Peter J. Storey - "No Party Poopers Allowed" (October 10, 1999)
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| Woman | The third reading is from the Gospel According | 0:04 |
| to Saint Matthew, the 22nd chapter. | 0:07 | |
| Once more, Jesus spoke to them in parables | 0:13 | |
| saying the kingdom of Heaven may be compared | 0:18 | |
| to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. | 0:22 | |
| He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited | 0:28 | |
| to the wedding and they did not want to come. | 0:32 | |
| Again, he sent other slaves saying | 0:37 | |
| tell those who have been invited look, | 0:41 | |
| I have prepared my dinner, my oxen, | 0:45 | |
| and my fat calves have been slaughtered | 0:48 | |
| and everything is ready, come to the wedding feast. | 0:52 | |
| But those who made light of it went away. | 0:58 | |
| One to his farm, another to his business, | 1:02 | |
| while the rest, seizing his slaves, abused and killed them. | 1:07 | |
| The king was enraged. | 1:14 | |
| He sent his soldiers and killed those murderers | 1:17 | |
| and burned their city. | 1:21 | |
| Then he says to his slaves, the wedding feast is ready, | 1:24 | |
| but those who were invited were not worthy. | 1:29 | |
| Go therefore into the main streets | 1:33 | |
| and whoever you find, invite them to the wedding banquet. | 1:37 | |
| And those slaves went out into the streets | 1:43 | |
| and gathered all whom they found, | 1:48 | |
| both the evil and the good, and the wedding banquet | 1:51 | |
| was filled with people reclining at table. | 1:56 | |
| But when the king came in to see them, | 2:02 | |
| he saw there a man not wearing a wedding robe, | 2:06 | |
| and he says to him, friend, how did you come in here | 2:11 | |
| without a wedding robe? | 2:15 | |
| But he was silent, and the king said to the waiters, | 2:18 | |
| bind him feet and hands and throw him out | 2:24 | |
| into the outer darkness. | 2:29 | |
| There, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, | 2:32 | |
| for many are invited, but few are chosen. | 2:37 | |
| This is word of the Lord. | 2:43 | |
| Congregation | Praise be to God. | 2:46 |
| Man | Let us pray. | 2:54 |
| May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts | 2:57 | |
| be acceptable in your sight oh God, | 3:01 | |
| our strength and our redeemer, amen. | 3:03 | |
| I'm going to preach on the gospel lesson this morning, | 3:15 | |
| my friends, and you will doubtless have gathered already | 3:18 | |
| that this is a difficult text to preach upon, | 3:22 | |
| which is doubtless one of the reasons why Dr. Willerman | 3:27 | |
| was so generous with his pulpit this morning. | 3:31 | |
| It was also a parable told at a difficult time. | 3:38 | |
| Jesus had had these people right up to here. | 3:49 | |
| I'm talking about those the Bible refers to as chief priests | 3:56 | |
| and elders of the people and scribes and Pharisees | 4:00 | |
| and doctors of the law, whatever their title | 4:02 | |
| these were the big deals of Israel. | 4:05 | |
| He and they are now in direct conflict. | 4:12 | |
| He knows that they can do him terrible harm, | 4:17 | |
| but the more or less polite debates in the countryside | 4:22 | |
| are over. | 4:25 | |
| Jesus has marched on Jerusalem, | 4:26 | |
| he was thrown their money changers out of the temple, | 4:28 | |
| he has virtually taken over the temple | 4:32 | |
| and made it his own pulpit, he has welcomed | 4:35 | |
| the blind and the crippled and the lame | 4:38 | |
| into its portals for the first time. | 4:41 | |
| This parable is all about trouble | 4:50 | |
| with the insiders of the day. | 4:57 | |
| Jesus has already hit them with two very stinging parables | 5:05 | |
| and here comes another. | 5:12 | |
| Just as there deciding what to do about him | 5:17 | |
| and how to quiet him down and whether they can risk | 5:19 | |
| arresting him or not, he says to them | 5:22 | |
| now tell me, do you want the good news or the bad news? | 5:25 | |
| Here it comes. | 5:29 | |
| The good news, at least for some people, | 5:32 | |
| is that the kingdom of Heaven is really just one big party. | 5:37 | |
| I always suspected Jesus was a party person. | 5:50 | |
| His first public act according to Sir John | 5:55 | |
| is to put his considerable powers | 6:00 | |
| at the disposal of a wedding feast. | 6:02 | |
| I get the impression that when Jesus and his followers | 6:06 | |
| came to any village and arrived there, | 6:09 | |
| it was like the circus coming to town. | 6:13 | |
| Everything brightened up. | 6:17 | |
| Life came with him and with his followers. | 6:18 | |
| Tony Campolo, in a book entitled | 6:28 | |
| The Kingdom of Heaven is Like a Party, | 6:32 | |
| tells thee the story of how he traveled to Honolulu | 6:37 | |
| in order to speak at a conference. | 6:42 | |
| He arrived there, of course, six hour time difference | 6:44 | |
| from the east coast of the United States to Honolulu, | 6:47 | |
| he was jet lagged, he woke up in his hotel | 6:52 | |
| at about half past two in the morning, | 6:55 | |
| he got dressed, went out looking for somewhere | 6:57 | |
| where he could get a cup of coffee | 7:00 | |
| and he found a little diner. | 7:02 | |
| Stopped in there, just one man behind the counter. | 7:04 | |
| What would you like? | 7:10 | |
| I'd like coffee and donuts and he sits down | 7:10 | |
| and he's just about to start eating his donut | 7:13 | |
| and drinking his coffee when the doors are flung open | 7:15 | |
| and in walk about eight or nine prostitutes | 7:18 | |
| off the streets of Honolulu and they've come | 7:21 | |
| for their coffee, too, and they pile into the small diner | 7:25 | |
| and they're all around him, one his left, one on his right, | 7:28 | |
| they're garrulous, they're noisy, they're a bit crude. | 7:31 | |
| Just as he's trying to make his getaway, | 7:37 | |
| he hears the woman on his left say to the other one, | 7:42 | |
| yeah tomorrow's my birthday, 39 tomorrow. | 7:44 | |
| And the reply from the woman on his right is, | 7:50 | |
| and so what do you want me to do about it? | 7:52 | |
| Throw a party and give you a birthday cake? | 7:54 | |
| And the one with the birthday says, | 7:59 | |
| you don't have to be so rough. | 8:00 | |
| I don't need a party, I don't even know | 8:02 | |
| what a birthday party is, I've never had one. | 8:03 | |
| And Campolo decides there and then what he's going to do. | 8:09 | |
| And when these women have left, he goes to the person | 8:14 | |
| behind the counter and he says, | 8:16 | |
| listen, he says, why don't we throw a party for Agnes. | 8:17 | |
| That's her name, isn't it? | 8:21 | |
| Tomorrow's her birthday. | 8:23 | |
| I'll get the decorations and I'll get a cake. | 8:25 | |
| Well, this beefy man behind the counter, | 8:28 | |
| a little smile crosses his face, | 8:30 | |
| he says, no wait a minute, he says, | 8:32 | |
| I'll do the cake, I'll bake it myself. | 8:33 | |
| And so, sure enough, half past two the next morning, | 8:38 | |
| and Tony Campolo's out of bed again, | 8:42 | |
| gets dressed, goes down to the diner | 8:44 | |
| with all the decorations he's bought during the day | 8:46 | |
| and they begin to set up for a celebration. | 8:48 | |
| A number of women come in, and are told the secret, | 8:53 | |
| until Agnes and her friend walk in | 8:58 | |
| at exactly three AM, and everybody jumps up | 9:00 | |
| and screams happy birthday, and they sing to her, | 9:04 | |
| and her knees wobble, tears come into her eyes | 9:09 | |
| and then, Fred, the man who runs the diner, | 9:13 | |
| walks out of the kitchen with a beautiful cake | 9:18 | |
| flaming with candles, and Agnes just loses it | 9:21 | |
| and breaks down and sobs. | 9:24 | |
| Her first birthday party ever. | 9:27 | |
| And he says, well, now, Agnes, blow the candles, | 9:34 | |
| blow the candles, and she blows them, | 9:36 | |
| and then he says, now, cut the cake, cut the cake, | 9:38 | |
| and she says, hey do you mind if I don't cut the cake? | 9:42 | |
| Do you mind if I just have it for a while? | 9:46 | |
| Do you mind if I take it home and just keep it there | 9:49 | |
| for a while? | 9:52 | |
| Sure do that. | 9:53 | |
| She says, I'll be back, I live two blocks down, | 9:54 | |
| and off she went. | 9:57 | |
| The kingdom of Heaven is like a party, | 10:02 | |
| here is a Christian preacher, sociology professor, | 10:06 | |
| Tony Campolo, half past two in the morning, | 10:08 | |
| having a party with a group of prostitutes. | 10:12 | |
| Now Jesus says, is that good news or bad news to you? | 10:16 | |
| 'Cause that's the way it is. | 10:21 | |
| The kingdom of Heaven is about feasting | 10:26 | |
| and balloons and joy and welcome and hospitality. | 10:28 | |
| Is that good news or bad news to you? | 10:33 | |
| The next thing he says is this: | 10:40 | |
| he says I've got some news for you, | 10:44 | |
| and you've got to decide whether it's good news | 10:46 | |
| or bad news for you, some of you won't be there. | 10:48 | |
| It's not that you weren't invited. | 10:53 | |
| You haven't been snubbed. | 10:56 | |
| My father wants and truly longs for everybody to be there, | 11:01 | |
| but not even a king can make you say yes. | 11:08 | |
| You did the snubbing. | 11:14 | |
| You counted yourselves out of the feast. | 11:17 | |
| In this parable, the responses to the gospel invitation | 11:24 | |
| are very clear. | 11:28 | |
| One response is complete indifference. | 11:30 | |
| I couldn't care less. | 11:33 | |
| A second response is preoccupation. | 11:37 | |
| I've got more important things to do with my time | 11:40 | |
| than go to your party. | 11:42 | |
| And the third is outright hostility. | 11:47 | |
| I don't agree with God throwing parties. | 11:52 | |
| I'm against it. | 11:57 | |
| I won't be there. | 11:59 | |
| And the shock of course, is that these responses | 12:05 | |
| come not from a callous and careless and faithless world, | 12:09 | |
| these responses Jesus makes absolutely clear | 12:13 | |
| are the response from the insiders of the religious faith. | 12:16 | |
| So what else is new? | 12:23 | |
| You know these big deals, Pharisees, Sadducees, | 12:29 | |
| chief priests, the rest, they had followed Jesus | 12:34 | |
| almost as long as his disciples. | 12:37 | |
| They had had somebody there whenever he spoke. | 12:42 | |
| Except they being just like the security branch | 12:47 | |
| used to be back home in South Africa in the old days, | 12:49 | |
| whenever we spoke, you could always tell | 12:52 | |
| who the security policemen were. | 12:55 | |
| You could tell because they never laughed at the jokes. | 12:59 | |
| You could tell they couldn't enter into the spirit | 13:03 | |
| it would've been betraying what they believed | 13:06 | |
| and stood for. | 13:08 | |
| And so they were always out of place at the party. | 13:09 | |
| These people had seen the joyful signs of deliverance | 13:16 | |
| and they had watched with studied indifference. | 13:24 | |
| These people, whenever Jesus began to talk | 13:31 | |
| about something that really mattered to ordinary people, | 13:33 | |
| began to raise their ridiculous religious priorities, | 13:36 | |
| preoccupied with them. | 13:44 | |
| These people had been openly hostile from time to time | 13:50 | |
| trying publicly and deliberately to undermine | 13:53 | |
| Jesus's special touch with the people. | 13:57 | |
| For them, you see, the problem was | 14:03 | |
| that the kingdom of God could never be a party. | 14:07 | |
| That wouldn't be right because they had taught everything, | 14:12 | |
| everyone that the kingdom of God | 14:15 | |
| was really an exam, an examination. | 14:17 | |
| They already had their A's, they knew the exam | 14:24 | |
| backwards, they already had a list of those | 14:28 | |
| with C's and D's and horrible F's, | 14:32 | |
| they knew who would fail, they determined who would pass, | 14:36 | |
| and therein lay the meaning of their lives. | 14:41 | |
| Little wonder they couldn't handle this transformation | 14:46 | |
| from an examination into a wedding feast. | 14:50 | |
| But there's more good news, Jesus said, or is it bad news? | 15:01 | |
| If you won't come, my father says go and get the rest. | 15:06 | |
| And the good and the bad alike will pack the wedding feast. | 15:11 | |
| Now Jesus is really laying it on, | 15:19 | |
| or certainly Matthew is, because in Luke's version | 15:22 | |
| of this parable, it is the lame and the blind | 15:26 | |
| and the crippled who are invited to replace | 15:32 | |
| the important guests. | 15:39 | |
| But here Matthew says uh uh it's more than that, | 15:42 | |
| it's the bad and the good. | 15:45 | |
| I do feel sorry for these Pharisees and Sadducees, | 15:52 | |
| and elders of the people and so should you. | 15:56 | |
| Can you imagine how their world, | 16:01 | |
| their whole frame of reference begins to fall apart? | 16:03 | |
| Because like most of us, a lot of life | 16:10 | |
| was all about who's in and who's out, | 16:17 | |
| what qualified and what disqualified people. | 16:24 | |
| That kind of thing is alive and well today, sadly, | 16:33 | |
| still in religious circles. | 16:38 | |
| We like to have out litmus tests. | 16:44 | |
| If you travel across this continent, | 16:50 | |
| you will discover a number of litmus tests | 16:55 | |
| by which people judge and determine | 16:58 | |
| whether you are going to be one of them or not. | 17:01 | |
| And they're all about who should be in | 17:08 | |
| and who should be out, | 17:09 | |
| who should come to the party and who should be kept away. | 17:12 | |
| Down the years, we have raised so many tests | 17:20 | |
| only to see God determined to break them down. | 17:25 | |
| The tests of race and income and education | 17:31 | |
| and language group and gender. | 17:38 | |
| We are so good at raising the barrier. | 17:44 | |
| And Jesus says to this group of people | 17:54 | |
| who make a life's work, they make a living out of that, | 17:57 | |
| the bad and the good will come together, | 18:04 | |
| and if you stopped obsessing about who should | 18:09 | |
| or who should not be at the party, | 18:14 | |
| perhaps you could begin to enjoy it. | 18:16 | |
| And by the way, says Jesus, if you do come, | 18:23 | |
| do come in the right frame of mind. | 18:28 | |
| 'Cause no party poopers are allowed. | 18:34 | |
| I don't pretend to understand the end of this parable. | 18:44 | |
| I've looked at what a number of other people | 18:51 | |
| think about the end of this parable, | 18:54 | |
| I am not all that persuaded about their conclusions, either. | 18:56 | |
| Where the person who's not wearing the party dress | 19:03 | |
| is flung out. | 19:07 | |
| But I do understand that while all may come to God's party, | 19:12 | |
| and while all are welcome, there is an appropriate spirit | 19:21 | |
| in which one attends a wedding feast, | 19:27 | |
| and if you're not willing to attend in that spirit, | 19:31 | |
| then perhaps it were wiser you didn't come. | 19:34 | |
| I come, surely, to the wedding feast of God | 19:42 | |
| in humble gratitude for the invitation. | 19:50 | |
| That's part of my wedding dress. | 19:55 | |
| I come amazed that I was invited. | 19:58 | |
| That's part of my wedding dress. | 20:03 | |
| I come wanting to celebrate in my life | 20:06 | |
| what matters most to my host. | 20:11 | |
| That's part of my wedding dress. | 20:16 | |
| And perhaps the things my host wants me to celebrate | 20:20 | |
| are the things that Paul talks about | 20:24 | |
| in that reading we heard from Philippians, | 20:26 | |
| all that is true and all that is noble and all that is just | 20:30 | |
| and pure, all that is lovable and gracious, | 20:34 | |
| all that is excellent and admirable, | 20:39 | |
| I come wanting, I come longing, | 20:44 | |
| to fill all my thoughts will all these things, | 20:48 | |
| with the help of my host, who is God, | 20:51 | |
| who throws this party for Jesus, God's son. | 20:58 | |
| You see, it's not so much about how good I must be to come | 21:04 | |
| or how bad, our understanding of good and bad becomes | 21:08 | |
| somewhat relative when we enter the presence of a holy God. | 21:16 | |
| It's all about knowing that just being there | 21:28 | |
| is the best news ever. | 21:35 | |
| It's all about wanting to be different enough to stay. | 21:44 | |
| It was said of John Wesley and Charles, his brother, | 21:54 | |
| that the word all was the most important word | 22:01 | |
| in their vocabulary. | 22:05 | |
| For all, for all my savior died. | 22:07 | |
| Come all to the gospel feast. | 22:11 | |
| But it was also said of Wesley and his movement | 22:15 | |
| that they who made it so easy for all to come | 22:21 | |
| made it tough for them to stay | 22:27 | |
| because staying meant changing my life. | 22:32 | |
| Staying meant being converted. | 22:38 | |
| Now that's a word we are a little cheery about these days. | 22:44 | |
| I heard about a little church in England | 22:50 | |
| where a visiting preacher came | 22:54 | |
| and spoke for the first time about conversion. | 22:58 | |
| They hadn't heard it for a while, | 23:02 | |
| and he even made an invitation and he said | 23:06 | |
| now if anybody really wants the converting power | 23:08 | |
| of God in your life, just stand up and I'll pray for you. | 23:10 | |
| And a rather smartly dressed ex-colonel of the British army | 23:17 | |
| who had been sitting in that pew for so many years | 23:22 | |
| suddenly popped out of his seat, | 23:24 | |
| standing up stiff as a ram rod. | 23:26 | |
| And there's his wife tugging at his sleeve | 23:30 | |
| and saying sit down, George. | 23:33 | |
| People like us don't get saved. | 23:35 | |
| The good news, my friends, or the bad news? | 23:41 | |
| All are invited. | 23:44 | |
| Will you come and be chosen? | 23:47 | |
| Amen. | 23:49 |