Tricia's Sermon for 10/12

As Jesus says in Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them," which means that Jesus had a great time grilling a bunch of pork and chicken in a pit next to the beech grove. I bring this up because I helped with the cooking for Sunday's great barbeque. This also means that I attended the early service which was held outside for us cooks. Tricia's sermon was slightlyi abbreviated (by about 95%), but here is the full text which she delivered at the later service.

The Welcome Table

I begin this morning with a confession.
The story we just read from Matthew’s gospel is probably my least favorite parable in the scriptures. I wish it wasn’t in the Bible. I wish it wasn’t in the lectionary. I wish I could just ignore it and preach on something else, but when something this distasteful is part of our Sunday readings I feel an obligation to not let it go uncommented upon.
This parable is an allegory, a story in which each of the characters stands for someone else; a story that has a wider symbolic meaning. When Matthew wrote his gospel, he was addressing members of the new, and very small, Christian movement.
The followers of Jesus were often persecuted by the religious establishment. They were such a minority that they must have sometimes wondered if following Jesus was the right thing to do, whether it was worth the risks they were taking.
This story must have bolstered their confidence and faith. Surely they would recognize that those who ignored the king’s invitation to the wedding banquet were the religious establishment. The refusal to accept the invitation led to their deaths.
And then who gets invited to the wedding feast? The riff-raff, the nobodies, the people off the street – in other words, the very people to whom Jesus reached out in his ministry.
But all of them are not allowed to stay. The king looks over his assembled guests and notices one who is not dressed properly. “How did you get in here without a robe?” the king demands.
Scripture tells us that the guest is speechless, which is understandable. How could he be expected to dress properly if he just came in – was just invited in -- off the street?
A king who kills those who ignore him and ousts people who are dressed improperly is hardly an appealing image of God. What has happened to the God of love, justice, and inclusivity? That God seems to be absent from this parable.
Obviously this is a story about the battle being waged between the religious establishment and the new radical sect of believers who followed Jesus. And it must have comforted that ragtag group to recognize themselves as the winners in this story.
But there is a big difference between those early Christians who heard this story, and we Christians we hear it today.
The difference is that we are not a ragtag group of nobodies. The difference is that we are the religious establishment.
And as the establishment, the ones in power, it is all too easy for us to hear this story as a justification of our own lack of hospitality, our own mean-spiritedness and hardness of heart.
It is all too easy for us to hear this story as a justification of our divisions of God’s world into those who are in and those who are out; those who are saved and those who are damned; those who are blessed and those who are cursed.
It is all too easy for us to hear this story and see ourselves as the ones who have on the right wedding garments and remain at the table and those others – who are not like us – as the ones who do not have the right garments and who are justifiably cast out.
Hearing the parable this way, it is no longer an allegory of God’s love for those who the world casts aside. Instead, it becomes a parable of inhospitality, cruelty and hatred.
And so we who are the establishment must hear this story in a new way. It must be retold in a way that captures the good news of a God who is, as we hear today from Isaiah, “a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm, and a shade from the heat.”
A God who Isaiah proclaims will “make for all peoples a feast of rich food.” A God who will swallow up death forever.
I recently read another kind of parable, one that captures the spirit of the gospel by twisting the parable of the wedding feast. This parable by Alice Walker, The Welcome Table, is an allegory closer to our own time and place.
The title comes from the words of a spiritual:

“I’m going to sit at the Welcome table,
Shout my troubles over
Walk and talk with Jesus
Tell God how you treat me
One of these days!”

* * *
Hear then, this modern day parable.
The old woman stood with eyes uplifted in her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes: high shoes polished about the tops and toes, a long rusty dress adorned with an old corsage, long withered, and the remnants of an elegant silk scarf as headrag stained with grease from the many oily pigtails underneath. Perhaps she had known suffering…
Some of those who saw her there on the church steps spoke words about her that were hardly fit to be heard, others held their pious peace, and some felt vague stirrings of pity, small and persistent and hazy, as if she were an old collie turned out to die.
Those who knew the hesitant creeping up on them of the law, looked at her and saw the beginning of the end of the sanctuary of Christian worship, saw the desecration of the Holy Church, and saw an invasion of privacy.
She had come down the road toward the big white church alone. Just herself, an old forgetful woman, nearly blind with age. Just her and her eyes raised dully to the glittering cross that crowned the sheer silver steeple.
She had walked along the road in a stagger from her house a half mile away. Perspiration, cold and clammy, stood on her brow. She stopped to calm herself on the wide front steps, not looking about her as they might have expected her to do, but simply standing quite still.
The reverend of the church stopped her pleasantly as she stepped into the vestibule. “Auntie, you know this is not your church?” he said. As if one could choose the wrong one.
But she brushed past him anyway, as if she had been brushing past him all her life, except this time she was in a hurry. Inside the church she sat on the very first bench from the back, gazing with concentration at the stained glass window over her head. It was cold, and she was shivering.
Everyone could see. They stared at her as they came in and sat near the front. It was cold, very cold, to them, too: outside the church it was below freezing and not much above inside. But the sight of her, sitting there somehow passionately ignoring them, brought them up short, burning.
The young usher, never having turned anyone out of his church before, but not even considering this job as that (after all, she had no right to be there, certainly) went up to her and whispered that she should leave.
She did not pay him any attention, just muttered, “Go ‘way,” in a weak, sharp, bothered voice, waving his blond hair and eyes from near her face.
It was the ladies who finally did what had to be done. Daring their burly indecisive husbands to throw the old colored woman out they made their point. God, mother, country, earth, church. It involved all that and well they knew it.
Leather bagged and shoed, with good calfskin gloves to keep out the cold, they looked with contempt at the bloodless gray arthritic hands of the old woman, clenched loosely, restlessly in her lap.
Could their husbands expect them to sit up in church with that? No, no, the husbands were quick to answer and even quicker to do their duty.
Under the old woman’s arms they placed their hard fists. Under the old woman’s arms they raised their fists, flexed their muscular shoulders, and out she flew through the door, back under the cold blue sky.
This done, the wives folded their healthy arms across their trim middles and felt at once justified and scornful.
Inside the church it was warmer. They sang, they prayed. The protection and promise of God’s impartial love grew more desirable as the sermon gathered fury and lashed out above their penitent heads.
* * *
The old woman stood at the top of the steps looking about in bewilderment. She had been singing in her head. They had interrupted her. Promptly she began singing again, though this time a sad song.
Suddenly, however, she looked down the long gray highway and saw something interesting and delightful coming.
She started to grin, toothlessly, with short giggles of joy, jumping about and slapping her hands on her knees.
And soon it was apparent why she was so happy. For coming down the highway at a firm though leisurely pace was Jesus. He was wearing an immaculate white, long dress trimmed in gold around the neck and hem, and a bright red cape. He was wearing sandals and a beard and he had long brown hair parted on the right side. His eyes, brown, had wrinkles around them as if he smiled or looked at the sun a lot.
She would have known him, recognized him, anywhere. There was a sad but joyful look to his face, like a candle was glowing behind it, and he walked with sure steps in her direction, as if he were walking on the sea.
Ecstatically she began to wave her arms for fear he would miss seeing her.
All he said when he got close to her was, “Follow me,” and she bounded down to his side. For every one of his long determined steps she made two quick ones.
They walked along in deep silence for a long time. Finally she started telling him about how many years she had cooked for them, cleaned for them, nursed them. He looked at her kindly but in silence.
She told him indignantly about how they had grabbed her when she was singing in her head and how they had tossed her out of his church. An old heifer like me, she said, straightening up next to Jesus, breathing hard.
But he smiled down at her and she felt better instantly and time just seemed to fly by. When they passed her house, forlorn and sagging, weather-beaten and patched, she did not even notice it, she was so happy to be walking along the highway with Jesus.
She broke the silence once more to tell Jesus how glad she was that he had come, how she had often looked at his picture hanging on her wall above her bed, and how she had never expected to see him down here in person. Jesus gave her one of his beautiful smiles and walked on.
She did not know where they were going; someplace wonderful, she suspected. The ground was like clouds under her feet, and she felt she could walk forever without becoming the least bit tired.
They walked on, looking straight over the treetops into the sky, and the smile that played over her dry, wind-cracked face was like the first clean ripples across a stagnant pond. On they walked without stopping.
* * *
The people in church never knew what happened to the old woman; they never mentioned her to one another or to anybody else. Most of them heard sometime later that an old colored woman fell dead along the highway. Silly as it seemed, it appeared she had walked herself to death.
Many of the black families along the road said they had seen the old lady high-stepping down the highway; sometimes jabbering in a low, insistent voice, sometimes singing, sometimes merely gesturing excitedly with her hands. Other times silent and smiling, looking at the sky. She had been alone, they said.
Some of them wondered aloud where the old woman had been going so stoutly that it had worn out her heart. They guessed maybe she had relatives across the river, some miles away, but none of them really knew.
* * *
I’m going to sit at the Welcome table
Shout my troubles over
Walk and talk with Jesus
Tell God how you treat me
One of these days!