[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to the collective table, where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice, and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: My name is Janelle. I am one of the pastors here.
A few of you have asked about how Jason's doing, so he's actually at a conference this morning, thanks to Dr. Tina.
We have a member here who has a direct primary care as a doctor, and she reached out to Jason and said, how are you doing at like seven in the morning a few days ago? And he said, terrible. And she said, I'm coming over with my bag and my mask. And sure enough, he had pneumonia. So thank you, Dr. Tina.
And now he's well enough to be at his conference today. So you have me.
Yay. Thank you. Thank you.
So over the past few months, we have been working on learning about what it means for this community to set collective tables. And this series has played out on Sunday mornings and as well as in our podcast for those of you who listen to it. And then some of your small groups are even chatting about a few themes, themes like self, work, community engagement, or what's happening outside in our world and how we deal with that when there's time to work and fight and when it's time to settle back and take care of ourselves.
And today we are going to finish this by taking a look at the parable of the great feast, which Claire read to you. But if you are like me, either you showed up late or with all that was happening, you might go, like, what did that say again? So I'm going to give you a little bit of a recap. So we see in Luke that Jesus tells a parable about a man who is hosting a banquet and sends out a servant who invites all of the regular guests and says, the party's ready, come on over. And they all have a lot of excuses.
So this makes the host a little angry. In fact, in the passage we see quite angry.
Everything's cooked, everything's ready. The fatted calf has been slaughtered. And so he says, go out into the roads and take. Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind servant brings them all back because they've all said yes for this invitation and the house is still not full. So we see them going back out into the highways and the hedges and bringing in More people into this house for the party.
Okay? So as progressive Christians, I can say, we're done. You guys can go home. This is. This is. This is the verse, right? We go out into the highways and the hedges. We want the marginalized to all be loved and feel the love of God and be cared for. So that's it.
However, I think if we want to be intellectually honest, we also need to realize that Matthew and Matthew 22:1 14 tells the same parable but a little differently.
And so, again, in the. Just for the sake of time, I'm not going to read the entire passage to you, but if you would like to look it up, it's Matthew 22:1 14. And so I'm going to go over the differences.
Okay? So in Matthew's version, the host is not just a man, it's a king.
And the dinner party isn't just a dinner party. It's a wedding feast.
In Matthew's version of this parable, the king's servants are met with violence. So the invitees get two opportunities to come forward. And the servants, there's multiple in this telling, are met with murder and mayhem and violence. So those poor souls that actually made it through just inviting those people came back to the king and said, they don't want to come. They're killing us off. And so the king is so angry, he sends out troops and destroys the perpetrators of this violence and then says, go out into the main roads and invite everyone.
And then with Matthew's version, we get to get a little peek into the actual party. So we see in the party that the king is there, the party's happening, this big wedding feast, but the king actually sees that one person is not wearing their wedding clothes. And so the king throws them out into the darkness with the gnashing of teeth.
Little different. Okay, so as progressive Christians, we're like, hell, no, no, no, no. Is that what this is talking about? Gnashing of teeth?
So if we're going to really take a look at this, we have to put these two parables that are, in fact, by most scholars, agree, the same parable taken from the same source material, but really used in a different way for a different audience and at a different time.
So maybe we should pray before we get into taking a look at these two tellings of the same parable side by side and seeing what we can learn for today.
Well, God, we've already been here and been doing a lot this morning, and we love your heart for those that are in the highways and the Hedges, help us to understand this ancient text and come to some conclusions about how we understand your expansive love at this time in this place.
In Jesus name, amen.
Okay, so I've told a lot of you that I grew up in a pretty conservative fundamentalist church.
So I was actually taught that much like the spirit of God came over Mary and created the Christ child, that the spirit of God came over every man we know. Now it wasn't always men, but every man who wrote, wrote every word in the Bible that in like a trance like state that God's words were written on the page.
So when I got to middle school I really started to read these things and I would go to my 22 year old youth pastor and say, okay, if God wrote everything, why are these different? These don't seem like the same thing. Whether it was this something in the Gospels where we would see multiple perspectives and different outcomes, or if it was Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, it's like these don't seem like, they seem like they're saying very different things. And this is where my sweet 22 year old youth pastor would say, well that's where faith comes in.
You just have to have faith and humility that you just don't understand.
Well, I didn't really like that answer.
And so I'm sitting here today because we are not fundamentalists.
I arrived through my Christian faith at a place where I thought God was really seen in the telling and the hearing of different perspectives and different stories. So as a spiritual director, I'm very lucky that I get to hear all of your stories about how many of you are experiencing God. And that gives me about better picture of who God is.
The ancient Jewish and Christian ways of understanding scripture was never ever, ever about rigid literalism.
It was about discovering the heart of God through engagement, reflection and debate. In Judaism they call it the midrash.
It was a time of looking at scripture, looking at what is everybody's perspective, understanding history and doing a real study around it. It's a lot of work and at some point around the early 1900s, we started seeing this idea of fundamentalism come into play where we could just say that there were really easy answers like you just don't understand, have faith.
So I think we need to get back and here at this church we believe in grappling with the text and getting back to this idea of really listening, putting these verses side by side and trying to see what we can understand from God.
So let's talk a little bit about maybe what we See, in these two passages, Matthew's Gospel was likely written first during a time of tension and persecution for Jewish Christians. Matthew's telling focused specifically on one group of people, the Hebrew people.
And they were in the midst of a lot of violence and longing for a king of justice.
Matthew in this passage uses insider language, cultural Jewish representations, and a promise of judgment.
So that's what we see in that space. It's for a very specific group of people.
By the time we get to the Gospel of Luke, it was written a little bit later on, and it was when the Jesus movement of that time had expanded. It's right before Acts when we're going to start to see all kinds of people experiencing the power of God that were not strictly Hebrew or Jewish.
Christ's message. I imagine that the writer of Luke is rubbing shoulders with people that he had not known before, and he's seeing God working in these folks. And so we're seeing a kinder, gentler telling of Jesus's parable.
Luke's audience was more diverse, and we just see this broader imagination in Luke's telling for who belonged at God's table.
So one of the things I have to say that I kind of geeked out on, that I'm really loving about this is from Matthew's writing to the years later in Luke's writing, we're actually seeing this story played out. Matthew was seeing for his people. That's where his imagination of God's love stood.
Luke is seeing highways and hedges. Luke is seeing the poor, the crippled, who were previously thought to be the cursed, the not blessed.
And so we're seeing that the table in this time in history is in fact enlarging in these two passages.
Same passages, same source material and enlarged table.
The other thing that I think we see in these two passages that are very similar is that there's a danger in complacency.
In both Matthew and Luke, we see an angry host frustrated by the privilege and complacency of the original invitees.
These are guests that are caught up in their own lives. They're satisfied with the status quo. They're not hungry for the feast that has been prepared.
One of the things that we talked about in a podcast and in several sermons was understanding your role within your Christian faith. What job do you have to help move forward the love of God and make sure that people knew that they were cared for, that they were loved. So whether you were on queer calm or injustice works or we can't do it all, but we need to do something and I can tell you that my role, I know one of my roles is going to city council meetings and working with Esther. But when Larry, the head of our Justice Works team, writes an email that says, hey, we need you to show up to the four hour long meeting and there's a bowl of lasagna and some Netflix waiting for me, my complacency is calling.
I do not want to accept that invitation. I will really scroll Netflix. I won't even know what to watch. And then I'll complain there's nothing to watch, and then I'll feel kind of sick from the cheesy food that I just ate. But somehow the work complacency calls us.
And so I think we can absolutely see ourselves in those first and original invitees as much as we can see ourselves or some of us on the margins.
Refusal to step outside of our privilege and participate in God's transformative work removes us from knowing God in a more tangible way. It keeps us from making sure that we're at the feast.
The other thing that we see in both of these passages is a call to radical transformation.
So both of these tellings of this parable, the original invitees are not who ends up on the guest list. We see a very transformed guest list.
We have this neighborhood that is, I often say, like a 1950s neighborhood. We've watched our kids grow up together. And we have this great group of friends, Jason and I, and most of our friends, like, they invite the neighborhood friends.
It's a party. We know everybody. They know our kids. We don't have to give the whole backstory. It's very comfortable, it's fun, it's easy. And we have this one friend, Lola. Lola, if you're watching Lola, Lola loves to throw a party. And she invites everybody, all of her worlds, not just her neighborhood, from work, the person she met at the Starbucks, the lady that she had conversation with at the Trader Joe's. They're all invited. And so, you know, it's kind of like, are we going to go to Lola's party? Like, I think I need to get a new outfit. I think I need to put on my best, because we're going to see a whole bunch of people we've never met.
Understanding what accepting God's invitation means is important. When you head to a feast given by the great God, you are going to see all kinds of people that look different than you, that act differently than you are, from different tribes, from different nations, from different places. You are not going to be comfortable. You are not going to know them all. The person sitting next to you is not going to be just like you.
And I also want to kind of get to Matthew. And this kind of detail that we see at the end of this passage that you're all like, this is the one. The progressive church attendee in me is not comfortable with this idea that Matthew.
In Matthew, that the king throws out somebody not wearing wedding clothes.
Okay? So I did a little bit. I'm going to admit, I did a little bit of a deep dive into near east fashion.
And let me tell you about the wedding garments. So a wedding garment was something that would have been worn as a sign that you were happy that the couple was getting married. It would be. So you would. If you didn't have that special wedding garment, you would be provided one at door. So no person would not be able to walk in and make sure that they were dressed in a wedding garment.
I don't know if many of you have been to a synagogue, but it's much like in a synagogue, when you enter into the foyer, there's a basket of kippas or yarmulkes.
So there's some.
I've spent a lot of time in the Jewish world because I was ahead of a Jewish retirement community. So there are some folks that they have their great, great, great grandfather's kippah, and they wear it and they zoom right into the worship space. There's others that are like, oh, shoot, I forgot my yarmulke. So they grab one out of the basket and there's a third group of people, and that's all of the guys who were invited that aren't Jewish. Maybe it's to a memorial or to some kind of service. And if you're a man and you go to a Jewish synagogue, you should be putting on that yarmulke before you enter into the place of worship. Why? Because it shows that you are safe to that community.
Wedding clothes were a sign that you are not going to harm or have war against the community that you would be entering in. So maybe the king throwing that person out because that person was very dangerous to his guests may give us a little bit of a different idea of what that passage might be about.
I can tell you that we have an open table here.
However, if we find a guest to be dangerous to our other guests, they will be asked to leave.
So there is this bit that I actually appreciate in Matthew's Gospel.
It's an important picture that God's grace does not just invite us to a feast.
It's going to change us. It's going to call us to be a safe person for. For others at the party. Accepting God's invitation is being willing to let go of our old selves, our angry selves, our dangerous selves, and put on our garments of grace.
I think the other thing that we see is it's really hard to comprehend because we don't always know what we don't know how far, how vast God's love extends.
We just don't know. I would not have imagined that we would be considering transgendered Day of Remembrance.
When I was 11 and going to church, I honestly didn't know that there was that group of people that was. That God deeply loved. I just didn't know.
And so I'd like to provide a bible verse, Romans 1:20. It's one of my favorites.
We'll see. I think it's going to come up for you. For his. For God's invisible attributes, that is his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen since the creation of the world being understood through what he has made. I love this because I'm like, I call it what the natural. Speaking of the invisible.
And in this case, I wanted to put forward to you that I believe that the universe itself provides a beautiful physical representation of these parables that we just read.
Scientists tell us that the universe is always expanding. Its boundaries are every minute stretching outward, revealing more stars, more galaxies. But it wasn't until 1929, right around when this building was built, y'all. It wasn't until 1929 that we learned that this was true. We just thought it was one bit. We didn't know it was growing. We didn't know what we didn't know. Matthew and Luke didn't know what they didn't know that we would be here today saying, oh, there's an extending table. God is actually always extending an invitation, always revealing a new group of people that God has always loved. But we didn't know that we needed to love. We didn't know that God loved. And so we have to say, grow our hearts for these new people, that they're not new, they've always been there, and God's always loved them. They're just new to us, Right?
So what does this really mean for us? How do we continue to expand our hearts at osc Well, I believe it looks like what we did today.
It looks like hearing the stories of our transgendered siblings and pulling up a seat of love and belonging and justice and saying, have a seat at God's table. With me. I'm safe. I have on my clothes of grace.
It means doing what we did yesterday, which is inviting food insecure seniors for a lunch. And we have a couple of pictures here.
One more, I think of our volunteers working their little rears off. So, so it's saying, you know, we have this group of seniors who picks up food a couple of times a month and we could just give them a box of food and they could go back home and eat by themselves. But we don't know that they're all getting a Thanksgiving dinner. So let's have a party.
Let's get them all together and not only take care of a lunch, but also of their social needs.
It means keeping our ears to the ground, looking at setting aside our privilege and embracing the growing transformative work of God.
It means continuing to listen to other stories that are maybe different than ours and believing those stories and then telling our own stories about who God is to us.
Just as the universe expands far beyond what we can imagine, so does God's table.
To the God whose love continues to reveal and expand our hearts.
For those that you love.
Thank you.
Our hearts expanding can be hard. It can be painful. It can show us, God, that we don't always have the best of others in mind.
Where the faith and the humility come in. God, letting you do that work, in us apologizing, doing better.
Thank you. That you are continuing to grow us and continuing to allow us to love others.
In your name we pray. Amen.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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