Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity by Revd Lucy

Exodus 32.1–14, Philippians 4.1–9, Matthew 22.1–14

Yesterday I took my youngest daughter to have her ears pierced. It was an early birthday present, and she was very excited about the whole thing. Getting your ears pierced is something of a rite of passage – I can still remember my own mother, after years of me pestering, finally taking me to have my ears pierced. For many, it’s the first time you get to wear more grown-up jewellery, something precious that you expect to keep – and my daughter took great delight in selecting a pair of silver studs in the shape of a flower. But why am I talking about earrings?

Before Israel left Egypt, God told Moses that the people should ask their Egyptian neighbours for silver and gold jewellery and clothing, to put on their sons and daughters. When they left, the Egyptians gave them what they asked for. People who’d been slaves departed wearing precious things, signs of their freedom and God’s blessing. (Exodus 3.21–22; 12.35–36.)

Those earrings appear again today. Moses has gone up Mount Sinai, leaving Aaron with responsibility for the people. He remains there forty days and nights. We know God is giving him instructions for the sanctuary where God will dwell among them. The people below can’t hear that conversation. (Exodus 24.14–18; 25.1–9.)

So they gather around Aaron and say: “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.” The Hebrew word translated here as “gathered around” can also suggest gathering against someone, confronting them with a demand. So the people gathering around Aaron may be putting pressure on him, perhaps even threatening him.

We’re not told why Aaron gives way so quickly. Perhaps he’s afraid of the crowd. Perhaps he thinks he’s being a good and democratic leader, giving the people what most of them want. He asks for the gold rings from the ears of their wives, sons and daughters. He casts a calf, builds an altar and announces: “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.”

He uses the name of the God who brought them out of Egypt. As far as we can tell, the people think they’re still worshipping that God. What they can’t bear is waiting for a God they can’t see. Moses has disappeared up the mountain, and the calf gives them something they can look at, gather around and carry with them. The gold came from their own ears. The jewellery they were given as they were set free, the sign of God’s blessing, is melted down and made into an idol they can see. Something God gave them has taken God’s place.

Only weeks before, they’d heard God speak the commandments from the mountain: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol” (Exodus 20.3–4). They’d answered with one voice, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 24.3). Now they’ve made an image to worship, and broken the covenant they’d only just made.

Later, when Moses asks Aaron what the people did to him, that he should bring so great a sin upon them, Aaron blames the people and says: “I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” The moulding, the casting, the work of his own hands, have disappeared from his account. (Exodus 32.21–24.)

On the mountain, God tells Moses what’s happened. “Your people,” God says, “whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.” Then comes the threat: “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.”

Moses declines that future for himself by pleading for these people to live. He answers: “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?” God has called them Moses’ people but Moses calls them God’s. He asks what the Egyptians will say if those rescued are destroyed, and recalls the promises to Abraham, Isaac and Israel. He makes no excuse for the calf, and he asks nothing for himself. He holds God to what God has done and promised, for the sake of God’s name.

The reading ends: “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”

Can God change God’s mind? Elsewhere scripture says God can’t: “God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind” (Numbers 23.19). Christians have long confessed a God who doesn’t waver as we do. Yet here Moses prays, and God turns from the disaster God has planned. The Bible retains both of these accounts, and I don’t think we should hurry to try to resolve this paradox.

What we can see is the shape of Moses’ prayer. He doesn’t argue that the people deserve better. He reminds God whose people they are, what God has done for them, and what God has promised. He prays toward the mercy at the heart of God, and he finds it there. When God passes before Moses on the mountain soon afterwards, God’s own name is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger” (Exodus 34.6).

So Moses’ prayer mattered. It was also answered by a God whose compassion was there before Moses opened his mouth. Our salvation rests on what God has done, and still our prayers and our lives make a difference.

Our Gospel reading today gives us another hard story, and it asks how we respond to a God who’s already invited us in.

The parable we heard from Matthew also appears in Luke’s Gospel, in a simpler form. There, a man gives a great dinner, and the guests send their excuses: one has bought a field, another some oxen, another has just married. So the host sends out into the streets and lanes for the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame, until his house is full (Luke 14.15–24).

Matthew’s version is darker. The host is a king, and the dinner is his son’s wedding. Jesus tells it in the Temple, during his confrontation with the religious leaders, shortly before his death. He’s just told a parable in which tenants kill the servants sent by a landowner, and finally kill his son. The chief priests and Pharisees recognise that he’s speaking about them. (Matthew 21.23, 33–46.)

The king summons the invited guests, but they refuse. He sends servants again: the animals have been slaughtered and dinner is ready. Some guests return to their farms and businesses. Others kill the messengers. The king sends his army to destroy them and burn their city, while dinner remains ready. Many scholars hear here an echo of Jerusalem’s destruction by the Romans in AD 70.

Then the servants are sent into the streets to invite everyone they find. They gather “both good and bad”, and the hall fills. No one’s first had to prove they deserve a place.

So far, those who suffer the king’s anger have refused his invitation. We might suppose that accepting it is enough. But the king enters the hall and notices a man without a wedding robe. “Friend,” he asks, “how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” The man is speechless.

Now, living in a house with daughters, as I do, if there’s another thing besides earrings that causes excitement, it’s dresses. When there’s a party, a lot of thought goes into what to wear, with different outfits tried on before a decision is reached. The preparations are part of the pleasure of being invited. For a wedding, we also think about the people who’ve invited us. We dress to honour their wedding and to show that we’re glad to share in it. What we wear is one way of responding to their invitation.

Matthew doesn’t explain why this guest has no wedding robe. But its absence suggests that, although he’s entered the hall, he hasn’t prepared to take part in the celebration. He’s been given a place freely; he’s also expected to rejoice with the son whose wedding it is. The king has him bound and thrown into the outer darkness. Jesus ends: “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

I don’t think Jesus tells this story so that we spend our lives anxiously trying to work out whether we belong to a fixed category called “the chosen”. The man in the story has been invited and has come to the feast. The question the parable puts to those of us who’ve accepted Christ’s invitation is what happens after we’ve come in.

Becoming a Christian is something like getting married. The promises are made on one day, but they’re about the life that follows: time spent together, loving and listening, taking the other person into account, and asking forgiveness when we’ve hurt them.

In baptism we’re joined to Christ, and that relationship continues throughout our lives. Through prayer and reading the Scriptures, we come to know him more deeply and learn to let his teaching guide our decisions. We bring him our needs and failures, trusting his love. We gather as a church to hear his word and receive him at his table. Our life with him continues at home and at work, in how we treat others. These things don’t earn our salvation. They’re our response to God’s gift, the ways we live within the covenant God has made with us.

In the Epistle we heard this morning, Paul gives the Philippians practical help in living this life with God. He writes from prison, uncertain what will happen to him, to friends who’ve sent him help. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he tells them. Then comes a short sentence on which everything else rests: “The Lord is near.”

At Sinai, the people thought they’d been left alone. Moses had vanished up the mountain, God seemed silent, and they made something they could see to reassure them, turning God’s own gift into an idol. Paul tells the Philippians they don’t need to do that. The God they pray to is close at hand, attentive to them, and coming to them in Christ. So he can say: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Because the Lord is near, they can bring everything that worries them to God, asking for what they need and giving thanks for what they’ve already received. Paul promises that “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Paul then tells them what to set their minds on: “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, 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.” Then he moves from thinking to doing: “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.” This is what faithfulness looks like from day to day, for people who’ve accepted the invitation and come in. They fill their minds with what’s good, they practise what they’ve learned, and God is with them as they do it.

In a moment we’ll celebrate communion, and I’d like you to notice the chalice we use. It was given by a former vicar of this church, and it’s set with rings and necklaces. You can still make out the shapes of the jewellery in the metal. These were once someone’s treasured possessions, given to be used at this table.

At Sinai, the people melted their earrings into something they could see and hold on to. Here, jewellery has been offered for a cup from which we receive Christ’s blood, poured out for the forgiveness of sins. We bring precious things to God, but at this table we receive what we could never provide for ourselves.

The wedding guest was asked about his clothes. Paul tells us where ours come from: “As many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Galatians 3.27). Isaiah rejoices that God “has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61.10). None of us can make that robe for ourselves. The faithful life we’ve been thinking about grows from what Christ gives. In baptism we’re clothed with him, and at this table he feeds us with his body and blood.

So we bring our gifts and our prayers, including all that’s still unresolved, and we hold out empty hands to receive Christ, who’s given himself for us.