridegroom and his friends and escort them to the banquet hall where he will meet the bride. In the days when there were no telephones or clocks people did a lot a standing around waiting, because if you were going to meet someone, sometimes the best you could do would be to agree on a particular day and place. The second thing is that all the young ladies fall asleep.

There was a popular song a few years ago which had the refrain, “live like you were dying”, and the singer went on to describe all the things he did after learning he had a fatal disease, and how glad he was that this had happened, because he would have never done all those things if he had been going along believing he had an indefinite number of tomorrows. And it's probably good advice. But no one can live like this all the time. When life throws us a huge setback or hurdle, we always adjust, because we like normalcy. No one can stare into the abyss forever. If you go to an assisted living facility and see people who've had strokes or lost limbs, They have adjusted to a new normal.

So even though our young ladies were anticipating meeting the bridegroom and the big party, they couldn't keep their senses heightened all the time, and they fell asleep.

When they hear the bridegroom and his friends coming, the rest of the story unfolds; the foolish ones run out of oil and go off to the village to buy more and they miss the party. The wise ones, having brought extra oil, fulfill their mission and join in the wedding feast.

Jesus tells us to be prepared, we don't know the day nor the hour, and this isn't the only time he says this. In fact it seems like Jesus says this or something like this a lot. And he is really talking about living in the present, I think. When I resented people stealing my time, I wasn't living in the present; I was living in a vague future where I would be doing something better with my time, something more worthwhile. And when someone is filling every moment with a list of planned tasks, she is not living in the present either, but looking forward to a time when all the tasks are done, and of course they never will be.

When the ten young ladies woke up, five were prepared for what they were there for, and five were not. You and I can't always be awake; we do have people and things that use up our time, so how can we learn to live in the present, to be where God himself is? God is not in the future or the past, but in the eternal now. So how do we keep our focus on the present? The monks of the desert had a lot of tricks. Each day was marked with certain prayers; at night some might sleep in the coffin in which they planned to be buried. The day had place markers as did the week,, the month, the year. Our church year beginning with the first Sunday of Advent helps us focus. But we need more than a Sunday mass. If we really want to be alert, we need to have a daily prayer life. Our first thoughts should be greeting Our Lord in something like a morning offering. When we sit down to eat, we should pause and bring our minds to God, who ultimately is the one who feeds us. Somewhere in the day, we should take ten minutes at the bare minimum to speak to Him in silence and without being disturbed, and longer is better. Towards the end of the day we should look back and try to see where God might have touched us, and where we might have done something that we could have done better. They say an unexamined life is not worth living; do we examine our lives every day? And finally, at the end of the day, we should give thanks. And don't forget the rosary. Even if you can't say a whole rosary, say a little bit of it. Think about one of the mysteries and say an Our Father, ten Hail Mary's and a Glory Be. You are saying the same prayer that many of the great saints prayed. Padre Pio called the rosary his weapon, and when he wanted something from God, he would use his rosary.

How is your prayer life? Could it be better? If you don't have regular times for prayer, even short prayer, please start today. I promise you that your life will change.

If we develop a prayer life, you can be sure we won't be caught off guard. We will have the oil we need when the bridegroom comes.

Thirty first Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 23:1 - 12

In the gospel we just heard, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of not doing what they were teaching, of laying heavy burdens on the people, showing off their status by how they dressed, and loving titles of honor given by people. In other words, hypocrites.

Matthew, of course, was composing his gospel at about the time Christians and Jews no longer recognized that they had a common faith. Christians had been kicked out of the synagogues and had to form their own churches. They had a new form of worship, the Eucharist; and they were rapidly developing an organizational structure. Christianity had become a distinct religion. But the Jews were not sitting still either. Their temple had been destroyed. Leadership now devolved to the Pharisees, because the leadership role of the priesthood could not exist without the temple. The Pharisees, now beginning to be called “Rabbi” took it upon themselves to refine and develop a new Jewish faith, the ancestor of the faith Jews practice today. It's a little known fact that modern Judaism is not quite as old as Christianity, and that the Jews of Jesus time would not recognize it.

The Pharisees were probably mostly good guys. They cared about their faith, they tried to live it, they preached it and taught it. When Matthew recalls these words of Jesus, he places them in a context where we could assume that Jesus is condemning the Pharisees, whereas it's probably Matthew who is doing the condemning.

Some of you may have heard about Father Thomas Weinandy, a brilliant theologian and the chief advisor to the United States Conference of Bishops on matters of doctrine. He wrote a letter to the pope and published it. He had several criticisms. The pope often teaches in a way that seems to be deliberately unclear. The pope seems to mock those who uphold traditional church teaching on marriage, referring to them as “Pharasaic stone throwers who embody a merciless rigorism”. The pope has appointed some bishops who support and defend views counter to Catholic teaching. The pope is pushing to weaken church unity by encouraging a more “synodal” governing structure, where local conferences of bishops make more decisions about litugy, among other things. The pope resents criticism of his pontificate and has moved to silence more than one critical voice. After the publication of his letter, Father Weinandy was asked to resign from his position with the United States Confence of Bishops, perhaps proving his point.

Father Weinandy did not just issue criticisms; he gave examples. He starts and ends his letter with heartfelt pledges of loyalty; he has no intention of leaving the church. I urge you to find a copy of the letter on line and read it.

Why do I bring this up? It seems to me that this priest who has devoted his whole life to studying theology, advising bishops, and writing books clarifying the truths of the Catholic faith is crying out to the Pope, “If you don't care about these things, then what will happen to the Church, which is supposed to speak for Christ on earth, which has spent two thousand years trying to steer a careful path between those who want no change, like the Pius X Catholics who think only the Tridentine mass is valid; and those who want the Church to get with the times and abandon opposition to same sex marriage, to abortion, and to other doctrines that seem out of place today.

I think the same thing is going on in the early Church, and that is reflected in the gospel today. Our ancestors, Jews and Christians both, were asking, “What do we do about the Law? On the one hand, it has kept our people together through persecution and enslavement and our tradition says that it comes from God himself. On the other hand, isn't it time we started thinking critically about the Law.. After all, some things just don't make sense anymore.

So what is the lesson for you and I? After all, Jesus isn't just doing another rant about the Pharisees. He is saying, the law is important – do as they say, because they know the law of Moses – that's what sitting on Moses seat means. But at the same time, remember you really only have one teacher, God the Father who speaks through His Son. Authority does not come about because of titles or garments or even having the ability to force or coerce people into doing something they don't want to do – of which Jesus accuses the Pharisees.

So Father Weinandy seems to be a humble man concerned about things happening in the Church. Pope Francis seems to be a humble man who is trying to push the Church in a direction that he thinks is more pastoral and more relevant to the people it serves. And they now are at odds with each other even though they both try to follow the same Lord.

And that's the point I think Jesus is making – for the Pharisees, for the Apostles, for Father Weinandy, even for the Pope. He who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted. Sometimes being humble means that you really believe something but you know that you could be wrong; and sometimes it means that you really believe you have to correct your brother, who seems to be off the rails, even at great personal cost.

Today we should look at ourselves. I know I have some of those characteristics Jesus identifies in the Pharisees. And the opposite of those characteristics is humility, which is not the same as being a doormat. Humility goes hand in hand with integrity – perhaps they are the same thing. And humility is one of those virtues we can develop in ourselves.

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 22:34-40

We are all familiar with this short gospel; some of us could probably recite it by heart. But it's interesting to see how Mark, Luke and Matthew deal with this same saying of Jesus. For Mark, Jesus has just given an answer that everyone approves of, and in that context a teacher of the law asks Jesus which is the most important commandment – a straightforward question. In Luke, a man asks Jesus what must he do to be saved, and Jesus asks him how he reads the law, and he answers with these words, which introduce the parable of the Good Samaritan. In Matthew's account, which we've just heard, it says, “a scholar of the law tested him”. Last Sunday, of course, Jesus' opponents came to him with a coin showing the head of Caesar and asked about the census tax – and it says they did this to test him. Same word. So the testing of Jesus continues.

The scholar of the law undoubtedly had in mind the 613 laws that were supposed to have been handed down by Moses. There were two ways to answer his question. One was to say they are all equally important, because that was the official position of the Pharisees, who strove to keep all these commandments. On the other hand, there were several other schools of thought which argued that some laws were more important than others. If you lived in Rome, for example, you couldn't keep any of the laws having to do with sacrifice and temple worship, because you couldn't get to the temple, and the leaders of those congregations believed some laws were more important than others. And the Sadduccees and Essenes and Zealots and other parties all emphasized different laws. Jesus could not give any answer without offending someone.

But again, he calls their attention to the prayer that every good Jew recited every day, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One. You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, mind and strength”. That wasn't even counted among the 630 laws; it was sort of self-evident. Had Jesus stopped there, I suspect his listeners would have concluded that he had won the argument. But he went on to say, “the second is like it”. In other words, this next commandment, which actually was one of the 630 and came from the book of Leviticus, was being elevated by Jesus to the rank of number 2 instead of being there along with not boiling a kid in it's mother's milk and leaving some grain on the stalks so that poor people could come through and harvest a little for themselves. And the third thing is that Jesus doesn't just stop at loving your neighbor, he adds, as yourself, which wasn't in the Leviticus commandment.

So Jesus is actually giving a new teaching, and he goes on to identify these two commandments as the bedrock of everything that had ever been said by Moses, by the prophets, by all the teachers of Israel.

Perhaps we should ask what does it mean to love ourselves, or love our neighbor? We aren't talking about feelings of course. To Jesus, love consists of desiring that the object of your love reach his or her potential and being willing to do something about it. A starving person can't achieve his potential without at least being fed. To love your neighbor might mean to feed him. And I can't reach my potential if I am captive to any number of slaveries – like addiction, like detrimental habits like wasting time, procrastination, gossip, painful sarcasm, making excuses for myself. To love myself means that I recognize where I am not meeting the mark and do something about it. That is usually hard, because it involves change, and we have spent our lives telling ourselves why we can't change.

But loving God is another story. We can't desire that God reach his potential; he's there. No room for improvement. Communicating with God through prayer and keeping his commandments is certainly part of loving God, although one could argue that it's in our best interest to do these things and whether praying and keeping God's commandments springs from love or fear doesn't matter, so long as we do these things. But I think loving God means first of all, appreciating His creation as a reflection of Him, and part of his creation is of course, you and I. Second, it means taking seriously the Lord's prayer, in which we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. In heaven there is no poverty, no estrangement, no prejudice, no war and in fact no sickness or death. When we are striving to align our world with heaven, we are loving God by bringing the world closer to its ultimate goal. Third, loving God means making a priority of the work we were given at baptism, to become more and more His son or daughter, to become more and more like Christ, like Mary, like the great saints – you pick one and model your life after that person, because the Church has held that person up as a model for you, someone who lived a life in imitation of Christ.

Loving God, as I think you can see, fits the definition of love – we can't hope that God will achieve his potential, but we can hope that his creation does, and then we do something about it consciously and making our effort a priority.

So Jesus' commandment is in a way, really just one commandment. You can't love God without loving your neighbor and loving yourself.

Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 22:15 – 21

There was a woman sitting on the beach sunbathing. A little boy came up to her and asked, “Do you go to church?” She said she did. A minute later, he said, “Do you read the Bible?” She replied that she read some every day. A few minutes later he asked, “Do you pray every day?” She replied, yes, and often more than once. The little boy was silent for a while, then said, “I guess I can trust you to hold my quarter while I go in the water?” It's hard to find jokes about coins. But don't worry, the joke has nothing to do with today's gospel.

Separation of Church and State. Religion doesn't belong in the public square. You can believe anything you want, as long as you are sincere and don't bother other people with your beliefs. I suspect these and many other ideas about the proper spheres of religion and politics, or perhaps religion and everything else, can be read into the words of Jesus: “Repay to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's”. It's interesting that during most of human history no one would have separated Church and State. In fact, in this year in which the world celebrates the 500^th anniversary of the Protestant reformation, it's not very widely known that Martin Luther was probably the first Christian to use these words of Jesus to proclaim that the State and the Church should be separate and independent of each other. Luther knew that as long as the people had to follow the religion of their ruler, there would be little hope for his reformation to take place. And even in the 19^th century, Pope Pius X's syllabus of errors, a list of things that he felt were not compatible with the Catholic faith, insisted that it was an error to say that a Catholic country should allow freedom of religion. And of course any Muslim majority country would laugh at this interpretation.

Jesus probably would have as well. Let's look at the story. The Jews didn't like taxes any more than anyone else, but most of them paid them, and their leaders didn't say they couldn't. After all, when the tax man came around with a few soldiers you didn't have much choice, and the rulers knew that there was only a certain amount you could extract from the population before you had open rebellion, so the system sort of worked, and a lot of the tax money did go to things that directly or indirectly benefitted the population – roads, irrigation systems, a standing army that kept the peace.

The problem was the census tax, or as the Greek has it, the tribute tax. If you were a male, you had to find a way to get a denarius – a specific coin worth about a day's wage, and you would bring that to the tax man who would write your name in his book. This was how every male in the Roman empire showed that he honored Caesar – and for the Jews, it was triple humiliation; – they had to pretend to honor someone who oppressed them and had taken away their independence; they had to do it with a coin containing a graven image and the words “Caesar Augustus, son of God” which was blasphemy through and through, and they had to take part in a census, knowing that this was forbidden by Mosaic law. Obviously the pharisees and herodians meant to trap Jesus, but they weren't asking about the morality of taxes or talking about the separation of Church and State.

Jesus answer, clever as it was, was not just clever. It was designed to make you think. What belongs to Caesar? Anyone who lives in a nation or state owes a minimum to that state. Obeying the law, paying taxes and voting come to mind. All Christians should be involved in politics but some are called to be much more involved than others; being a politician is a vocation, just like being a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman.

More importantly, what belongs to God? The Jewish answer, like the Christian answer, is everything. But in Jewish law, it was as though human beings could own things, could behave as though things belonged to them. So in Jewish law it is carefully spelled out what people owe to God. Everyone owes God one day a week, the Sabbath. Everyone is called to tithe, and in Leviticus how much you tithed of different things is spelled out in detail. And of course there are those called to give God more. Recall the rich young man that Jesus told to give up everything and follow him. Jesus did not make that request of many people, just a few. And in the Old Testament, the same could be said of the patriarchs and prophets – people who were called to give more to God than the rest.

The Pharisees and Herodians had been arguing over whether or not it was possible for a good Jew to pay the tribute tax. Some said it was totally against Jewish law, and other said paying it was the best way to go along and get along; after all, to not pay it might mean your life. But Jesus is saying, as he has said so often, the Sabbath belongs to man, not man to the Sabbath. The real issue is what you owe your political community, and what you owe God. Because if you want to follow Jesus, there are only two things that matter; how you love God and how you love your neighbor. Give to God what is God's, and give to Caesar what is Caesar's.

So perhaps rather than dividing the world into that which belongs to Caesar and that which belongs to God, the secular and the sacred, a division that leads to disharmony and forcing us to take sides, we should rather ask on this Sunday, how are we being good citizens? And should we do more? And how are we being good Christians? And should we do more? These are not opposites, they in fact often go hand in hand.

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 22:1-14

There was a little church in the poor part of town whose members didn't have much but very loving. A new family moved into the neighborhood and it was apparent that they had threadbare patched up clothing, so the pastor asked the congregation to have a clothing drive to help out the family. And they did. With smiles and well wishes, they presented the almost new clothing to the family, with the invitation that they would be welcome at the little church. The father of the family assured the membership that they would be there. The next Sunday came and went, and the Sunday after that. Finally the pastor went to the father and said, “you certainly don't have to come to our church, but I thought you were going to when we talked.” The father replied, “Well, we were, but when we got all cleaned up and dressed in those clothes, we decided we'd be more comfortable with the Episcopalians.”

This is the third parable Jesus addresses to the chief priests and elders. Two weeks ago it was the two sons; last week it was the tenants of the vineyard who refuse to give the owner what is rightfully his; and then we come to this week. And again, it's easy to read this as still another place where Jesus says, “You Jews had your chance! I'm going to hand over the kingdom to the gentiles!”

But before we jump to that, a little background. The king is planning a wedding feast for his son. Only the best people are invited. The king has told all the A-list upper class high society people that the feast will take place on a particular day, and they should hold the date. And the date comes, and he sends out his servants to invite the guests. So far, so good. Everyone listening to Jesus knew about those kind of parties. Probably none of them had ever been invited to one, though. And they had all heard this comparison before – there is more than one description of God's kingdom as a wedding banquet, or at least a banquet, in the Hebrew scriptures. And while it helped to be Jewish to be invited, it was no guarantee; you had to also be a righteous person.

Then Jesus starts to expand a bit. People are turning the king down! And for stupid reasons. The social event of the century, and you have to check out your farm? You can't take the day off? And of course even more shocking is the fact that the king's invitation is met with violence and even murder. Now we could pause here and say, if the king is God, what next? It doesn't sound like God when the king marshals his army and wipes out the city and its inhabitants; it doesn't sound like our God, at least. But put that aside for a minute; Jesus does not imply that the king is God. And the next thing is almost as shocking. The king throws open the banquet to everyone his servants can round up, and finally the banquet hall is full. It doesn't appear that it matters whether you are upper class or lower class, even good or bad – you are invited.

And then those who were listening heard the most shocking statement of all. A man is thrown out, bound hand and foot, because he isn't wearing a wedding garment. They knew that the people who had come to the banquet would have been given a simple white tunic to wear over their clothing – the wedding garment.

Now if you were invited to a wedding today you might have been given a card with your name and assigned seat on it. Lets say you showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, tossed the card on the floor and went up and sat at the head table. You might get thrown out also, and that's kind of what the man in the parable was like.

So what do we make of all this? How does it apply to us? And really, it has nothing to do with the Jews and the Gentiles. Matthew wrote at a time where this division was just beginning, and some communities of Christians still considered themselves to be Jews.

I think it's like this. Jesus is still answering the question, what is the kingdom of heaven like? And he starts with a familiar image – its like a wedding feast; and only the right people are invited, people who had the right status, the right friends, the right amount of money. And it really helped to be a relative of the king.

But Jesus goes on to say that actually, everyone is welcome, good or bad. Everyone is invited to the banquet. So Jesus is saying that there are no preconditions to the invitation; you don't have to pray a certain way or live like a Pharisee, or have Abraham as your ancestor. And you can reject the invitation. If you ignore it, that's up to you. If you actively oppose the kingdom, there will be consequences.

But if you do accept the invitation, you will have to change your life, you will have to, as Saint Paul tells us, “put on Christ”. Every time we baptize someone in our church, he or she puts on a white garment to symbolize this exact thing. The man who was thrown out accepted the invitation but refused to change, refused to be led by the Spirit of Christ.

If we put on Christ, that means that we make a conscious effort to put God first in our lives. Jesus was a man of prayer, and the reason he prayed was to learn what God wanted of him, not to ask God for favors. And his prayers were often prayers of thanksgiving, because he had seen the Father at work in the world. And that should be our goal – to learn what God has in mind for us and to be grateful for what we've been given.

But if we put on Christ that means we make a conscious effort to notice the people who God puts in our path – to notice that they, like us, are beloved of the Father and that Jesus died for them. It's our task to see their need and try to do something about it – and everyone needs something if only a sign of connection and solidarity, like a smile or compliment or a serious inquiry such as “How are you?” And if they haven't heard the invitation to the wedding banquet, we may be the messengers that have been sent out by the king.