Exodus 32: 3,4,5; Matthew 22: 8-12

Honoring and dishonoring God

In many ways the Bible is written from God’s perspective.  Like in a novel, the authors take the perspective of the third person. In the Psalms and in the direct quotes God’s perspective is told in first person.  Let’s summarize what we have learned from today’s texts.  First the people of Israel are stuck in the desert and they are under Aaron’s leadership as Moses is up on the mountain receiving inspiration for the ten commandments. The worst thing imaginable happens. The people abandon God, but more than that, they wipe God out, strike God off the aboard and make up a whole new sets of gods.  On top of it they give those gods credit for all the good that has happened to them.  It’s a total dishonoring. Imagine a child has parents who have been raising the child and taking away those parents, wiping out all that they have done for the child but pretending they never existed and then making up a completely fake story with fake characters.  It would be a bit like that.  Then in Matthew there is the story of the king who hosts a wedding.  Many guests are not worthy, so others are invited. One guest is given a set of wedding clothes to wear in their size, kind of like a tux or a bride’s maid dress, but instead they show up in “jeans” to the wedding.  It is a story about dishonoring the host.  The host is God.

The questions before us, friends, is: how do we honor the God of the exodus and the God of the banquet? How do we honor God for God’s generosity?  And let’s look at it from God’s perspective. Let’s look at it from the perspective of God’s hurt, God’s dismay, God’s despair. Wiped off the board. Off the plate, off the face of the earth by the people God has loved so deeply and so desperately.  It raises a very uncomfortable question: “ to what extent are we like the people of Israel in the desert and to what degree are we like the bad host.  And this is not about what we wear to church.  This is about how we honor or dishonor God.   Twenty-five years ago Methodist Church leaders Stanley Hauerwas and William  Willimon wrote a book called :”Resident Aliens.”  It was a book about mainline churches in the US, especially the south who had been partially hijacked by he moral majority revolution that fused traditional Christian faith with conservative politics. The argument of the authors was the Church should be an island in society, away from religion that has been perverted by politics.  Christians in American society should be resident aliens.  They should be part of it, but separate, alien but present. Now twenty five years a number of Christian thinkers are reviewing that book once more and a number of them are scathing in their critique.  “The church should not,” they say, “be insular. It should not be separate from the world, but transform the world.”

Friends, this congregation could not be what it is today had it been an island, stuck in its own traditions and culture.   In order to become what we are now we had to open the doors wide and welcome everyone. This we did at a risk.  It took time to be ready for this.  Without realizing we rejected the message at the heart of that book, even though your current pastor is a resident alien and we let the world flood in. By letting the world flood in we hoped to transform it.

It was a difficult task because World War II really made Japanese Americans radical aliens, but this church realized that it could not continue without letting the society come in that had alienated them.  And amazingly, many people that wound up sitting in our pews felt alienated from the Church.  How wonderful a story is that? Instead of becoming a congregation that isolated itself from the world, we have become a place for people to come in from the world who felt alienated from the church.  Resident aliens inviting resident aliens in a sense.

Let’s pat ourselves o the back for a few seconds. Okay, now stop.  For we are not perfect.  Because we are talking about honoring God.  Are we doing that?  Are we really responding to God’s call to be part of God’s life.   What is the right way?   You see, I think it boils down to this: our job is to show that God loves people through word and action and as Christians we believe that Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s love to the world. It’s that simple and that hard.  We can be good guests of God by being good hosts.  This is crucial.  I think this congregation has survived, by God’s grace, through the power of hospitality in our congregation. Most of the people who stepped into our sanctuary or into our social hall or into our …kitchen over the last decade or so were different from us in one way or another, in experience or ethnicity or theology or religion or some other way.  But if they returned and stayed, it was in the end because of the power of your hospitality.  As a church we honor God by welcoming others to God’s house of worship through an act of radical hospitality. It is this act of hospitality that we must continually try to perfect. May God help us.