October 11, 2020 (Proper 23A)
9:30 a.m. serviceSisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Have you ever really regretted turning down an invitation?

When I was in my first few months of college one of my cousins got married. I’m from a pretty close-knit family and certainly all of us were invited. We also like to party. And this cousin liked to party more than the rest of us. He was marrying into a prominent South Carolina family that also liked to party, as people in South Carolina are known to do. Several days of parties. “The number of shrimp who gave their lives for this wedding,” my mother said afterward, with awe in her voice.

Of course I wanted to go. But I was in school. And it was the experimental college I’ve mentioned to you before. I was four hours by car and bus from the nearest airport, and in any case we lived under a strict isolation policy that was meant to keep us from going off to the nearby town of Bishop, California to have fun and be trivial. I didn’t even ask for permission to go to this family celebration.

Later on I learned that the student body would almost certainly have given me permission to break the isolation policy (I know this is starting to sound like a cult but I promise it wasn’t) and go. A wedding is a singular event. It was, from all accounts, a very special party. And I regret missing it.

Today’s Gospel is about missing a wedding party. And I can’t help but think about how we respond to invitations, or not. Among your friends and family you are probably the person who makes a lot of invitations, or the person who waits for them. You are probably someone who always or usually says yes to game night or watching the Cowboys with your friends or going hiking; or you are someone who is strongly inclined to say no, or nothing at all. I’ve noticed over the last several months that I have become more and more reclusive. Partly this is a safety issue. But at least as much as that, I’ve discovered a tendency to hole up and shut out the world.

The first round of guests in today’s story all make some kind of excuse. They have business to attend to. And that’s real. When we get an invitation, from God or from our neighbor, we can easily miss the party because we think we have something more important to do. In the parable it’s a King making the invitation, not just to drink beers and watch the Cowboys but to celebrate his son’s wedding, and so their casual refusal is a serious breach of honor. And of course some mistreat or even kill the servants who send the invitation.

I don’t have any experience with that. But missing the party is bad enough. It’s a big deal. There won’t be another chance.

What’s really interesting about this story is that the guests who refuse to go get replaced. The King, wanting a real banquet for his son, sends out the servants to bring in anyone from the street to celebrate.

And that is part of the point of this parable. You can’t ruin the party by skipping it. You can only miss out. God will find someone to say Yes if you insist on saying No.

Since very early days Christians have understood our worship as the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, or the Son, of God. We celebrate the union of Christ and his Church here, together. And this feast, where we share the Sacrament of his body and blood, is a preview of the great Wedding Feast that will sum up and complete and restore all of creation at the end of the age. That’s the image we get from today’s Isaiah reading: God plays host to all the nations of the earth, feeding them with rich food and wiping away every tear. We are greatly privileged to have been called to this feast in advance.

And just like the guests in the story, we aren’t called because we’re special, or because we’ve earned anything from God. We’re called because God wants a feast. God wants a crowd. It simply pleases him to do this.

Our only task is to say yes when we hear the call. That means coming to worship however we safely and responsibly can. It means making a commitment of time and money, however small or large, to the work of God’s church. It means showing forth our Lord in our words and actions every day, even when it’s hard, even when it means putting aside some pressing business that would distract us and keep us away from the party.

Because that, in the end, is what this is all about. Don’t miss the party. Amen.

Last Sunday we kicked off our annual pledge campaign with a lovely video presentation on Christ Lutheran Church's seventy-five year history. This week we'll hear from current members in their own words about the reasons they are so committed to their church.

We're asking people to return their commitments at any time, either by mail (with the commitment card sent out last week) or online. As many shocks as we've all endured this year, it may feel like a difficult time to be asking for annual pledges. But whatever the circumstance, it's always a good time to ask how our household decisions and commitments reflect our faith and our priorities. One thing Kerry made clear to me when we were first married is that we would give what felt to me like a fairly aggressive percentage of our income to church. I'll admit I was a little shocked at first, being a good Lutheran who did not want to justify himself by works of the Law, and who also wanted to spend more of our household budget. But she was absolutely right, and it's a practice that has shaped my faith ever since. Giving regularly, as a share of household income, is itself an act of discipleship that builds up our faith.

At the same time, however, the church has to be mindful that everyone's circumstances are different and there is no single standard for generosity. We can only give from what we have to give. But even the tiniest offering, made in faith and as a commitment to the work of the church, has the power to grow. That's why it's also important to remember what we, together, can do with the gifts God entrusts to us.

And throughout a difficult year, Christ Lutheran Church has continued to be generous with our partners and ministries. We've supported backpack drives and campus ministry, missionary work and sister churches nearby who have struggled during the downturn. We've brought on a new Youth and Family minister and avoided laying off anyone from the church or preschool staff, even as facilities and programs around us shed workers or closed their doors. This was all enabled by your continuing generosity. I thank God for that.

Now as we crest our anniversary year, we have both the responsibility and the opportunity to look ahead. As we strengthen old partnerships and build new ones, we'll be finding new ways to connect with our community beyond financial generosity. We have the awesome privilege of asking ourselves what this church can and should be for our neighborhood, our city, and the world. How can the Gospel be preached and celebrated for those who need to hear it? How can we put our skills, knowledge, and dedication to work in collaborative efforts to heal the fissures and wounds both within us and around us? How can we contribute to the vocal, visible presence of the Body of Christ in the world?

I don't have the answers to those questions. And even if I did, it wouldn't matter. Because they have to be our answers, just like the stewardship of this congregation has to be our gifts.

This week we hear a great and terrible story from Jesus, about prominent guests spurning an invitation from the King and the great unwashed masses being called in their place. Like every parable, it asks us to imagine our place in the story. Are we the King's servants? The heedless guests? The unexpected substitute guests? The person who neglects to put on a wedding garment?

It's a story about bad manners and violence that, when I hear it today, makes me think mostly about missed opportunities. About how many times I (and probably plenty of you) say "no" out of fear or distraction or boredom or simply by default. How many invitations go unreturned. How many possibilities never get explored. Underneath the severity of the threat in the story is, I think, a kernel of hope: this day, this moment, this year really matters. The choices we make in response to God's generosity, and God's calling on our lives, will matter forever.  One of the psalms tells us "if today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts." That's maybe the most important piece of advice for us to remember each day. We talk at this time of year about giving and financial support. But stewardship goes far beyond that, into how we commit our time, how we live and act together, and how we turn ourselves toward God's future here and now.

Read After Ten Years at the following link:

This week we hear one of my favorite parables in the whole New Testament, the so-called "parable of the laborers (or workers) in the vineyard," Matthew 20:1-16. I encourage you to read it for yourself and sit with it for a few days before church.

The story is of a house-master ("landowner" is our translation but it's not quite right) who goes out to the marketplace to find workers for the vineyard. He hires a group at 6 a.m. ("the first hour") and goes back to hire more at 9 a.m., noon, and 3 p.m. To the first group he promises a denarius, the "usual daily wage," and to the subsequent groups he promises "what is right." Finally he goes back at the eleventh hour (5 p.m.) and hires the last of those without work, sending them in to the vineyard for the last hour of the workday. Then he instructs the manager to pay each worker the full day's wage, starting with those hired at 5 p.m. This causes some resentment in those who worked all day; even though they were paid exactly what they expected, they do not appreciate the latecomers getting paid the same. 

My perspective on this parable shifted at a synod assembly (of all places) when a pastor led a Bible study on it, retelling it from the perspective of the laborers who couldn't get hired all day and had to wait to the point of giving up before getting a last chance at work. It's easy enough to identify with those hired first, who work longest--we often feel that we are in that position. And it's easy to identify with the last hired, in an unreal way, as we sometimes feel ourselves to have received grace by the skin of our teeth. But hearing the story from the standpoint of actual day labor, where your family's ability to eat in the days ahead is dependent on being hired, made me feel differently about it. It's not actually easy to be looking for work and not finding it. And as a society, we tend to value the lives and welfare of those who are not working at a lower level than those who are (unless the people not working are living on investment income, in which case we tend not to object).

The parable confronts us with a scenario in which the house-master has chosen to honor the daily need of the workers rather than the hours they worked. No one would have objected if he'd pro-rated the wage for those hired later. It would be, in our world as in his, a kind of shrewd dealing and good stewardship to keep a lower but still technically "fair" wage for them. But the master in the story accepts both the hit to his "bottom line" and the resentment of the people he hired first in order to give a living wage to everyone.

It's worth running through this story a few times, putting ourselves in different places. How would we feel if we were the first hired? Or those hired mid-day, or at the last hour? How would we look at this scene--imagining a marketplace that always seems to have unemployed men looking for work--if we were the house-master? How would we interpret the master's command if we were the manager, handing out pay at the end of the day? The power of a parable is not that it makes a single point with a story, but that it invites us into a scene that has many possible meanings. We learn about ourselves and the assumptions we make when we hear it. And in that learning, Jesus is trying to show us something of the Kingdom of God.

We're resuming the outdoor celebration of Holy Communion on Sunday at 10:45 a.m. in the courtyard. In June and July our first attempts at celebrating and distributing the Sacrament went very smoothly and safely. Masks are required of everyone, and we ask everyone to maintain six feet of distance between households. I thoroughly wash and sanitize my hands beforehand, and I wear gloves for the consecration and distribution of the elements.

We don't want anyone who is uncomfortable being in a group to feel obligated to participate. We believe we have a very safe and responsible procedure that also preserves the reverence and power of the Sacrament, but we all have to make the best choices we can about where and how we go out these days. It can help to bear in mind that the coronavirus is a respiratory virus. People contract it by breathing it in; food does not seem to be a source of transmission. This appears to be a disease we give each other directly, by proximity, rather than through a medium like the host or the chalice.

That said, we are being still more cautious, and so to minimize contact we are for now distributing only the host and not the chalice. I'm confident that we can find a good and safe way to include the chalice, but we will read up and plan out how best to do that before we make any changes.

A few people have mentioned this product to me as a possible answer, so I thought I'd share my reasons for not wishing to use it:

These pre-filled and sealed packages have become more popular recently among Lutheran churches. Previously they would have been more common in denominations that take a purely symbolic view of Communion. I've refrained from using them for two reasons:  first because Holy Communion is essentially a shared meal. The community would bring the gifts, which the presider would then consecrate with the Word of God and prayer before distributing to those present. Originally this was in the form of a single loaf broken and shared, and a single cup from which everyone drank. The important thing was that it was an experience of real unity and sharing (this is the reason I touch each vessel during the words of Jesus). This was a difficult aspect of early Christianity, as Paul's first letter to the Corinthians made clear. By sharing one bread we become one Body with Christ and with one another. I don't think that works if each worshiper is getting an individual, pre-divided "dose" of the meal.

Second, I've avoided these products for the less theological reason that I dislike the waste. One problem with having a lot of individual packages rather than a single shared meal is that it leaves a lot of plastic to be discarded. Apart from the environmental concerns, it's spiritually and aesthetically discouraging to have to throw away a lot of packaging after celebrating the most important aspect of Christian worship. After spending many years watching little buckets fill with plastic cups, still coated with what we were just calling the Blood of Christ, it's not something I think communities should be doing.

One challenge of this period has been thinking through changes to our life together, as worshipers and in many other ways. One problem with Christian worship (especially among Lutherans, for whatever reason) is that the exception can very quickly become the rule. We've been careful about doing things in worship or education that we wouldn't be comfortable with under normal circumstances, if only because it's easier to establish an expectation than it is to take it away.

So I greatly appreciate your patience and cooperation as we continue to do the best we can, faithfully, reverently, and safely, to share the fullness of God's grace in Word and Sacrament.

For those interested, some further reading on the Sacrament:

"The Use of the Means of Grace," a 1997 ELCA document that gives helpful guidance on baptism, preaching, and the Eucharist (including the indication that the sacrament should be individually administered by the pastor, and all the gifts placed on the altar together).

From the Apology of the Augsburg Confession on the Sacrament of the Altar

I've written about Holy Communion here (with specific reference to the sealed packages, it turns out), and early in the pandemic when many churches were trying "virtual" communion. It's also Chapter 3 of my book, which I'll post here for anyone interested (please be a dear and don't download the whole thing; if you'd like a copy and the price will put you out, just let me know and I'll get one to you).

Next week we're starting a four-week discussion of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. One of Lewis's most famous books, Screwtape takes the form of letters from the titular senior demon to his nephew, a junior tempter tasked with corrupting and winning the soul of a young man for Hell. It's a clever book and full of powerful insight on humanity as seen from the imagined perspective of our spiritual foes. You can order it here, or on Amazon, or anywhere else you buy books. And of course you can get it from the library. We'll start our conversation on Wednesday, September 9 at 6:30 p.m. You can join us at this link (open it in Chrome or Edge web browsers, or download the free Microsoft Teams app).

We're going to look at Letters 1-7 at our first session, which cover topics like "modern" thought, Christians, family relationships, and war (a lot of big topics get touched on in a few pages, which makes the book so fun to read). But as I read ahead to reacquaint myself with this book, which I hadn't picked up in a dozen years or more, I was struck by a moment a little later on. Screwtape talks to his nephew about tempting humans away from both what they enjoy (sinfully or harmlessly) and what they are obligated to do:

This experience doing neither what one wants nor what one should is something Christian monks identified sixteen centuries ago as acedia. It's a kind of sullen, restless boredom that haunts all human effort. For Lewis it's in a way worse than actual pleasurable sins, because even a wicked enjoyment relies on some gift of God. This vacancy of thought and enjoyment and intention doesn't even offer that glimpse into God's goodness. 

As I read this passage again I was struck by how much more true and urgent it seems today than it could have even for Lewis himself. Acedia is not just a destructive quirk of human personality now. It's central to the business model of much of our lives. When I think about how much time we can spend watching Netflix shows we only half enjoy, engaging in online conversations we only barely care about with people we don't really know, or watching an endless queue of YouTube videos chosen for us because we had a momentary interest in a topic or a game, I feel the shudder Lewis is trying to provoke here.

There are moments like this strewn through this little book. It's got its problems too (which I will probably talk about more than anyone wants to hear), but even those are very interesting. This is the kind of book than can get us to rethink some important questions, assumptions, and habits in our lives. So don't miss out! See you on Wednesday!

Perhaps you've seen this graphic or one like it recently. It shows the countries closed to American travelers, open to American travelers, or those open only with restrictions (including negative COVID tests, two-week self-quarantine upon arrival, and so forth).

I'm not much of an international traveler--I've been out of the country five times this century--but I have to admit these graphics have caught me up short. As an American, I'm accustomed to being part of a nation that puts a great deal of effort into deciding who may or may not enter my country, and on what terms (dubious as much of this effort may be). But as I preached way back in my first sermon at Christ, on Lazarus and the rich man's gate, you can't build a wall to keep others out without also locking yourself in. And because of our disastrous failure to contain the novel virus, that's exactly what has happened: we are, for the most part, stuck here.

This week we hear part of Paul the Apostle's famous depiction of humanity under the Law. In making his case that Jews and Gentiles, by different routes, are included in God's promises, Paul says that "God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that hey may be merciful to all." That word, which our version translates as "imprisoned," seems to have made translators and commentators squirm a bit. The King James scholars say "concluded," the New International Version says "bound over," the Revised Standard Version says "consigned." We have tended to hear it with two overriding concerns: am I really trapped in disobedience? And to what extent has God willed this imprisonment?

Here, as in most places, I prefer the more shocking and unpleasant translation. And the map above may explain why. Part of Paul's argument in his letters is that, Jew or Gentile, we tend not to know that we are imprisoned in disobedience. Day to day I just don't think about where I can go outside of the country. But faced with the grim reality--I am, in fact, more or less trapped here--it makes me think differently. Freedom can't come until we recognize that we are not already free.

Paul's harsh and stirring word here connects the Old Testament and the Gospel. Isaiah promises a time when God will gather not only his own people but others; and a Gentile woman pleads with Jesus to make this promise a reality for her. It is not that she is better or worse than the Jewish followers of Jesus. It is merely that she stands outside of the people to whom and through whom the Law and the Prophets speak. She is imprisoned in disobedience in her own way, as all the Gentiles are, but she makes the act of faith in pleading with the Messiah to heal her daughter all the same.

We live in a world full of unjust distinctions. Imprisonment is a powerful metaphor because we in America can be particularly cruel to the incarcerated on the grounds that they have somehow deserved that cruelty. Even prisoners approved for parole in Texas are being kept behind bars during a pandemic hitting those facilities especially hard. Humans tolerate cruelty like this because we can convince ourselves that the imprisoned are categorically different from us, deserving of a lower standard of dignity and humanity.

But Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul all remind us this week that our prison bars are just not visible to us. God saw fit to make confinement a universal human condition, so that all of us would need and call upon God's even-more-abundant mercy.