INTRODUCTION
Today is the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, and our theme is “God offers grace to the world – but will we accept it?” The focus is on two well-known biblical stories: the story of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32, and the Parable of the Wedding Banquet in Matthew 22.
In the Exodus story the grace God is about to offer to the Israelites is the Law, the Torah—do they accept it? In the Wedding Banquet parable Jesus is explaining how God offers the even greater grace of the Kingdom to the world, to all of us—do we accept it? What happens to us when we, so often, reject God’s grace? How does God respond to our rejection?
Of course, there are not one, but two elephants in the room today, which I also want to bring into the story. Talking about rejecting God’s grace—which is always for reconciliation and learning to live together, selflessly, in community—there is a terrible rejection of it going on right now in Gaza and Israel, a shocking, devastating conflict.
Then, also, yesterday, the Australian people, we, rejected the Voice to Parliament—really a grace initiative, a great way forward, many of us believed, for our nation, for reconciliation and empowerment for Indigenous people. Obviously the rejection is a blow for many people who had put a big effort and their heart and soul into the campaign. Last night we had a great email from Yes23 National Campaign Director Dean Parkin; I’ll share some words from it with you later in the service.
So, what does happen to us when we, so often, reject God’s grace? And, even more importantly, how does God respond to our rejection? Well, that’s exactly what we’ll talk about in the Refection coming up.
REFLECTION
So, yes, our theme for today: God is always offering amazing grace to the world—but will we accept it? What happens to us when we, so often, reject God’s grace? And, even more importantly, how does God respond to our rejection? As I said in my intro we’re going to track this theme through four stories:
- Exodus 32:1-14, the first part of the Golden Calf story.
- Matthew 22:1-14, the parable of the Wedding Banquet.
- Israel v. Palestine
- The Voice to Parliament
Firstly, the Golden Calf story. I’m sure you know the context: the Exodus, the great escape from slavery in Egypt, led by Moses; God has performed amazing miracles to set the Israelites free. Now they’re at the foot of Mt Sinai, and Moses has been up on the mountain alone, talking to God, receiving the Law, which God writes with his own finger on two tablets of stone. The Law is not just the Ten Commandments, there’s an incredible amount of detail covering virtually every aspect of the people living together in community when they arrive in the Promised Land. I’m sure it didn’t literally fit on the two tablets; in fact the Torah, as it is called in Judaism, spreads throughout most of the four books from Exodus to Numbers—that’s a lot of detail!
Remember what we discussed last week about the Torah, the Law: in Jewish tradition the Torah is understood as “Guidance for living well”, for living the best possible life together in community. And the key part of the guidance or teaching of the Torah is love—consideration and respect for others, selflessness, serving one another. This is what we accept when we accept the Law: the command, the imperative, to love one another. This was true of the Law back then, and, by the way, it is true of law now. When we accept the rule of law here in a great democratic country like Australia, that’s what we commit ourselves to, that’s what being law-abiding teaches us: to consider, respect, love one another.
The Law is really amazing grace God is offering to the people: a ticket out of a history of chaotic living, dog eat dog, every one for themself, sweating under the tyranny of Pharoah or some other terrible tyrant or dictator; learning to be obedient to the God of love, learning to love one another and live together harmoniously, creatively.
But Moses was up on the mountain for forty days and forty nights, and the Israelites were stuck down below, not really knowing what was going on, getting increasingly restless and fearful, arguing, fighting among each other—hassling Aaron, Moses’ 2IC, to do something, anything! Let’s now hear what happened:
1 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” 6 They rose early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to revel. [Exodus 32:1-14]
What a story, and how typically human of the Israelites! They reject the God who has brought them out of slavery in Egypt and set them on the road to the Promised Land—they want a visible god they can worship and make sacrifices to, and through doing so hopefully manipulate into doing what they, selfishly, want; rather than an invisible God who really saves them and calls them into obedience to selflessly loving each another through the Law. Then, before the god they hope the Golden Calf represents, even has a chance to not deliver what they want (how can a false god, one who doesn’t actually exist, deliver anything?!), they crack the champagne, get drunk and party!
They were returning to their old idolatry. Like we always do. We don’t worship and try to manipulate idols of imagined gods like ancient peoples in many parts of the world did; we worship and try to manipulate what these imagined gods really always were and are: projections, idols of the human self – we worship ourselves and try to manipulate the world by the power of our own selfish egos! The very opposite of what God was offering the Israelites in the Law, namely letting go of our visible idols of self and becoming obedient to the invisible God of selflessness. When we live selfishly, worshipping our idols of self, these self-idols, of course, never deliver; and we end up just turning our lives into our own personal private hell, just as the Israelites were very good at doing back in the day—hell is the only place selfishness ever gets us!
Now we know what happened next, right down through the whole story of the Old Testament, this constant to-and-fro between God and the people: God offering grace, the people rejecting it, or accepting it but falling away from it sometime later. God never gives up and sulks in the corner—he never packs up his stumps and goes home—he just keeps upping the ante, offering an even greater grace next time, until, eventually, he offers the greatest grace of all—and of course that was, and is …. Jesus!
Which brings us now to the Parable of the Wedding Banquet. The context: we’re in the Temple, in Jerusalem, Jesus is confronting the Chief Priests and the Pharisees, they are busily hatching their plot to arrest him and silence him forever. Jesus never takes a backward step, however—they think they are setting a trap for him, but really, he’s setting a trap for them.
1 Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2 “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ 5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6 while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. 8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ 10 Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding hall was filled with guests. 11 “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12 and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. 13 Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 For many are called, but few are chosen.” [Matthew 22:1-14]
The Kingdom: through Moses God offered the Law to the Israelites; through Jesus, God offers the Kingdom to the whole world. The Kingdom is the next step up in grace from the Law: Jesus provides the ways and means to overcome the power of sinful selfishness in our lives, to be able to be truly selfless—the very thing that’s needed to make the Law work. But will we accept the offer, the grace?
In the parable the king is God, obviously, and the wedding banquet is the Kingdom. Who does the king invite first? The Chief Priests and Pharisees, of course, the leaders of the Jewish people—but, as we heard, they don’t just decline the invitation and send in a polite apology, they spurn it with pride and arrogance, in doing so building, like the people in the Golden Calf story, and like us when we reject God’s grace, their own personal private hell, which is symbolized in the parable by the king’s very violent response to their rejection of the invitation. God doesn’t have to “bind us hand and foot, and throw us into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”—we do it to ourselves!!
How does the king—God—respond to the first rejection? Well, he ups the grace ante by opening up the invitation to anyone, Jew or non-Jew, good or bad. So many now come, but one person is not dressed appropriately—he comes dressed just in his own everyday gear, didn’t bother to dress up. This is worse even than the original invited guests—disrespect, contempt straight in the king’s face. One theory is that it was the custom in those days for the host of a wedding banquet to provide wedding garments for each guest, so the failure of the man to wear what he was given was an intentional insult to the king.
“Many are called but few are chosen”—the final, summarizing words of the parable. We might paraphrase it as “many are called but few accept”, or, better, “many are called but few have the capability of accepting”. How is it that any of us are able to accept God’s grace? Off our own bat, none of us are. We’re all in danger of being the guy who turns up in his own gear. We naturally want it to be on our own terms, but it can’t be—it can only be on God’s terms. We have to let go of our own self-righteousness, our own idols of self. That’s actually the hardest thing in the world to do—it’s not natural—and it’s only because of the grace already brought into the world through Jesus that any of us can pull it off. Sometimes, in fact, it takes some terrible failure and devastation to occur in our lives for us to be able to receive the grace—our self-idols are ripped away from us and we are forced to realize that we are victims not of anyone else’s wrongdoing but of our own selfish folly—we find Jesus waiting, already there ahead of us, as we descend into the pit.
Speaking of terrible failure and devastation, that’s what we’re seeing in Israel and Gaza at the moment.
The International Community has been trying hard now for many years to help Israel and Palestine resolve their conflict—God’s grace offered to the Israeli and Palestinian people. Yes, this help hasn’t always been helpful, sometimes it has been very divided and self-seeking. There was a moment, as we know, in the 1990’s when a deal was nearly made—the Oslo Accords, brokered by the UN in 1993, held out great hope—but hopes were then dashed with the failure of the Camp David Summit in 2000. The two sides blinked! Since then, both sides have hardened their hearts towards each other—Israel has moved solidly to the right under Netanyahu, and in Gaza we’ve seen the rise of Hamas, sponsored by Iran. Both sides, more than ever, refuse to budge, to let go of their clinging on to their own separate religious and national identities, their own claim to the land, their own idols of self.
So, yes, where is the grace, love and hope of the Kingdom? For the Ukrainian people as well, and the Russian people too for that matter, under the thumb of a tyrannical regime? Without God obviously there is no hope. With God, however, there is always hope, always an even greater grace, which we can usually never predict, still to come.
Finally, the Voice: God’s grace offered to the Australian people: a great way forward for our nation, an opportunity to heal the wounds and divisions of the past, a voice to the voiceless. But we rejected it! Here’s a few words from Campaign Director Dean Parkin’s letter late last night:
“We must not lose our resolve and we must make sure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are recognised, respected, and listened to; that our communities can live well and live safely as most Australians have the opportunity to do. This Referendum represented a promise made to Indigenous Australians for a better future, and it’s a promise we must find a way to keep.”
A promise?! Well, the real promise is not a human thing, it’s a God thing—the promise of an even greater grace to come. So, yes, we can keep working towards reconciliation and empowerment for Indigenous Australians, but, even more importantly, we can have hope in our hearts and stay open to what God has for the future of our nation—something even better that we probably haven’t thought about yet!
Why is it that we humans so often seem to wait till we experience failure and devastation before we finally accept God’s grace? Well, as we’ve seen today, it’s pretty simple: letting go of our selfish selves, our idols of self, our Golden Calves, accepting the beautiful Law which teaches us how to live together in a great way, accepting the invitation to the Wedding Banquet, the Kingdom, is actually the hardest thing of all for us to do, naturally. Only through Jesus, God’s most amazing grace to the world, can we ever find the ways and means to do so. When we reject God’s grace, God doesn’t sulk in the corner, pack up his stumps and go home; he offers an even greater grace next time!
Amen.
