Thanksgiving is a wonderful time, although the Covid rituals may overshadow our various family rituals this year. Being dual citizens gives Lois and me the special privilege of celebrating twice. Thanksgiving comes at the beginning of October and at the end of November! We do our best to take full advantage of Thanksgiving.
The Scriptures that we read this morning come from the common lectionary – assigned readings for each Sunday of the year, and they are puzzling and troubling texts for a time of giving thanks. The Children of Israel got in serious trouble when they gave thanks to the LORD through the golden calf, and the religious leaders of Jesus’ day find themselves on the wrong side of Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast, a notable time of thanksgiving.
What’s going on in these passages? What’s going on in our lives? Is it possible to get into trouble for being too thankful? It would seem so. We consider our texts together and listen for “the word of the Lord” to break through into our lives.
Exodus 32
In Exodus, God leads the Children of Israel through the wilderness from slavery in Egypt to their home in the Promised Land. Chapters 19 through 32 detail their encounter with God at Mount Sinai. In chapter 19, Moses ascends the mountain and meets God. He then goes back down the mountain to prepare the people to hear God’s words. Once they have prepared themselves, he re-ascends the mountain and receives the Ten Words and laws that work out what it means to be people living in covenant with God.
I am not clear how chapter 24 fits with chapter 19. Either it describes Moses coming down from the mountain and then re-ascending to receive the rest of the Law, or it is a repetition of his first ascent with some extra details. In both cases, it makes it clear that the whole process of giving the Law was complex and central to Israel’s identity.
Then comes chapter 32. The Children of Israel were struggling with the whole process of waiting for God and Moses to finish. They wondered if Moses were still alive, or if he had died on the mountain. The verses read in a matter of fact manner, but I suspect that they were in real distress. They wondered not only if Moses were still alive, but even if God was still with them.
Aaron responded by drawing on the images of God that surrounded them. He took their offerings of gold and made from them what we often call “the golden calf”. The golden calf has become a symbol in Christian thinking for an idol that draws us away from God. Notable in this picture is the way that this idol draws on local culture and on the people’s offerings.
God tells Moses what has happened and declares judgment on the people. They will be destroyed. Moses pleads with God not to destroy them, but rather to save them. In a stunning reversal, God agrees with Moses and spares the people ultimate judgment. The chapter ends in judgment, but here we have at least the promise that the judgment will not destroy the people.
Matthew 22
The parable in Matthew 22 is both like and unlike the parallel passage in Luke 14. The king prepares a banquet for his son’s wedding. The invited guests refuse to come and kill the king’s messengers. (In Luke 14, they simply refuse, giving their excuses.) The King responds by killing them in their turn and sending his servants out into the main streets to gather guests of all kinds in for the banquet. (In Luke 14, the master sends out his servants to gather all kinds of people from “the highways and the byways”.) Here follows a twist that is unique to Matthew’s account. The King sees one of these wedding guests who is not properly attired. He rebukes him, and then he has his servants throw the rascal out into “outer darkness” – a reference to the final judgment.
An obvious question is, “What is the wedding garment that the guest failed to put on?” The King’s own servants had just plucked him off the street and planted him in the banquet; one might wonder what the King expected him to wear. The question illustrates the danger of trying to make every element of a parable fit into a neat realistic story. Jesus is saying something important about invitation and judgment, not giving instructions on how to run a wedding.
If you want to fit it into the story in a logical way, you could say that the King provided appropriate apparel for all of the unexpected guests, and that this guest decided not to put his wedding suit on. He acted as though he was already good enough, perhaps assuming that they were lucky he agreed to come.
Whatever you decide the missing wedding garment is – faith, justification, God’s righteousness, and so on; the point is clear. God invites everyone to faith, but some sort of response is required. God gives us what we need, but we have to put it on. Acting as though we are good enough on our own is deadly and undermines everything else that has happened.
John Calvin puts it this way (quoted in Richard Gardner’s commentary on Matthew in the BCBC series):
There is no point in arguing about the marriage garment … All Christ wants to say here is that we are called by the Lord under the condition that we be renewed in our spirits into His image, and therefore, if we are to remain always in His house, the old man with all his blemishes is to be cast off and we are to practice the new life so that our appearance (habitus) may correspond to our honourable calling.
This passage comes in the middle of portraits of Jesus in conflict with the religious authorities of his day. They thought that their status as devout Jews and as religious leaders ensured their right standing with God, when in fact they were guilty of usurping God’s place in their own lives. Jesus warns them that only God’s grace can bring them into God’s presence. They had nothing in themselves to fit them for the wedding feast of God. Neither do we.
Back to Thanksgiving
I asked earlier if it is possible for us to be too thankful, or to be thankful in the wrong way. Based on these two passages – the experience of the Children of Israel in the desert and the parable that Jesus tells – I think we must say that we can indeed by thankful in the wrong way. Consider where both the wedding guest and the Children of Israel went wrong.
The Children of Israel wanted to worship God, but they were not willing to wait for God to do God’s full work in their lives. In their hurry and impatience they reconstructed God in the image of their own minds, replacing God with an image drawn from the surrounding religion. God tolerates no rivals. If it had not been for Moses’ intercession, they would have been destroyed. (This divine violence is a great mystery, which requires a separate conversation. I will not pursue it here.)
In Exodus 32, then, the wrong way to give thanks is impatiently, replacing the God who is King of the Universe with a divine figure drawn from our own thoughts and culture. On this Thanksgiving Sunday, we give thanks to God, revealed to us in the person of Jesus the Messiah.
I will not consider the first part of the parable of the Wedding Feast but ask only how the badly dressed wedding guest failed. I assume that a wedding suit was made available to him and for his own reasons he chose not to wear it. In his case, he wants to participate in the wedding feast, but he does not want to change who he is. He wants God’s gift of salvation, but he does not want God’s gift of righteousness.
Such false thanksgiving – accepting the gift of salvation but rejecting the giver of the gift – such false thanksgiving brings down a harsh response. Again, the divine violence that consigns the guest to “outer darkness” is a further problem of its own. I will not develop here, but we can talk about it more thoroughly in the Going Deeper time. For now, I note simply that it is possible to thank God and not mean it, and we see that God does not accept gratitude that simply covers up our continued life of rebellion.
Holistic Faith
So what? How does this understanding inform our giving thanks this Thanksgiving? Let me suggest a way to hold these two passages together. In Exodus 32, the people give thanks, but their impatience leads them to replace the true God in their hearts and minds with a false figure of divinity – the golden calf. We might say that the story reminds us of the importance of right belief, what we sometimes call “orthodox Christian faith”. What we believe matters, because what we do flows from what we believe. Exodus 32 makes it clear that worshipping God rightly is important.
Matthew 22 picks up the other side of the equation. Just before this parable, Matthew writes, “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.” Just after this parable, Matthew writes, “Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said.” The Scribes and Pharisees, along with the priests and other religious leaders, were as orthodox in their beliefs as you could get. You might say that “Orthodoxy” was their middle name. Yet Jesus makes it clear that they are in rebellion against God. Why? Their lives did not measure up to their beliefs. They could say the right words, but when the Messiah Jesus came, they did not accept him. In spite of their orthodox beliefs, they wanted to be in charge of their own lives. They needed a new life. They needed God’s grace to make them right with God. Right beliefs were not enough; they needed God’s righteous living – what we might call “orthopraxy”, right living – to go along with right beliefs about God. That righteousness, that right living, could come only from embracing Jesus.
In fact, right beliefs and right living go together. God wants us to have both. We worship God alone, and we live only for God. We thank God for God’s grace and mercy in our lives, and we show our thankfulness by the way that we live. As the old hymn puts it, we “trust and obey”. Trust (or faith) is not enough. Obedience is not enough. Trust that does not obey is not trust. Obedience that does not grow out of faith is not real obedience.
Obedience, right living, shows what is really inside of us. As John put it, “If you don’t love your brother or sister, whom you see, how can you say you love God, whom you don’t see?” The wedding guest’s failure to put on the wedding garment reminds us that response to God’s grace unlocks God’s grace in our lives. We are changed people, and we live like changed people.
An Example
Consider a simple example from my own experience of being married. Lois might listen to my words, and it is important for me to speak my love for her and to state my concern for her well-being. You might call that “orthodoxy” – right thinking about the marriage relationship. At the same time, nice words are not enough. When she is under pressure to finish a particular project, my willingness to provide support is vitally important. You might call that “orthopraxy” – right acting within a marriage relationship.
In fact, if I do not show my love with the way we relate to each other, my spouse begins to disbelieve my words. I teach a course in cross-cultural communications. There are many ways that we communicate, not just in words. One author counts 12 different signal systems, from words to tone of voice to body language, and so on. Some of these signals are conscious and intentional, and some of them are sub-conscious – we use them without being aware of them. When we tell someone something, if our conscious communication with words is contradicted by the subconscious signals we send off, the other person will believe the subconscious communication every time. As the old saying puts it, “What you do speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say.”
Conclusion
How might we give thanks badly? How might we actually offend God by expressing gratitude? By pretending to be thankful when we are only impatient. By saying “Thank you” when we our lives show our lack of gratitude. We should be like the wedding guests who put on “the garments of righteousness” when the King invited them to the wedding feast, not like the ungrateful guest who insisted that he was already just fine, thank you. We need God’s Spirit, and God with infinite grace and mercy gives us the fullness of God’s Spirit to live the way God wants us to live. Paul puts it like this in the New Testament reading that goes with the passages we read in the lectionary:
4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. …. 8 Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.
Remember that this is an invitation. If this call to right thinking and right living becomes a requirement for entering God’s Reign, it is a burden too heavy to bear. If it is an invitation that we can respond to, it is good news beyond belief – in the words of T.S. Eliot, “A condition of complete simplicity, demanding not less than everything.”
Texts
Exodus 32:1-14
32:1 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron.
4 He took the gold from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf; and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the LORD.” 6 They rose early the next day, and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.
7 The LORD said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8 they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”
9 The LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10 Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.” 11 But Moses implored the LORD his God, and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’”
14 And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
Philippians 4:1-9
4:1 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. 2 I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.
4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8 Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.
Matthew 22:1-14
22:1 Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2 “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ 5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6 while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.
7 “The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. 8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’
10 “Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. 11 “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12 and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. 13 “Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 For many are called, but few are chosen.”
Steinbach Mennonite Church
11 October 2020
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