The parish has identified candidates for Holy Orders, and the members of the Diocese are in the process of affirming those calls. The individuals involved will be training locally to serve God's people in the community through All Saints.
I am excited about this new assignment. One of the little secrets that most people don't know about me is that, despite having the M.Div. (Master of Divinity, the basic 3-year professional degree for clergy) and an S.T.M. (Master of Sacred Theology, an additional post-M.Div. degree that allows a person to devote intensive study to an area of particular interest, in my case, history of biblical interpretation in the Anglican tradition), and despite having been ordained for 25 years, I have no course work on my transcript either in liturgy or in preaching. Now I'm getting to revisit these subjects, along with the others that a candidate for the priesthood must learn. They are all prescribed in the Constitutions and Canons of the Episcopal Church. It looks to me like a lot to cover in three years of full time seminary study, much less in the two years I'll have to work with these people--and they will continue in their full time work or professions both now and (until they retire) after they are ordained.
On the recommendation of my bishop, the Rt. Rev. J. Neil Alexander, I picked up a copy of Patrick Malloy's Celebrating the Eucharist (New York: Church Publishing, 2007). Professor Malloy was our speaker at the conference for priests of the Diocese of Atlanta last month at Camp Mikell. He's a very organized, engaging speaker. I'm looking forward to digging deep into his book. There's nothing like having to teach someone else to force a person to re-examine practices and presuppositions. I admit to feeling my skin crawl a little as I confront the flurry of details in this book. I am a little bit "spatially challenged." You do not want me near you in a line dance. I nearly trip and fall on my face as I think about a simple instruction to put my right foot in front of my left foot. But Professor Malloy promises that there are principles behind his prescriptions, and I believe him.
In his introductory chapter, he writes:
The liturgy is a kind of "rehearsal." In and through it the church, using the medium of ritual, behaves as it aspires always to behave, but in a very stylized and controlled way. The exchange of the Peace, for example, is seldom an actual event of reconciliation between enemies, but is a stylized gesture that rehearses the community in reaching out with love to whomever is near. By this very act of "rehearsing," the church can grow, if only by the smallest increments, into being what it aspires to be. (p. 7)I read Malloy's comment last week as I was preparing to preach at today's celebration of the Eucharist, on the strange, multivalent parable of the Wedding Banquet for the King's son (Matthew 22:1-14).
Themes of wedding banquets are bound up, in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, with a vision of a joyous, culminating, triumphant celebration of the Reign of God. The book of the Prophet Isaiah contains oracles about the feast of rich food and well-aged wines that God will provide "for all the peoples" on the Day of the LORD, the day when God will "wipe away the tears from every face" and destroy death forever. The Book of the Revelation to St. John presents the culminating vision of the triumph of God as the Marriage Supper of Jesus, the Lamb of God, to the Church. The image is rich: the slain Lamb of God, with all those allusions to Passover, has triumphed over death to be both Victim and Victor.
When Patrick Malloy says we "rehearse" who we are in liturgy, he is implying that all of this imagery and metaphor may be ringing in our hearts and minds. When the Celebrant recounts in prayer that Jesus "stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself..." Episcopalians who know Holy Writ and their prayer books may well think of the prayer we may pray daily in Morning Prayer, in which we say, "Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the Cross, so that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace." They may well see in the Cross, not only a symbol of suffering and death, but an evocation of the four cardinal directions, and remember words of scripture about people coming "from east and west and north and south" welcomed into God's kingdom.
One of the things we "rehearse" in the Eucharist is the invitation and the welcome of Our Lord to the most unexpected, most undeserving people, even to "prostitutes and tax collectors," the idiom of Jesus' day for the lowest and most despicable members of society. The Reign of God makes a place for the orphan, the widow, the foreigner, the blind, the lame, the sick, the suffering, the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned--in short, for all the people who are most easily overlooked, or, worse, most easily blamed for their own lot in life, whether or not it is their fault.
Jesus tells this parable during Holy Week, addressing the Temple officials in Jerusalem, people with whom he typically has little patience, people who represent hypocrisy, arrogance, and self-centeredness. Jesus had been telling parables that those officials heard as judging them. The shoes were fitting, and pinching! But, like all parables, this parable addresses the rest of us, as well. I know I'm not alone in finding this parable hard to wrap my mind and heart around.
- The king has issued his invitation, in a way analogous to the "save the date" messages I receive from my friends whose children are planning to be married several months hence.
- As the event gets close, the king sends servants out to tell everybody: "Come to the party!"
- People's response to the invitation, now that the time is near, range from indifference--continuing to go about their business--to outright hostility. Some of the invited guests actually kill the king's servants. Why this extreme response to the king?
- The king appears to put the party on hold while he takes retaliatory measures that remind me of nothing so much as the kind of violence I used to see on TV cartoons when I was a child.
- The king REALLY wants people to attend the party, so he sends out servants to the thoroughfares and the countryside, to gather everybody in: good and bad. No excuses. No advance warning...
- Then, when everybody is celebrating, the king focuses on one person who is not wearing the prescribed wedding clothes, confronts him, asks him how he showed up there, and proceeds to have him tied up and thrown out of the party into the outer darkness where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Gnash, gnash, gnash....
- How is that fair? It just doesn't fit with the picture that Matthew's Gospel has been building up, of the Kingdom of Heaven as being for ALL the people, as a celebratory party to which God has been issuing invitations to EVERYBODY.
Or perhaps you've heard in a sermon or a Bible study that the guy without the wedding garment is the person who is trying to sneak in without an invitation. (The king would naturally have provided the tuxedos or togas along with the engraved invitations, the explanation goes.) The next step in this way of telling the story is often that those kinds of people are Jews, homosexuals, adulterers...and they're going to hell.
In her reflections on this parable in The Christian Century (vo. 128 No. 20, October 4, 2011), Mary Anderson imagines the thoughts a parishioner might have to that kind of sermon on this parable:
Imagine that an active member in a congregation has just heard that sermon. She has tears in her eyes. She hears the judgment loud and clear. Her son-in-law is a self-proclaimed atheist and her granddaughter is unbaptized at age six. She has a wonderful neighbor who is Jewish; her longtime doctor is the best listener in the world--and a practicing Hindu. How can she be happy in heaven without them? She was told once that heaven will be so incredible that she won't miss these people, but she can't imagine rejoicing in the Lord under these conditions. She can't imagine her sweet grandchild in hell.
But the grandmother has accepted the invitation; she's put on Christ and considers herself clothed with righteousness. She has recommitted herself on many occasions to imitating Christ. So what would Jesus do, she wonders. The congregation rises to sing a hymn rejoicing in salvation, and worshipers dutifully recite the Apostles' Creed. The grandmother's voice catches on the words of faith, "he descended into hell." She's never had a satisfactory explanation of what Jesus was doing in hell between his death and resurrection. For her at that moment, after suffering through a sermon that sent her loved ones to outer darkness, she knew what the creed meant for her. Before he was raised from the dead, Jesus went to retrieve those who had not heard the gospel through no fault of their own. Jesus went to get those cast into outer darkness and bring them into the kingdom with him. If she was clothed with Christ, she reasoned, she was called to be like him.
By the time of the final hymn she decided that to really be like Christ, she would pass up heaven in order to comfort her grandbaby in hell. ..She would descend into hell as Jesus did. She left church convinced that day that if we truly live a transformed life, we can't stand by and feast while others starve and burn. That just isn't the Jesus way!
...Isn't this what Jesus did and what Jesus would do? Orthodox interpretation or not, the parable interpreted her life, and she found herself exiting worship with a slight limp [--an allusion to Jacob wrestling with God--] but rejoicing nevertheless. (p. 20)Anderson says that these parables judge us. We see in them, ideally, what God needs us to see. We hear the story in the context of our great weekly re-enactment (PRE-enactment??) of the Heavenly Party. (Another blogger on this theme, The Rev. Rick Morley on September 27th, writes about his preference for "party" over "banquet," which makes him think of plastic tablecloths and vats of overcooked green beans and rubber chicken: events to which one is supposed to go, but to which one may not really want to go.) If we read carefully, we can see that the role in this parable of the King's subjects is to really enjoy the party. The role of the King's servants is to keep crying out: "Come to the party!" The servants are NOT assigned the role of doorkeeper or of fashion arbiter. The king's servants keep inviting and inviting and welcoming and welcoming. There is still plenty of room at the party!
And the King does not give up easily. (Hearers of this parable are going to draw parallels between the King and the Owner of the Vineyard in the parable we heard last week (Matthew 21:33-41), whose chief character traits are perseverance and patience.) The arms of love are extended in an embrace. But there is freedom in the embrace. The king does not force anyone to come to the party. We can leave it up to the King to sort out these matters, and, however undeserving we think we are, however surprised we may be to find ourselves at the party, we can eat and drink with great joy. And we can say, "Thank you. Thank you, Thank you." That is what we rehearse, Sunday after Sunday, in our liturgy that is called The Great Thanksgiving. Even though the bread does not look like bread. Even though we have just a tiny taste of wine. The bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Jesus himself, offered for us. A great and holy mystery is that Jesus is the host of the feast, and the Feast himself.
My friend, the Rev. Penny Nash, preached a wise and compelling sermon on this parable this morning at Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, Virginia. You can read it here.
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