Dt. 34, Phil. 4:2-9, Matth. 22:1-14.

Thou and Thou only, first in my heart;

High King of heaven, my treasure Thou art.

Fortunately for me, we have three theologians in my house; and though it wasn’t easy to see how today’s readings connect, we managed to come up with one central idea. So my sermon title is “The Joy of God’s Company”. I mean “company” both in the sense of our being with God, and of those who belong as a company to God. I should like you, please, to take your BCP and open it to p. 251, where you will find today’s Gospel passage conveniently laid out under the 20th after Trinity. I hope to try to unpack this portion of Our Lord’s teaching, looking at it with just side-glances at the Deuteronomy and Philippians passages.

Jesus is using a parable. This means that He is giving us a comparison or picture. As we shall see, this one is a moving picture.

Jesus said: “The Kingdom of Heaven”. What is that? Simply put, it is the sphere in this world and the next where God is God. Human beings not in it are the out-of-tune instruments in a vast orchestra, the out-of-step dancers in the Great Dance.

“... is like unto a certain king”. We enter the Kingdom by returning to the King. It is because we see the world through a great distorting bubble of man-centred vanity that we do not see God as He is, that is as sovereign over the dance of atoms, over every cell in our bodies. If God is King, we should constantly be going to the top with prayer and thanksgiving, trusting that though we may often be confused between our felt wants and our real needs, things are in hand however it may seem. So Paul tells the Philippians to ask the management about everything and let anxiety go.

“... who made a marriage for his son”. God is giving a party, a Royal Wedding with all the trimmings.

“... and sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding”. This is the two-stage oriental invitation, the only kind which is taken seriously to this day in Arab lands: first a broad ‘Yes’ is asked for, then when the tables are laid --- a big job, as feasting will go on for days --- the guests are told that now’s the time.

“And they would not come”. So --- the height of bad manners --- they say, “But then again, maybe I won’t.” We see that we human beings are free to choose. We can say ‘No’ to God. It is a personal, very personal invitation and response, just as Moses had a face-to-face relationship with Him considered unprecedented at the time Deuteronomy was written, and Paul’s team at Philippi had their names written individually in the Book of Life.

“Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all things are now ready; come unto the marriage”. This shows that God is pressing and persistent in offering His welcome. He comes near to beseeching the people to come: ‘You should try it, you might like it’.

“But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise”. They had better thing to do, and off they went to those better things, things which seemed really serious. Notice that there is nothing wrong in principle with what they did prefer: farming and commerce are good, worthy and necessary things. It’s just that they would still have been there after the party: they could wait; which surely shows that at bottom the people just didn’t want to go. It’s quite certain, I believe, that they could have had all this and Heaven too; but with their priorities, in the end they lost the things of this world, as was bound to happen, and had nothing after them either. As the man said when asked what some tycoon had left when he died, ‘Everything’.

We are what we eat, they say. Much more fundamentally, we are what we think, what we concentrate on, set our hearts on, desire most deeply, take our joy in. If your problem is lust, or like me lust for clothes and beautiful fabrics, if your problem is sadistic images, or anxiety, or love of money, or pessimism, or resentment, there are memories, images and literature which you should definitely make a point of avoiding. Paul suggests a conscious switching of our thoughts to their opposites. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable --- if anything is excellent, or praiseworthy --- think about such things”. Recently feeling sorry for myself has been a snare to me: I am trying as a simple discipline, every time I am assailed in this way, to concentrate myself on Terry Waite and the others and on praying for them. It helps me; it’s just a shame that it takes self-preservation to persuade me out of myself in this way.

“And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them”. It seems that Our Lord is speaking here of a kind of people who haven’t even the excuse of taking other occupations more seriously: they go out of their way to insult God and are maximally hostile to His messengers. Incidentally I find it very interesting that in these few words we have a complete account of what evangelism is. The invitation is issued from Person to person by God, but He chooses to use earthen vessels to carry it; in the process the messenger may get first hurt and then shot. I notice that no servant is authorised to leave anyone out. He will need to be gentle, forgiving, peaceable and gracious at all times: it is to commend the message that Paul exhorts the Philippians in our Epistle to “let your forbearance be known to all men”, and himself strives to be exemplary, so that he can without vanity urge them to imitate what he is as well as remembering what he taught. Let’s watch that we too commend the Gospel not only with our lips but in our lives.

“But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth; and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burnt up their city. Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy.” Overreaction,, we might say, but this is a command invitation which has been despised, and the lèse majesté has been compounded by gratuitous murder. Undoubtedly the historical background to this is the rejection of God’s open invitation by His ancient people , Israel, their maltreatment of a whole succession of prophets, and the coming doom of the nation and destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of Rome. But let’s think for a moment what kind of people these were. Like most of us, they had every advantage from the point of view of faith. They were born and brought up as members of God’s people. They thought that God’s welcome was so automatic that they despised it. It is not automatic: if, for instance, you never make the baptismal promises your own, God will not receive you at the end by some kind of magic. Even the obviously pious can really be saying, “Thanks, but no thanks”.

“Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all, as many as they found, both bad and good; and the wedding was furnished with guests”. So who does get in? Pretty much anybody else who really wants to, it seems. We shouldn’t be surprised if we find the Church a mixed bunch, with a lot of imperfect characters. This is what the Kingdom looks like. Moses was buried before he could lead the people into the Promised Land: for all his greatness he was not perfect. The two ladies in the Philippians passage had done sterling service in the past: now they were having a row. Accepting our personal invitation is one thing: it can be quite a shock when we come up against the social dimension. Some of our experiences of church life can leave us not too enthusiastic about the idea of more of the same, prolonged indefinitely for all eternity. But I’m afraid there’s no getting around it: Heaven will be very social. Meanwhile, we do not help ourselves if we expect smooth sailing, in this or other respects. Some people teach that the truly spiritual go through life grinning from ear to ear. That is a childish fancy, credible if you are young and strong, with a good digestive system and plenty to put in it, but it doesn’t stand up to mature experience. The falsehood, last time I heard Billy Graham, was parodied by him as “Come to Christ and be healthy, wealthy and happy all your days -- and please send me all your money”. After the laughter had died away he added very quietly, “That is not the teaching of the New Testament”. No, Paul knew that eudaimonism, to use the old name --- modern names are Christian Science or Prosperity Theology --- was false. We know that he knew it not just because he was warned at the outset what things he was to suffer, rather than do, for the name of Jesus, but because after many afflictions he begged the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord, and promised them peace in spite of terrible circumstances, in a letter written from prison. His house arrest may not have been miserably uncomfortable, but it was definitely prolonged, frustrating and led, as far as we know, to an adverse verdict and to execution. He knew that joy is not the same as happiness, that in this life not all hopes are realised, all loves consummated, all enigmas solved, all injustices righted, all sorrows comforted, all illnesses made better. It is my experience that we begin to find out what it means to rejoice in the Lord when everything else in the way of happiness has been stripped from us. My sufferings have been light. Richard Wurmbrandt, a Romanian pastor horribly mistreated for his faith, testified, “Alone in my cell at night, starving, frozen, beaten and in rags, I danced for joy.”

Some Christians get very excited about the Last Days, and whether they and the Lord’s return are near. This is actually quite straightforward: we have been in the last days since Jesus rose from the dead, and He returns for each of us at our death, with the exception of that last generation whose ‘pre-need’ funeral packages will prove to be money wasted. All down the ages God’s company have been collecting --- what people we have met and will meet! --- because He wanted them in His house. Then comes the great moment, when He is present in person: let’s hope we’re not caught out. Some 30 (note: now 38) years ago my husband-then-to-be got turned away of a summer’s evening from the Vienna Opera House because he had no tie on. Now Chris and I have had 28 (now 36) years of unclouded wedded bliss: never a cross word, and all that, with just the occasional little disagreement -- when I am always right. It does happen that we are due to go out, and the following scenario unfolds. I descend the stairs, clothed, as always, with impeccable taste and elegance, to find him still in the shirt, pants and tweed jacket in which he has worked all day, or gardened, or the like. More or less simultaneously I will say to him and he to me, “You’re not thinking of going like that, are you?” The colloquy then proceeds with “You look much too tarted up to me” (from him) and “Really, dearest, you have no sense of fitness!” (from me). Imagine the biggest bash ever, the Royal Wedding, the Coronation, the P.N.E., Expo, the Olympics, V.E. Day, the marathon run through the Brandenburg Gate, you name it, all rolled into one, magnify it a zillion times, and you have some idea of the Kingdom of Heaven in its fullness, the kind of party God wants us to be at. Is this a “Come-as-you-are” kind of thing? What do you wear, and how can you afford it? “And when the King came in to see his guests, he saw there a man who had not on a wedding-garment. And he saith unto him, Friend (notice God’s absolute goodwill expressed here), how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding-garment?”. In other words, how had he got in like that when they would have offered him the right stuff at the door? God’s servants are supposed to be informed about appropriate dress, even if, fascinatingly, none of them had the right to turn him away for not looking right. What’s going on? What has he done wrong? Tried Grandpa’s good Sunday suit or something? What has become of the God Who looks on the heart, while it is man who looks on the outward appearance? The poor man came, didn’t he? “And he was speechless.” The question leaves him speechless. He seems not to have a clue that he wasn’t OK in there just as he was. “Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot (no more freedom of choice or action) and take him away (banishment from God’s presence) and cast him into outer darkness (exclusion from the great company and the absence of God): there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (bitter, bitter regret and a sense of irrevocable loss). For many are called, but few chosen”. It seems that there is such a thing as perdition, final and absolute, whether or not that is the extinction of the personality or a conscious experience infinitely prolonged. And in spite of God’s invitation, some choose it.

Well. This is Jesus’ teaching. Nobody’s but His. Moreover He is our main source of such terrible words. What does it mean? I do not pretend to understand it, but tentatively I put forward these few points, most of them very old ideas that do not originate with me.

· Firstly, no-one according to the Bible goes to perdition for what he does not know.

· Secondly, all Our Lord’s teaching on perdition is addressed to the earnestly but blindly religious.

· Thirdly, Hell is what Heaven feels like to those who are not comfortable in God’s company.

· Fourthly, there are those who will be found at judgement day to have been in the church but not of it.

· Fifthly, this man’s problem was that he hadn’t a clue that all his grime and muck must be covered in the sight of God.

· Sixthly, the missing wedding-garment is the righteousness of Christ, which we must put on in order to be acceptable at the only party worth going to.

May God give us the light and grace we need to say “Yes” to the joy of His company, and mean it, to know where to get the right clothing, and to put it on, while there is still time.