Scripture text: Matthew 22:1-14
I’m going to be honest. I have some fairly deep reservations about our nation’s response to the terror group ISIS. I fear us getting bogged down in a quagmire we just now (in the last few years) have managed to escape. I’m not convinced ISIS is anything more than a regional threat, and I’m particularly concerned about us rushing in to stop a group of terrorists that is so deliberately and provocatively vicious. I feel we are being played. We’re doing precisely what they want us to do.
But I will also concede that I am not a policy wonk. I am no expert in foreign policy nor military strategy. I do not have access to all the intelligence that the people in our government do. I am, for better or worse, a theologian and in that capacity there is something about this that I can address. Something far more troubling that the official decision of our government. And that is the way the people, ordinary folk like you and I, are often responding to this issue.
There’s something almost cartoonish about ISIS. They are evil for evil’s own sake, something we really don’t see outside of fiction and pop culture. Oh, propaganda would have us think otherwise; it would have us believe all our enemies are nothing more more than monsters. But real life is never that simple. But ISIS is a propagandist’s dream. They are doing everything they can to shock and infuriate us, being as mindlessly cruel and vicious as possible, and we are buying up what they are selling wholesale.
On a recent episode of his show, Bill Maher had noted atheist Sam Harris and actor Ben Affleck on to discuss the various goings-on in politics of late. The discussion turned to ISIS and Harris and Maher both were very quick to say that ISIS is not an anomaly, that all Muslims are like that. Affleck rightly called them out over it, saying that they were doing the same thing that racists do when justifying their bigotry. “Some black men are criminals, therefore they all are.”
This debate has been discussed and written about rather extensively on the liberal websites that I frequent. And in astounds me how many people are agreeing with Maher and Harris. All Muslims are evil. We have a Muslim problem and we need to do something about it. These are my fellow liberals (hippies, in one sense) that are saying this. You know, hey, let’s all hold hands as one big human family and sing Kumbaya together. Those sort of people.
But as troubling as that is, even they haven’t gone as far as we Christians. No, a Christian author wrote this week also in a popular Christian magazine that the answer to the problem of ISIS and the problem of Islam is genocide. Kill. Them. All. The article was yanked in less than 24 hours, but that’s irrelevant. Someone said it. One of us Christians proposed it. Hitler killed 12 million people in his camps between the Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, and his political enemies. There are about 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and a Christian author proposed we commit the Holocaust 100 times over to answer the problem of ISIS.
I wish I could say he’s an anomaly, just one crazy author whose opinion doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But he’s not alone. We’ve been hearing stuff like this from all sorts of supposedly good-Christian folks for weeks now.
(Anyone else having trouble telling these two apart anymore?)
It’s scary. Nietzsche once famously wrote that we should be cautious when we seek to hunt down monsters, for when we stare too long into the Abyss it starts to stare back at us. ISIS beheads a few dozen people and our answer to that is to propose the slaughter of 1/7 the world’s population. Who are the monsters now?
We are Christians. We should know better.
It is perhaps not coincidental that we have this Gospel text today. This is one of the more complicated parables Jesus tells for us to understand because it requires us to look into cultural realities that are alien to us. But its message, once we understand those realities, is powerfully appropriate for what is happening to us in these frightening times.
A king gives a banquet in celebration of his son’s wedding. He, as royalty is wont to do, invites the high and mighty, the nobles, the landed gentry, the wealthy merchants, the Bill Gates, the Pope, and the Queen of England of his day. They all make excuses. They cannot come. The king, annoyed, moves to plan B. Invite the masses, the plain and ordinary folk. Let them come.
Now, in the ancient world, if you attended such a wedding banquet, it was considered very poor taste to upstage the bride and groom. So your host would provide you with a wedding gown, a robe that somewhat plain so that you would not appear to be dressed more ornately or more fabulously than the happy couple. As the masses come in, they receive their gowns, put them on, and go into the feast. All except this one, who when the king sees him so flagrantly disrespect his son and his new bride, has him cast out of the feast into the darkness.
Jesus is telling this parable (along with the two we’ve had over the past two weeks) during his final week of life. He’s in Jerusalem and the cross casts a big shadow over his dealings during this time. He’s drawing a line in the sand with the Pharisees and his other opponents. They are the ones who should be most receptive to his message. They are the ones who claim and boast of their closeness to God. Yet like the nobles and rich in the parable, they reject the king and his invitation. But when the doors are opened to the common folk, to us, there are those among us who treat this gift with the same scorn and contempt as the guest who refused to wear his banquet gown.
How many of us Christians, in our fear and in our anger and in our hatred, have taken the gown given us in our baptism, washed white in the blood of Jesus Christ himself, and have sought to soil it anew with the blood of innocent people who happen to pray differently than we do? Christ died for everyone. He seeks to save everyone. He loves everyone. Whether they know it or not is beside the point. We DO know it. The king’s invitation to his feast is a gift beyond price. Why do we cheapen it so?
This parable is a warning...to us. When the king invites us to his banquet, it is a gift that we have not earned nor deserved. We are brought to this font, washed clean in the waters of baptism, and we called by those waters and those words to be something different than what we were before. We are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ and to live by his command and example. To care for those in trouble. To welcome the stranger. To embrace the outcast. To love even our enemies.
We cannot allow ourselves to forget that when the fears of this world encroach upon us. We are called to struggle against the barbarian within us, not embrace him. To reject hate, not celebrate it. To hold to faith and not give in to fear.
Christ died and rose again for the sake of all people, you, me, all the Muslims of the world, including the monsters in ISIS. While the realities of this fallen world may force us to use violence to answer the threat of terrorists like ISIS, we cannot allow that violence and our fear to turn us into monsters as well. We are Christians. We are the baptized. We are those called to be something different. Called to trust. Called to believe. Called to love. To not be darkness like all the rest, but to be light in the midst of darkness. To wear our wedding gown proudly at the Lamb’s high feast and to show the world there is a better way than hate and anger. That is who we are meant to be. That is who we are called to be. That is what it means to be Christian. Amen.
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