Luke 14:15-24, The Parable of the Great Feast

We have a new worship theme about throwing parties. My favorite party story in the bible is the parable Jesus tells about the great feast. The host has invited all the big shots, perhaps his best friends.  It appears to be a classic event. I can picture something on the order Lord Grantham inviting the village elite to Downton Abbey for a grand dinner.
Here’s the story as Luke tells it.

Jesus said, “Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.’ But they all alike began to make excuses.  The first said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.’  So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ And the slave said, ‘Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’ Then the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and lanes and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.”

Don’t you love the excuses in this story?  They’re so lame. Every listener knows they’re bogus. Imagine someone saying, “I just bought a house and I have to go inspect it”.  You inspect a house before you buy it.  Same thing with a yoke of oxen. You would test drive your oxen before you bought them just as you would test drive a car before you bought it.  And remember the slave is just going to remind people of the party. They had already been invited, so can you imagine a bridegroom having forgotten he was going to get married the day of the party?  These are jokes.

I think that the reason ministers like this parable so much is that it happens to us all the time.  Ministers spend our lives doing a lot of inviting – to meetings, to overnights, to choir, to youth group events, to Sunday morning worship. And one by one those excuses come back. “Oh retreat is in April this year (It has been for 20 years)?  I forgot and scheduled my wedding that weekend and invited half the congregation.” These are like arrows to the ministerial heart.

It’s an easy parable to communicate, because everyone’s had an invitation rejected at some point in life. Have you ever tried to have a New Year’s Eve party and sensed that most folks were waffling, seeing if they got a better offer? (We have).

This parable was probably remembered by the early church to explain why they were not getting the positive response they expected from the religious establishment.  The movers and shakers were making excuses.  So the early church welcomed the people on the edges of society, those who didn’t fit in, who had been left out of places of power and influence. These outsiders experienced a great party, and in the process the master of the house was changed as well. He is now one of them. Think of Lord Grantham sitting down to dinner in the main dining room with all the servants. His life would be changed as much as theirs.  But I get ahead of myself.

Today is Reformation Sunday.   It is the day we celebrate Martin Luther’s decision to speak up against the only show in town, the established church, which we now call the Roman Catholic Church. Back then it was just The Church. Luther was a priest in that church in Germany.  He had bitter differences with the bishops and the pope.  But what really set him off was an order from the pope to raise money to spiff up the Vatican. For a decent contribution to the building fund, the pope would promise that contributors’ sins would be forgiven. This was called selling indulgences, and Martin Luther had a quota, sort of like a car salesman has to sell 30 Buicks by the end of the month.

Luther went ballistic. He nailed 95 theses, his arguments against the church, on the front doors of the church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, 499 years ago.  Paying for indulgences was just one of many things the church said one had to do to be saved.  Luther believed that one was saved by faith alone and not the many practices the church required.  For this he was declared a heretic and eventually an outlaw.

He went into hiding at a castle in Wartburg, and during this time he translated the New Testament from Latin to German, making the bible and faith open to all people, not just through priests and pontiffs. That in itself was a revolutionary act.

Eventually he split off from the Holy Roman Church and began a new church. Services were in German, not Latin, so the average person could actually understand what was said. But it still was not a very attractive party to attend. Even today, starting a new church requires courage and deep conviction. Back then, starting an entire new denomination called people to put their lives and livelihoods in danger.

Luther was one of many reformers who risked their own safety because of their faith.  Luther was well aware that 100 years earlier in Prague, the reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake for challenging the Catholic Church. Many prophets picked up the mantle of reform during and following Luther’s time. The world changed from the authoritarian rule of pope and prince to the beginning of what eventually became democracy, partially as the result of the Protestant movement.  The reformation was bumpy. It had its own excesses, but it was also based on recognizing that we are judged not according to how well we follow distant authority, but by how well we follow our own conscience.  When challenged to back down from his principles or face arrest, Luther is said to have proclaimed, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

The Congregational church of the pilgrims, one of the forerunners of the United Church of Christ, was made up of people who could not accept the authority of the Church of England. They left their homes and livelihoods to come to the new world as pilgrims on the Mayflower because of their faith.

The Evangelical and Reformed Church, the other half of the United Church of Christ has its origins in the teachings of Luther and of Calvin and made a similar migration a century later.

My ancestors, Mennonite pacifists fled from Germany to Russia in 1763 when Tsar Catherine the Great promised them freedom of religion and exemption from military service in return for their skills as farmers.  In 1873, Russia cancelled their exemption from military service and began persecuting Mennonites. Most of the German/Russian Mennonites fled, some, including my grandparents, to the US – others to Mexico, and Canada.

My point in bringing this up is that throughout history there has been high a cost to being part of a dissenting religious community. I haven’t even touched on the persecution of Jews and the wholesale expulsion of Muslims from Europe in the middle ages. All of this reminds me to ask how important is my faith and my religious community to me in these days of religious freedom. And I ask how important is it to us? If the beliefs and practices of the United Church of Gainesville were declared illegal, would I stand firm with the beliefs of this church?

In the 1980’s, when refugees were fleeing religious and political persecution in Central and South America, Sandy and I created a youth group retreat where we imagined that the US had fallen prey to a totalitarian regime similar to those the US supported Central America. In this simulation UCG had been declared illegal. The youth group retreat simulated an underground railroad to escape.

Our youth group members knew there was going to be a weekend overnight, but they didn’t know what it would be.  We notified each of them individually that they were considered religious refugees.  They were directed to go to certain checkpoints where they would be picked up by guides who would take them to safety. The guides could be identified by red bandanas they wore, but we warned our youth group that there could also be infiltrators trying to capture them, and they needed a password.

Most of the youth group made contact with their guides who took them to vans with blocked windows. They were transported to an abandoned lake house in Keystone Heights owned at the time by Bob Atkins. We blocked all the front windows of this house, so nobody would know we were there, and so the young people wouldn’t know where they were.

About a half dozen members of the youth group were indeed captured by the double agents, Sanford Berg and Stan Smith.  These young people were isolated and interrogated here in backrooms of the old church and told that if they renounced the compact of the United Church of Gainesville they could join their friends for the rest of a fun weekend retreat.
They wouldn’t do it.
They were offered pizza.  They would not renounce the compact. .
They were offered ice cream. They would not renounce the compact.
They were given a paper to sign renouncing UCG and told they could now go to their retreat on the lake. They would not renounce the compact.

In the face of significant pressure from Berg and Smith’s intellectual and spiritual challenges, not a single captured member of the youth group recanted his or her beliefs in UCG and its compact.

Eventually, we brought all of the captives to the safe house in Keystone Heights, and we spent a weekend talking about core beliefs and values. We celebrated what these beliefs and values meant to us.  After the day of discussion we sat in a circle on the floor of that vacant house lit by a few candles and shared the bread and wine of communion, affirming both the outward journey of justice and the inward journey of peace. We asked what was essential to who we were.  We considered what our faith and conscience required of us.

Andy Bachmann essentially does a real life extended version of this every time he challenges the young people of this church to leave the comforts of spring break behind to go on a work trip.

Which brings me back to the United Church of Gainesville today.  How do I form my life and conscience around a faith in God, however known? Can’t that be so all- encompassing it actually commits to nothing?

The phrase “God, however known”, for me is not an individual statement of faith. Every one of us has to hold some specific belief in or about God’s existence or non-existence, just as each of us has to be physically, somewhere. The statement God, however known, for me is recognition that others know God differently than I do, and I accept that.  Here’s how that works for me.

I believe that God, the divine, the holy, is like what the psychologist Carl Jung calls the collective, universal unconscious.  It is a realm where we can connect, love, and understand each other.  Its existence is why we understand each other’s dreams. It is how we fall in love. It is why we understand the prayers of our faith, and also of native peoples, and of religions and beliefs we have never personally encountered.  This collective unconscious is like the aquifer that exists under the layer of earth that is Florida.  The paths to this collective unconscious are like the individual wells and springs that plunge deep into the earth to find the aquifer. I don’t find my depth by dabbling on the surface. I only reach the depth by digging deeply into the faith journey that I choose to follow my well.  No religious faith has a call that says, “Study me.”  They all say, “Follow me. Explore me. Find your depths in me.”

I believe that when I get to the source, God, the holy, the collective unconscious, I then find that it is a horizontal flowing underground river that connects me to all others.  This is mysticism. It is inclusion. It is love and respect for one another. It is a connection to the eternal known by many peoples in many ways.

I commit to my faith, to my path, and to my church to find the depth that connects me to all others. That is how I perceive God however known. It is the depth that I hope and trust will guide me when my conscience and my comfort are challenged.

This open, inclusive, yet very specific journey is where I like Luther, say, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” This is my altar call of sorts to you and to me.  What is the depth of our commitment to this church, yours and mine?   What cost are we willing to bear to live the faith of this church, personally, financially, communally? When the invitation to the great feast, the party that is this church, goes out, do we say yes, or do we make our own sad excuses?

We are regularly invited to great feasts of faith. Sometimes they are easy and attractive. Sometimes they are challenging and inconvenient. Sometimes they ask us to risk safety and security.  It is good to pay attention to the places in our lives where we find ourselves saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” And in these moments we may trust that the community that is our church and the God who is our foundation surround us and sustain us.  In these moments we find our depth, our courage, and the meaning of doing what is good, and just, and true.

Prayer –
In prayer give thanks for the saints who have gone before us and given us love, direction, and even sacrificed their comfort and wellbeing to give us the paths to faith we follow today. Give thanks for the grand saints who carved out paths of justice, welcome, and peace. Give thanks for the everyday saints, our teachers, parents, friends, pastors who have been like God’s subtle touches, hugs, smiles and tears along out way.
In prayer, pause and consider where we stand, commitments that guide our lives, values we will not abandon.
Pray too for this community, in which our faith flourishes like a well-tended garden, a great party.
And in this spirit, let us read together this paraphrase of what we know as
UNISON PRAYER – paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer by Jim Cotton
Eternal Spirit, Life Giver, Pain Bearer, Love Maker,
Source of all that is and shall be,
Mother and Father of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
sustain our hope and be born on earth!
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation, strengthen us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever.