Sermon on Matthew22:1-14

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

This week’s Gospel reading picks up right where last week’s left off with yet another parable Jesus told to the religious leaders who were challenging him between Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

It’s similar to the last two parables in that Jesus used it to call out the religious authorities for not accepting what God was up to through John the Baptist’s warnings or Jesus’ teachings.

They were busy maintaining the status quo and guarding the delicate relationship between their people and the Roman Empire. So, they were suspicious and critical of new prophets and rabbis like John and Jesus.

So, Jesus compared them to no-show wedding guests. The parable gets surprisingly violent, with the wedding guests killing the messengers and the king massacring the guests and burning their city.I’m surprised Quentin Tarantino hasn’t made a movie of this parable yet.

But Jesus sometimes used heightened and exaggerated language in his parables and teachings. It’s sureattention-getting!

Meanwhile, Jesus lulled his larger audience into letting their guard down. After two parables criticizing the religious leaders, the crowds following Jesus might have been patting themselves on the back for accepting John and Jesus’ teachings. We humans like to pick sides and root for our side to win.

So, it probably felt pretty good to count oneself among the second round of wedding guests. It is a really beautiful image of the wedding feast of the Lamb, where everyone’s included—anyone and everyone, the good and the bad, regardless of class or background or worthiness.

But the parable doesn’t end there. An underdressed wedding guest gets treated disturbingly harshly.

Since this second round of wedding guests dropped what they were doing to come to the banquet, appropriate clothing may have been provided for them—akin to a fancy restaurant loaning out ties. So, this wedding guest would have had to refuse the clothing hospitably offered.

If the crowds were a little too happy about the religious leaders getting their comeuppance from Jesus’ parables, this one ended with a warning not to get self-satisfied and forget to be a grateful guest.

It was a troubling parable for Jesus’ entire audience, not just the religious leaders.

And it’s a troubling parable for us, too.

As an introvert, I understand the temptation to decide last minute not to go to a social event, and I really hope my home is left standing the next time I cancel.

But really, it’s easy to get caught up in the cares of this world. It’s hard to feel like celebrating when the world is full of political, economic, environmental, and social injustice. The news right now is full of murder and the death penalty and sexual assault and hurricanes and war. There’s a highly-charged election coming up. Things are getting more expensive all the time. And it was so darn hot last week!

Plus, I know many of you are dealing with health stuff and work stuff and financial stuff and family stuff.

How can we celebrate at a time like this?

And yet, as we see in the parable, there is a wedding to celebrate. We’re invited to the already and not yet wedding feast of the Lamb. In the parable and elsewhere, the completion of the Beloved Community is described as a wedding feast—better than the most joyful and exquisite one you can imagine.

Everyone’s invited—the good and the bad, regardless of class or background or worthiness. You don’t have to worry about what to wear.

Because Christ is our clothing. God knows who’s invited to the feast, and God wants you just as you are. We, who were created by God, are celebrating what was done for us by Jesus, who broke the power of death and brings us all abundant life.

Not too long ago, we read from Romans chapter 13, in which Paul exhorts us to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” comparing him to armor or clothing.

Just like we baptize people of all ages because baptism is about what God does, not about what we do, we can be part of the banquet, not because we’ve earned it, but because of who Christ is.

If the parable talks of an inappropriately clothed guest, it’s more like C.S. Lewis portrays in The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.

After the final battle between good and evil, the characters arrive in Aslan’s country to spend eternity.

But, there’s a group of dwarves who have decided that they’re going to look out only for themselves and don’t want any part in fighting for what’s good and right or having compassion for others.

So, when they arrive in Aslan’s country, they still think they’re in the damp, smelly stable they were in before the battle ended. They refuse to receive what’s in front of them—not even recognizing what’s real.

It’s not that they weren’t invited to the banquet. They were present at the banquet. But they refused to accept the clothing. They refused to celebrate. They excluded themselves.

Beloved siblings in Christ, what invitations from the Holy Spirit are we ignoring?

What are we refusing to celebrate?

Because, even in the midst of what’s challenging and heart-breaking in this life, God still invites us to see glimpses of the Beloved Community here and now.

It doesn’t mean we have to be happy all the time. It doesn’t mean we have to plaster on a smile and keep the tears inside when life feels like too much.

Joy can coexist with sadness. Joy can remind us we’re human and that God loves us when something silly makes us laugh while we sit in a medical center waiting room yet again.

Love can coexist with anger. Anger can fill us when someone we love is being mistreated and can give us strength to fight for justice. All our emotions have things to teach us, and pretending to be happy doesn’t serve us.

Even while we grieve what’s still broken about this world, we can celebrate that there are still things worth living for as we wait for the world to be made right in God’s time.

Because Jesus already won. He lived and died and rose again because he loves you and wants you to be at his party, telling stories, laughing, eating hors d’oeuvres, and making a fool of yourself when the DJ puts on the YMCA.

Your place card is on the table already. Let’s celebrate!

Sermon on Matthew21:23-32

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Our Gospel readings for the next several weeks take us back to Holy Week. We’ll be reading several parables and teachings that Jesus gave in response to the religious leaders’ oppositionbetween Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

Let’s start by putting ourselves in the religious leaders’ shoes to see what they were reacting against.

There were rumors of this new rabbi named Jesus getting attention around the area. You don’t really believe the stories of miraculous healings—there are so many charlatans around—but then some people start saying he’s a prophet or even John the Baptist back from the dead. He’s getting more and more attention, and you worry that he might be spreading some unorthodox ideas.

Then, he arrives in Jerusalem on the same day as Roman leader Pontius Pilate. Pilate arrives on one side of the city like the grand, victorious Roman overlord he is.

And then this upstart rabbi Jesus approaches the other side of the city, riding not a warhorse but a donkey, with crowds of people cheering him on like he’s a military hero—an over-the-top form of political theater mocking Pilate and the Roman Empire. This guy is going to get us all killed!

Then, he goes straight to the Temple—the center of Jewish religious and cultural life, and he starts yelling at people and assaulting the merchants.

So, we religious leaders decide it’s time to put a stop to this. We decide to confront him and let him know he and his behavior aren’t welcome here.

We try to trap him into either discrediting himself or claiming divine power so that we can say he blasphemed and arrest him. Either way, we need him to stop talking before he gets Rome’s attention. We can’t be lumped in with this radical.

But then, Jesus parries our question with another question that entraps us instead! The nerve! And then, he tells a parable that portrays us as not doing God’s will and says that the most undesirable people in our society are going to join the Reign of God before us.

This guy is unbelievable! We can’t let him continue like this. Before the week’s up, this has got to stop. We’re going to put an end to this one way or another.

The religious leaders were trying to maintain order, keep the status quo, and placate the Roman Empire.

Jesus was challenging them, saying that they were missing what God was up to.

And since God was sending prophetic messages through John the Baptist and then through Jesus himself, the religious leaders should have accepted those messages, because they were very much in the tradition of the prophets who spoke to God’s people throughout their history.

There’s a whole section of the Hebrew Bible devoted to the messages of the prophets. We read from Ezekiel today, where God invited God’s people to turn from the unjust ways their society was behaving and get “a new heart and a new spirit.”

Surely John the Baptist’s message to God’s people to change their minds and ways wasn’t so different that the religious leaders couldn’t recognize God’s voice.

So, Jesus called them out on it.

And he invited them to change their minds too, just like in his parable.

The way was open. It’s a standing invitation. The doors of the Beloved Community are always open. It’s up to us human beings to be willing to change our minds and hearts to want to be part of it.

The religious leaders feared that Jesus threatened their power and even their safety—unbalancing their precarious relationship with Rome.

But Jesus was showing them a different kind of power—contrasting the military might of empire with the self-emptying power of God made human.

As our Bible study talked about on Tuesday, our reading from Philippians contains an early hymn of the Church that’s the centerpiece of the whole letter. Jesus “did not regard equality with Godas something to be grasped,but emptied himself,” humbling himself to the point of a humiliating execution.

And by the upside-down way God works, that wasn’t a defeat, but the ultimate triumph, breaking the power of death forever.

Jesus’ conflict wasn’t with the religious leaders or even the Roman Empire, but with everything that is death-dealing in this world.

And his purpose wasn’t to wage a military campaign against Rome or overthrow the religious authorities. It was to bring life abundant to the world, building a community that would uplift the lowly, comfort the broken-hearted, and help us to change our minds so that we see the world the way God sees it, with eyes full of love.

And John the Baptist was preparing us human beings for that purpose, proclaiming that God was up to something in the world and that we should pay attention.

But many of the people who should have recognized what was going on weren’t open to hearing God’s prophetic message.

What prophetic messages are we missing today?

It’s good to be discerning and not just accept anything someone tells you.People can use the Bible to support pretty much whatever message they want, depending on how far you take it out of context.

But at the same time, our own interpretations can start to feel comfortable, and we can find ourselves getting complacent or being unwilling to question the status quo.

Are we, like the religious leaders who were opposing Jesus, missing out on what God is up to today?

What prophets are we ignoring?

I was deeply saddened a few weeks ago to hear of the death of an author I consider prophetic.

They published their work under the name Lenny Duncan and used he/him pronouns at the time of publication, but I’ve come to learn that they more recently went by lynnyduncan and used they/them pronouns.

I read their book Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S. during my internship, and it was a challenging and important read.

Duncanhad been an ELCA pastor, (the ELCA being the whitest denomination they spoke of in the title of their first book) though they eventually left our denomination and continued to do scholarly and spiritual work in other capacities. They were 48 years old when they died of heart problems.

I wish they had had longer on this side of life to speak their prophetic message.

Their work challenged me. They talked about racism and homophobia in the church. They named specific things that we can change to be more equitable and just. They called out traditions and symbols I have loved and named them as problematic and hurtful. They called me to deeper thought and deeper love.

I can’t do justice to their work in one sermon, but here is one small passage from Dear Church to give you a taste of their prophetic message:

“Dear Church, we are the ones we have been waiting for. No one else is coming. You are the generation that has been chosen for this time, this place, this moment in human history. Stop waiting for some sort of transformative leader to arise from the body politic or the body of Christ. It is you. You with all your flaws, fears, doubts, brokenness, and downright utter humanness—you are called for more. The bags under your eyes are going to get darker. The weariness in your bones will get deeper. The amount of pain you are going to have to hold in your heart will grow bigger and almost unbearable. The calendar will be jam packed, and the road just gets narrower from here. But the narrow road is our only path for survival, Church.

“Dear Church, stretching God’s tent is frontline freedom fighting. Our role in the revolution was started in a synagogue in Galilee, when Jesus unfurled the text from Isaiah. He read to those gathered:

“’The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

(Luke 4:18-19; see Isaiah 61:1-2)

Don’t you get it that the text is fulfilled in your hearing? You have been given a post, armed with grace and armored in love, and you are being drafted to wage peace on the world. When someone gives you hell, you are ordered to give them heaven. This is a radical and dangerous act. If our places of worship really are the nerve centers for the souls of dozens of families in our communities, then this can be a shock to the system. Waging peace is more dangerous than waging war.”

I pray that lynny’s eyes no longer have bags under them and that they rest in God’s complete peace and love. And I’m thankful that their prophetic message can live on in their written words.

Prophetic messages can be painful, humbling, maddening. It’s no wonder so many prophets have historically been discredited, persecuted, and killed. It’s not surprising that the religious leaders resisted John the Baptist and Jesus so intensely.

We need the Holy Spirit to help us discern what messages to listen to, but ignoring anything that challenges us isn’t the answer.

God is still speaking prophetic messages to us. God will never stop speaking and inviting God’s people to change our minds and our hearts to help us embrace the world like God does.

The Beloved Community’s doors are wide open for tax collectors, sex workers, religious leaders, and you, and me. It’s not on a cloudsomewhere in the sky. It’s a way of life and of loving the world here and now that brings heaven to earth. And we get to be part of it.

There are prophetic voices pointing to it all the time. Listen to them with all your heart.

Sermon on Matthew20:1-16

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

“I didn’t get what I deserved.” His voice rang through the warehouse that had been filled with folding tables and chairs and decked out with orange tablecloths and paper turkey decorations.

On the day before the Thanksgiving holiday at the Orange County Conservation Corps, the nonprofit I worked for before going to seminary, program participants would scramble out of the vans from their work sites, ignoring sore muscles and sweaty brows, eager for an early dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and Costco-sized pumpkin pies.

But silence fell over the warehouse when one of the field supervisors stood up and said, “I didn’t get what I deserved.”

Some of the people in our parable today didn’t feel like they got what they deserved.

There’s a way the world works, you know. That’s how it is now and how it was back in the first century.

People who are rich are powerful, and things in the world go their way. People don’t say no to people like that.

Except Jesus.

Right before Jesus told this parable, he had had an encounter with a young man who asked him what he needed to do to have eternal life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments, and the man said he did. Okay, sure.

So, Jesus told him

·       to sell his possessions,

·       give the money to the poor,

·       and then follow Jesus.

And the young man left sadly because he had a lot of possessions.

Then, Jesus told his disciples the infamous, difficult statement that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for rich people to enter the kingdom of God.

The disciples knew how the world worked: people don’t say no to rich people. So, they were stressed out, worried that if this rich guy couldn’t be part of the Beloved Community, “then who can be saved?”

Jesus reassured them that all things are possible with God and that those who make sacrifices for Jesus’ sake will be part of the abundance of the Beloved Community.

Then, Jesus told the parable we just read, which closes with “the last will be first, and the first will be last.” There’s a reversal here, an upending of expectations.

The disciples had expectations about what people deserved based on how the world generally operates.

And the first workers in the story had expectations about what they and their fellow workers deserved. It wasn’t just that they thought they should get more. They were offended that they were made the same as the workers who had only worked for an hour, saying, “You have made them equal to us.”

They didn’t just want more than they were given. They wanted others to be treated as less than them.

It had become an “us” vs. “them” situation. The issue was that those lazy people over there are not like “us” and shouldn’t be equal to “us.”

But in the Reign of God, there is no “us” and “them.” There isinstead unity and wholeness.

In this parable, the landowner kept going out to find more people. The people who didn’t get hired the first or second or third time.

It wasn’t their fault that they hadn’t been hired. They had been sitting there since the early morning. When the landowner finally hired them, I’m sure they expected to earn what they “deserved”: about an eight of a denarius, because they had worked one hour instead of eight like the other workers.

But the landowner did something surprising and upside down: making sure that they also had enough to feed themselves and their families regardless of how long they had a chance to work. The landowner collected workers throughout the day, including those who had been left out and gave them more than they “deserved.”

God, too, collects people who have been left out.

And so does the Orange County Conservation Corps.Participants in the program were called “at-risk” young adults: 18-25-year-olds who had dropped out of high school, or had been incarcerated, or were unhoused, or had gotten into unhealthy relationships with drugs, or were young parents, or were emancipated foster youth—any combination of circumstances and choices that kept them from the futures we hoped for them.

This motley assortment of young people held their breaths as the supervisor started giving a speech before the Thanksgiving meal was served.

“I didn’t get what I deserved,” he began. “I thank God that I didn’t get what I deserved.”

He went on to say that he had deserved more time in prison, that he didn’t deserve the opportunities that had been given to him. He had been a program participant—one of those who had been left out—before being hired as a staff member.

He could have been hardened and embittered by all that had happened in his life. Instead, he responded to incredibly challenging circumstances with gratitude.

God gives each of us more than we deserve.

None of us live 100% in the life-giving way God wants for humanity. We hurt ourselves, each other, and the world around us—often grievously.

But God gives us grace, forgiving us every time, journeying with us as we learn to reconcile with and love our neighbors better. God invites us into the Beloved Community, full of left out misfits like us, where we get to love and be loved, regardless of whether we deserve it.

None of us gets what we deserve—thank God!

Instead, God lavishes us with more than we could ever hope for.God provides for us above and beyond what we deserve.

And out of gratitude and the assurance of our belonging to God, we get to share that love and abundance with those around us. We get to love other people more than they deserve. We get to forgive as we have been forgiven. We get to feed people body and soul. Thanks be to God!