A week ago I drove up to visit family and friends in New York and Connecticut. On that seemingly endless New Jersey Turnpike I had my IPOD connected to the car's stereo system. It was playing on shuffle thereby giving me the best radio station out there: all the songs I love with none of the crap or commercials. And yes, I am one of those crazy persons you see on the road singing away at the top of their lungs, with my dog Allie in the back seat covering her ears. Even though it was two weeks ahead of time, as I was singing and driving I was thinking about today's Gospel reading and considering preaching possibilities. In one of those flukes that happen in life the REM song "World Leader Pretend" came on, and I was singing along until I came to the verse that says "It's high time I raze the walls that I've constructed".  Don't you just love a good turn of phrase? Razing as in tearing down, as opposed to raising as in building: word-smithing can be so much fun. That verse got me thinking about today's Gospel in a different way.

As is probably obvious, this is another judgment parable, the give-away being Matthew's infamous "weeping and gnashing of teeth" line. This is actually the third and last in a triad of judgment parables we have recently heard: the parable of the two sons (one saying yup I'll go to the field and then doesn't and the other son who says, nope not gonna, and then changes his mind and he does go); and the parable of the vineyard and the lease-holders (those who refused to live up to their end of the bargain to provide the fruits of the vineyard). And then we have today's judgment parable that has a whole bunch of disconcerting elements within the parable. We have a wedding banquet that none of the invited guests come to. The king sends his slaves out who are ignored by some and killed by others. The king then gets pissed and kills those and burns the city and sends more slaves to invite everyone and anyone they can find to the banquet. And then this king notices an individual not appropriately attired, although that wasn't made part of the invite, and he has this individual bound hand and foot thrown out into the darkness. There is this seeming conflict between the king inviting everyone found on the road and then kicking someone out for not wearing the proper garment. This is not the most balanced of accounts we have come across in our Gospel selections of late.

All this ignoring and killing and burning and binding actually gets in the way of understanding this parable as it is meant to be understood. This is one of those parables that is utilized by so many as a reason to condemn people, to exclude people from being part of the Body of Christ. And that is certainly one way to understand and interpret this Gospel. There are others though. By getting lost in the condemnation descriptions in this parable we can easily lose the idea that this wedding banquet we are being invited to is just that: a wedding feast. The Kingdom of God then is a joyous thing, like a wedding banquet is meant to be a joyous event. We are not being invited here to some somber, breast-beating, self-flagellation event, but rather we are invited into joy. As the Letter to the Philippians reminds us we are called to Rejoice in this new-found kingdom!

Many of the commentators on this passage indicate that the individual kicked out of the wedding banquet for not wearing the proper garment is indicative of this individual not having a certain goodness within. The individual was missing a certain attitude of respect, the individual was too complacent about life and how to live life.  Those are all good and appropriate and possible interpretations. Perhaps there is another. In early Christendom, when a person became part of the Christian community, when the conversion happened, they changed clothes: by this physical act they were clearly saying that they were giving up the old and were on to something new in their lives. They were declaring themselves as something new, something different by this outward physical manifestation of this new and inward change. Sound familiar? (BCP page number 857, "The Sacraments" exercise.) This was a sacramental act on their part. They were proving not only that they were ready for this change, but that this change had occurred and they were changed and ready to appear before God and their new spiritual family.