I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 15, 2023 at Saint Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:1-14, one of Jesus’ particularly challenging parables about a wedding banquet and a violent king.
I remember, when I was much younger, how great I thought it would be to drink coffee. You know, my mom would have it at home in the morning, or I would smell it brewing in a coffee shop, and I thought it surely had to be the most delicious thing ever. The fact that I was not allowed to drink it because it was “for grown-ups” probably made it all the more tantalizing. And so I wondered, when would I get to taste this magical drink with its secret power that apparently only adults could handle? My cousins and I would play with a plastic tea party set sometimes, setting out the cups and saucers and sipping on air, and I always imagined that it was coffee in the cup, and I would pretend to drink it in carefully, as if I were imbibing the mysteries of the universe, rich and delicious and sweet.
Then, the day came when I actually tried coffee for the first time. I think it was out of the pump pot in my grandparents kitchen. Nobody was looking, so I got out a cup and watched the steaming dark liquid cascade down and then held it up to my lips, ready to see what the mysteries of the universe actually tasted like.
I promptly spit it out. Whatever I was expecting coffee to be, that weird, bitter brew was not it. I thought, why on earth would anyone willingly drink this?! Grown-ups must be out of their minds! Those empty tea cups with their imaginary sweetness were far preferable to whatever this nastiness was.
Now, of course, that was a long time ago, and some of you know that I am now mildly obsessed with coffee. Like many grown ups, for whatever reason I have come to appreciate its oddly compelling mixture of bitterness and sweetness, the way its flavors can be both bright and deep all at once. Those were not things I was prepared for the first time I tried coffee, but over time, cup by cup, its complexities and paradoxes have become deeply satisfying.
And with apologies to the tea and hot chocolate drinkers out there, I think faith might be a little bit like coffee, for faith, too, necessitates a willingness to embrace complexity and paradox, to savor robust and impenetrable flavors, and to be jolted awake from time to time.
Case in point: our Gospel text this week, where we have quite a bit to wrestle with. As one commentator says, it is a parable that will make anyone trying to interpret it go weak in the knees. We might need a good cup of coffee to tackle this one.
So let’s just acknowledge this up front: if the Kingdom of God is anything like this wedding banquet and this king, I don’t know who on earth would want to be a part of it. The imagery that Jesus uses here seems to fly directly in the face of our understanding of an inclusive, expansive, forgiving, welcoming God. We are troubled by this retaliatory king, his excess and his violence; we are discomfited by the idea of someone thrown into the outer darkness for wearing the wrong garment to a party. That sort of callousness sounds too much like the world we already know, not the one we long for. It’s a bitter cup to swallow.
But one of the things that we must remember when we approach the parables of Jesus is that they are not simple, allegorical fables. They don’t describe heaven, nor do they describe the precise nature of God. They are not a rule book for how to live well. No, the parables are intentionally disturbing, they are acrid on the tongue, because they are meant to wake us up, to make us a bit jittery, to question our assumptions, and, most importantly, to realize that the inbreaking of the good news of God will not be anything like the existing conventions and power structures of this world. Let me say that again: the good news of God will not be anything like the existing conventions and power structures of this world.
And that is indeed good news, because you only need to glance at recent headlines to see that the existing conventions and power structures of this world are incapable of bringing out the peace for which we long. And so, in its own, strange and paradoxical way, there is hope in this disturbing parable, hope in the notion that the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with the worn out systems of patronage and privilege where all the usual faces are invited to the banquet.
On the contrary, in this parable, the Kingdom is a feast that nobody really wants to attend, because it is as dangerous as it is desirable, as costly as it is dazzling. The stakes are uncomfortably high, and the risks are just as great as the rewards.
And then you look again at those news headlines, and you think about what it means to actually live in this world and be present to it—its pleasures and its pain, its beauty and its terror—and you begin to realize: the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks, the feast in which we tremble to take part—is simply the real world, the world where we stop playing pretend, where God abides and calls us to risk everything for the sake of love. It is the world we discover when we grow up and stop sipping on air and begin to taste the deep, dark, bittersweet mystery of life as it actually is, not as we imagined it to be.
Later this morning, we will baptize baby Lydia, and of the many ways that we can speak about baptism, one of the ways that I often think about it is this: it is to be initiated into reality. It is so easy to spend our lives under a cloud of delusion and daydreams, hiding from the truth about ourselves and our world.
But God says, no, I desire that you would truly live, that you would truly look upon this world and learn how to love it, even in its brokenness, and so by water and the indwelling of my Spirit, I awaken you. I enmesh you in my love. I incorporate you into my accountability for the well-being of all things. I give you the bitter cup of which I myself have drunk, the cup of life, by which all illusion dies and by which your soul will burn with the fire of the eternal stars. This is my gift, God says: to make you as real and as alive as I am, marked as Christ’s own forever.
It is terrifying, wondrous, beautiful thing, to be baptized. It is a terrifying, wondrous, beautiful thing to be truly alive. To be guided and shaped by the requirements of love. To be drawn out into the complexities and paradoxes where God is at work, to do what we can, while we can, as best we can.
It is like a banquet that, if one were to truly count the cost, nobody would want to attend.
But it is also the only choice we have, if we wish to be truly part of this world. For the cities still burn, and the kings still rage, and the feast is still costly, but the Kingdom of Heaven is like the one who says: I will put on a garment of compassion and I will attend anyway.
So fill up my cup. I am ready to live.
By Another Road 