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VOICES OF THE UNINVITED John M. Buchanan
Matthew 22:1-10 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
October 14, 1984 Columbus, Ohio

Queen Elizabeth II visited Lexington, Kentucky last week and nobody refused
an invitation to dinner. In fact, the dinners and teas were small. Invitations were
treasured. Guest lists were carefully prepared and painfully reduced. No one
sent regrets when the Queen came to Lexington.

But that's exactly what happened in a parable Jesus told one time about
a king who invited people to a banquet to celebrate his son's marriage. People
being people, and royalty being royalty, one would assume that the announcement
that the king was having a grand dinner party would set off the same hoping and
anticipating and social excitement that the news told us was epidemic in Blue
Grass country last week. Not so. These guests wouldn't come. The king sent
another invitation. They were too busy, they said, and treated the king's messenger
rudely at the same time. And so the king has these ungracious and unresponsive
guests destroyed, and then does an incredible thing - opens the gates to the great
hall and invites in the street people, whoever happened to be walking by. The
uninvited came to the banquet and were welcomed by the king.

Throughout the First Gospel Jesus is engaged in a series of running verbal
skirmishes with the religious authorities on the topic of who is in God's kingdom
and who isn't. The Scribes and Pharisees were scandalized by his openness, by
his view that God was most interested in the unwanted, the outsiders. They were
offended by his refusal to play by the accepted rules of society. He kept associating
with, eating with, living with people who were not up to their standards! This
story uses one of their favorite images of God's kingdom...the banquet table. It
is a rich Hebrew metaphor. In Isaiah 25, God's promise to his people is expressed
in wonderful images of a generous and very happy feast with a table laden with
good food and drink. Jesus takes that powerful metaphor, turns it inside out,
has the proper, invited guests miss the feast because of their own boorishness,
and fills the hall with anyone who happens to be walking by.

That kind of thing got him in trouble. Clearly one of the most consistent
motifs in his life, was his inclusiveness or his unwillingness to abide by the exclusive
structures in his society. He said and did the unthinkable - everytime he ate with
the unclean, spent time with fishermen and tax collectors, talked with a prostitute.
Jesus crossed the barriers his society had set in place to exclude people, and the
early church at its best followed his example, tearing down walls which separated
Jew from Greek, slave from free person, man from woman. "AIl" they learned

\to say “are one in Christ."

Christian baptism was originally a radical, revolutionary practice because
it did not differentiate between men and women, male babies and female babies.
The older Jewish rite of entrance and covenant, circumcision, was for males,
Baptism paid no attention to gender and the Gospel, from the beginning has: been
strongly inclusive, egalitarian and in judgment of every societal structure which
isnot. Christians are not and cannot be very comfortable with any form of exclusiv-
ism.

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On the other hand the text is very encouraging to those who understand
themselves to be on the outside generally looking in. The most vigorously debated
theology of the day is being written from the point of view of the outsiders. It
is called Liberation Theology, and it has a distinct Central and South American

. flavor to it. Instead of the cerebral texts written at Yale, Harvard and Chicago,

Liberation Theology is done from the bottom up, in base communities, small groups
of peasant Christians, who meet together and with startling honesty use the words
of scripture as a way to understand their own lives. They are the poor, the disen-
franchised, the oppressed, the victims who have no power, no voice. When the
parable is read at a secret base community meeting in Central America, the people
know who the invited guests who don't show up are. And they know themselves
to be the uninvited who end up welcomed at the king's table, and for them - the
uninvited - the parable is the source of great comfort and hope.

I hear in this text, inspiration for the kind of a city church we are trying
to be. In a recent Christian Century the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey,
wrote, "The city reflects the wide variety of human experience - a variety of
race, national background and life style. Building a cohesive community out of
that diversity is a primary urban need which the church, simply by being there,
helps to meet." I thought of that observation as I watched the wonderful diversity
of the people who came to the opening of the art exhibit here Wednesday evening.
If God's kingdom is as diverse and inclusive as Jesus taught that it was, gatherings
like that point to it, testify to it and celebrate its brief appearance rather eloquent-
ly, I think. The Bishop observed: "In the city, the church's presence as a universal
community proclaims the kingdom of God, made up of people who come from
all four corners of the earth, as well as the least of these, our brothers and sisters."
(Christian Century, September 12-19, 1984, p. 829-830, John Shelby Sprung, "The
Urban Church, Symbol and Reality")

The text asks us to be here, I believe, with our doors open to the street,
and our arms ~ God's arms ~- wide open to any who would enter.

The text asks an accounting, I believe, of the church on the topic of inclusive-
ness. Now that is neither an easy nor a popular subject. Anthropologists teach
us that the "tribe" is a common, historic and necessary structure of civilization.
The tribe by nature is exclusive and tells the individuals in it who they are by
drawing a circle, or building a wall around them. Tribes give a sense of identity
with shared stories and rituals and customs. Tribal behavior is expressed at family
reunions when the old stories begin, and by fraternities and sororities. The "tribe"
exists at high school pep rallies, Ohio State football games, and Olympic crowds
chanting "USA, USA." Sometimes the church becomes tribe. When belligerent
Protestants and angry Roman Catholics participate in the weekend parades in
the streets of Derry commemorating religious wars three centuries ago, religion
and tribalism are seen in tragic combination. Ordinarily it is neither that overt
nor that intentional. One of the built-in problems with denominations in the United
States is that they become exclusive - sociologically, economically, sometimes
racially. The text asks us to monitor ourselves always in order to avoid the sin
of exclusivism. It asks the church to do something the church does not find it
easy to do, namely to listen to the voices of those who perceive themselves to
be uninvited and excluded. The issues today are the difficult ones: minorities,

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equal opportunity, affirmative action: women's issues, exclusive/inclusive language,
sexual preference and life style issues, Jesus told a story about God's kingdom
which was radically inclusive. No one was left out whe wanted to be in,

The first word from the parable can be a hard one. To sit here in this sanctu-
ary, most of us safe, secure, comfortable, is to identify with the privileged guests
who don't show - and soon it is to feel guilt about those who we exclude. But
in the middle of my reflection and reading this week I heard another word ~ a
word of grace. Presbyterian author and preacher Frederick Buechner wrote about
an experience everyone has had, or can understand. He had spent a cold and harrow~
ing day in New York and, along the way had been exposed to the rawness and cruelty
of life as it is for the street people on 42nd Street. As the day wore one he longed
to be home - safe, secure, warm. And as he imagined that haven, with the people
he loved most waiting for him, dinner in the oven, a fire in the woodstove, he
began to feel guilty, the same guilt sensitive, middle class Christians feel when
they hear this story. But he reflected: "Warmth. Light. .Peace. Stillness. Love,
That was what I felt. And as I entered that room where they were present, it
seemed to me that wherever these things are found in the world, they should not
be the cause for guilt but treasured, nurtured, sheltered from the darkness that
threatens them." (A Room Called Remember, p. 105)

Perhaps the message here is at least mixed. The parable, after all, is very
good news if you perceive yourself among the uninvited. It is judgment for the
invited guests who didn't show, but it is amazing grace for the ones walking by,
minding their own business, who know they aren't on the select list, but nevertheless
suddehly find themselves guests of honor at the king’s table. One of the mission
priorities of the Presbyterian Church at this time and place, it seems to me, is
to balance those segments of the church which seem to know precisely the names
on the guest list at the heavenly banquet; to remind all that this is a complicated
little vignette the point of which may be lost entirely if we think we know who's
invited and who isn't: who's in and who's out. Maybe - just maybe - the grace
is here for us too. Maybe some of the people on the guest list didn't come because
they didn't think they were good enough. Perhaps some eliminated themselves
from this celebration out of some deep sense that they did not belong at the table
of the king. Perhaps there is more grace here than meets the eye - which is the
way grace often is, '

Our best analysts, our most profound theologians - from St. Paul, St. Augus-
tine, to John Calvin, and Karl Barth have agreed that the basic human dilemma
is an inability to deal with grace. Invited to the banquet as guest, we want to
know that we deserve to be there. We'd like to buy ow own ticket. Our sin is
pride, all those theologians agree, and pride can both make us feel better about
ourselves than we ought, but it can also make us incapable of receiving grace,
love, acceptance. Conversion, the late Paul Tillich taught, is "accepting the fact
that lam accepted by that which is greater than I,"

tT One of our deepest fears is that we will not be acceptable. Sigmund Freud
broke through to new possibilities for mental health when he understoad that feel-
ings of inadequacy and guilt begin with every infant's fear of rejection by parents.
Infants, Freud proposed, are profoundly influenced by losing parental love. It

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was a Swiss psychiatrist, Paul Tournier, who took that basic kernel of Freudianism
and sat it beside what the theologians from St. Paul had been saying about us
and concluded that deep within most of us, perhaps all of us, is that same fear
~ that God, our heavenly parent, will withhold acceptance, security, love. Rejection
. of any kind is one of the most devastating human experiences: the Pro-baseball
player treated without ceremony, the executive pushed upstairs, the professional
whose job is eliminated, the lover jilted, the politician defeated. Perhaps our
basic spiritual dilemma then is not so much that we don’t believe in God, or don't
have time for church, but that we can't comprehend the Good News that we are
accepted, Perhaps our basic dilemma is that we can't comprehend a grace that
amazing, a love that accepting, arms open that wide.

‘Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, who writes very learnedly, in a rare autobi-
ographical note, recalls his own spiritual journey. It began in a small Baptist Church
in Malvern, Pennsylvania. He remembers as a boy singing “Just As I Am" during
the weekly altar call,

-"Though the words may sound lachrymose to many, for me they still convey
a sense of comfort and assurance, Was it really true that I could enter the presence
of the Most High, Just As I Am? If true, that was very good news to an adolescent
who was always being reminded - or so it seemed to me - of my shortcomings
and defects. I was never good at football or basketball. Someone else played
the saxophone better. Most of the girls preferred other guys.

“God accepted me Just As | Am. That was Good News! Years later when
I read Paul Tillich's famous sermon, ‘You Are Accepted,’ I knew exactly what
it meant, and I could hear the melody of the old hymn still humming on in the
back of my mind." (Just As 1 Am, p. 152}

Jesus told a story once about a banquet...and about guests who tragically
missed it, but also about uninvited guests who miraculously, amazingly, wonderfully
found themselves welcomed at the king's table!

There is no more futile task than trying to determine why people come to
church. Only those who don't attend seem to know, and after years of hearing
those reasons, I have respectfully concluded that they are mostly wrong. We don't
come here any longer because it's the thing to do. That day is long over. Nor
do we come to be seen, or because it will help business, And most of us have
grown theologically beyond an image of. God as celestial accountant, keeping a
record of our attendance in the book. Pm.-really not much interested in the project
of inquiring - but I de now know that the reasons are ‘not far from that banquet
table of the king’- at which we do not feel worthy to sit. Ido know now that rejec-
tion of any kind is devastating and that when it comes into life with its almost
unspeakable pain, the Good News of a God - who with open arms accepts us ~
is the most amazing grace. I do know now that the reasons are not far from a
table at which we are welcome, where we are wanted, accepted guests, and a
king who opens the doors to all who would come. I do know now that it has, ultima~
tely to do with grace, and as Buechner wrote it: "Warmth and Light and Peace
and Stiliness and Love and the fact'that wherever they are found in this world
they are to be treasured, nurtured, and sheltered from the darkness that threatens
them.”

To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God's eternal glory in union with
Christ, be the power forever! Amen,