all the world

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

People’d call, say, “beware doll, you’re bound to fall”

You thought they were all kiddin’ you

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hangin’ out

Now you don’t talk so loud

Now you don’t seem so proud

About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel

How does it feel

To be without a home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

Dylan could have written his version of the Fall, his great song of isolation and estrangement to the modern church. We have all heard the reports of a seismic shift in church attendance. We have all heard that today’s young people are more than twice as likely to have no church affiliation as their parents and grandparents. And many people would say that big expensive buildings such as the one we’re in right now belong to an earlier time when going to church was just what people did. While all of this is true, and may sound like bad news, I say the opposite is true—this is actually great news. When times are uncertain or maybe even a little shaky—when we’re isolated, estranged, alone, and we know it---there is an opportunity for us to take a good look at ourselves. And that is what I see the churches needing to do. With his parable of the great feast, Jesus is asking all of us to look at ourselves—with his parable of the great feast Jesus is asking all of us to see ourselves as we actually are, to see ourselves as the Christ sees us. Why might Jesus think we need to look at ourselves through his eyes? Consider the following quote from Einstein: and I apologize for the male-centric language.

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty”.

It is interesting that all of the world’s great faith traditions agree with Einstein. You see, all of the great religions have one thing in common, they all suggest that there is something a little or maybe a lot wrong with the way most human beings see the world. They express this in culturally specific ways, but at their core they are all saying a very similar thing. Islam says the world is in the state it’s in because we have forgotten our divine origins (Gaflah). Buddhism and the Hinduism it came out of both say a kind of ignorance shrouds our minds. Judaism and Christianity say we have fallen away from God—and this is often expressed as a kind of blindness. Jesus said we needed to deny ourselves in order to correct this situation—because this blindness is synonymous with self-centeredness.  All of these religions are saying there is something wrong with the way we see the world because we are cut off or estranged from the divine or ultimate reality due to self-centeredness. As Einstein said, We are separated, cut off from the whole and suffering from an optical delusion of consciousness that amounts to self-centeredness. In divinity school when I first began studying Jesus’ parables in depth, I kept asking myself, what is Jesus essentially trying to do with his parables? And the answer was simple: correct our vision by reconciling us to God.

There are three versions of the parable we heard this morning—2 in the NT, Luke’s and Matthew’s, and one in the gospel of Thomas. All three are similar in most respects. At their core they all involve a King or a rich man inviting people to a big feast of some kind. Imagine being a poor first century Jew listening to Jesus. When you’re not sure where your next meal might come from, the story of a great feast would surely grab your attention. And this is why it is such a great metaphor—in other words, Jesus is not literally speaking of a great big meal—he is speaking of a spiritual experience (metaphor for spiritual experience). And if you’re a poor first century Jewish peasant, what does his choice of metaphor tell you about spiritual experience? It is beyond your wildest dreams, and Life giving in the extreme because it reconciles us with one another and God. In the version of the story we heard this morning, there is another important metaphor. That of a wedding party. At weddings two seemingly separate individuals come together and make one couple. Wedding parties celebrate a coming together, a union. In Matthew it is the wedding party of the King’s son that people are being invited to—in other words, it is Jesus’ wedding party. Jesus was a first century spiritual teacher who taught his followers how to experience union with God, the God he called Alaha.  That is what the metaphor of a wedding party is pointing toward, the human being’s Union with God through the teaching or way of the Christ. And that is the reason for the church’s existence—to wed the human being to God—it is the church’s role to facilitate such a spiritual experience. And, generally speaking, I am afraid the church finds itself where it is because it has not done a very good job of this. Why not? The parable gives us a clue…in all three versions a king or a rich man invites people to his wedding party/slash feast and in all three versions the people decline the invite. In our passage this morning we hear that they paid no attention and went off to their fields and businesses. In the world of the parable these people represent the comfortable elite. And the fact that they paid no attention is very telling—when you don’t pay attention to something, you don’t see it very well. This gets us back to the faulty way of perceiving or spiritual blindness noted by the world’s religions. Why didn’t they pay attention? Because they were preoccupied with what some might call the things of the world—and what I’ll call self-centered pursuits. In many ways, The church has been no different. The church is the culture. It is full of people who are full of the culture and so for this reason The church has been used to support the culture—the culture that depends on self-centered ambition. Consider the so-called protestant work ethic—when the churches became so identified with the larger culture they ceased challenging it, they ceased speaking prophetically to it. When the church and the culture are identical the church cannot see the culture objectively. And again we’re back to spiritual blindness—we’re like the person Dylan is addressing in his song—we have no direction home. We, and I include myself in this, too often support and defend our culture so we don’t truly challenge it—we usually seem most concerned with pumping its values into our people—even when those values are having a disastrous effect on other cultures—and ourselves. For example, the average child born in America will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime as a child born in Brazil. The average American drains the same amount of resources as 35 people in India. The United States comprises 5% of the world’s population but consumes 25% of the world’s energy. Right here at home we have a huge gulf between communities. Many people have way more than they need while children go hungry, and men and women live lives many of us can barely imagine. The church has too often been a church of charitable gestures not transformation. And charitable gestures are not what Jesus had in mind when he said love your neighbor. Too often a counter-cultural church has been little more than an idea. But there is another way—as we heard, Jesus likens it to a wedding-party, a feast…

In the parable, the well-to-do people ignored their invitation to spiritual experience, to union with God, because of their self-centered pursuits. They said sorry, I have to go off to my business, to my land, I have to go look after my possessions. By doing this they, even though they didn’t see it, remained estranged from God, they missed the great feast. If we summarize all three versions of the story, The King next sends his servants out to invite outsiders and poor people to the wedding party. In Matthew, Luke, and Thomas’ versions, the outsiders and the poor seem to accept the invitation. This is consistent with the rest of the NT. It is not that the poor or outsiders are by nature better or more spiritual than people who have many possessions. It is that they symbolize human beings who are poor when it comes to the things of the culture. To be free from the need to accumulate outward riches, there must be the realization of inward poverty—then we receive the untold riches that union with God brings. People who have realized this state have emptied themselves of what the NT calls the old self. And so they are truly free—free in Christ as Paul said. They are free of all the suffering that is the result of self-centered fear. And being trapped in self-centered fear equals what our parable calls being bound hand and foot in the farthest darkness. To be free in Christ is to be freed from the estrangement and isolation of the outer darkness, from self-centeredness, it is to be poor in spirit, it is to realize a state of inward poverty which, paradoxically, mysteriously, brings about the treasures of a blessed state.

To transcend this old self, this cultural conditioning, is to transcend the culture—it is to be an outsider—and only this kind of an outsider can see the culture objectively and  be consciously open to or one with Einstein’s universe, Brahman, Allah, and the God Jesus called Alaha—an Aramaic word for the divine meaning sacred oneness. In verse 11 of Matthew’s version of the parable we get a clue as to how this transformation happens. In Jesus’ world, and the world of the parable, the wedding robe was a metaphor for a profound spiritual or meditative experience and such an experience allowed a person to be beyond the outer darkness or old self.  In our world, the outsiders Jesus welcomed equal those folks who see clearly that our culture encourages materialism and rabid ambition which really means rabid self-expansion.  Because they see this clearly they transcend their conditioned self and challenge their culture. At times, they might sound like trouble makers or discontented pains in the neck. But, at times, Jesus was a trouble maker and a discontented pain in the neck. Like Jesus these people have opened their eyes to the unimaginable beauty and peace that is union with God in this great feast we call Eternal Life. To go back to Dylan, We, the church, were long ago shown the direction Home—we have been invited to a great feast—to a wedding party. It is time to accept the invitation. Amen.