I.
How many of you feel a tinge of sympathy for the ill-clad guest who’s been invited and then he’s chucked out?
Why do you feel that sympathy? (It seems like most of you do.)
What if I told you the ill-clad guest was Vladimir Putin or a member of Hamas? What changes? Why did your opinion change there?
***
What ends do we go to have our needs met? What ends do we go to have our emotional, our physical, our spiritual needs met?
What ends do we go to when those needs are not met?
Would it be fair to say that in many cases when those needs are not met, we have recourse to sin of some kind or another, whether it’s emotional abuse, whether it’s various kinds of spirituality that are not Christian, whether it’s physical abuse, whether it’s fornication, adultery, pornography, terrorism?
What sort of sins do we have recourse to when our needs are not met?
Let’s have a gut check here right now. Are your sins bringing you joy in your life? If yes, then this message is not for you.
***
I used to have a mood tracker on my phone. It would ask me politely every four hours how I was feeling.
And the options were: “Really great, great, very good, good, okay, sad, blue, depressed, ashamed, rejected, sense of dread, jittery, anxious, plain old angry,” or the worst, “abandoned and persecuted.”
(You can make up your own entries, so I’ll let you guess which ones I made up.)
Needless to say, when I looked back at my chart over many months, it was clear that many of my efforts were not bringing me joy.
II.
Today’s message is a tough message.
Jesus is again talking about “outer darkness” and the “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” This time He adds a little bit more vigor to it, and He says what seems to be a very unfair statement: “Many are called but few are chosen.”
And I wonder if that’s the root of our problem.
We feel called, and yet, somehow, we’re robbed of our joy. My mood graph certainly showed evidence of that theft.
We face, because of this stealing, this theft, this robbing of our joy, we face rejection, and we face depression, and so when Paul says today: “rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice,” it can sound a little like salt rubbed into the wounds.
What do you mean rejoice?
We’ve got another parable today. It’s similar to the parables we’ve been reading these past couple of weeks. It’s another parable about a king.
You should be catching on by now.
The king is always God the Father, the son is always Jesus, the slaves that are sent out are always the prophets, those few righteous men from the history of Israel that try to bring Israel back to the ways of God, and turn it away from its idolatry, and who are always mistreated, misunderstood, persecuted, cast out and finally killed.
But this parable has a bit of a twist.
There’s this ill-clad guest. The king comes in to see the guests and he notices a man there who is not wearing a wedding robe.
“Friend,” he said to him. “How did you get in here without a wedding robe?”
I don’t think the king is being rude here. I think the guest is actually dead, and I think the king is noticing one of his wedding guests has passed away. The text says that the man was speechless.
The original meaning of that text is that he’s been muzzled, rendered speechless. The man had nothing to say because he was ashamed. He knew he was dead.
He had no joy because of his shame, the shame of knowing that he was dead in his sins.
In Ephesians 2:1 and Colossians 2:13, Paul talks about being dead in our sins, and I think that’s what this man was.
I think the king discovered a corpse among his merry banquet and he did what you would do with a corpse. He had it removed.
You see, the dead don’t belong at the banquet of the living.
Another way we could put that is to say that the king asks this mute guest, “Why aren’t you happy?”
The wedding garment is a garment of joy. It’s a garment of happiness, and this man isn’t wearing joy.
He’s not wearing happiness, and he knows why. His sins have robbed him of his joy.
You see, what this gospel is telling us is that joy is proof, the living proof that we have entered the kingdom.
III.
That’s why I said if you’re joyful, if you’re full of joy, then this message isn’t for you. You’re already in the kingdom, but if there are days in your life where joy is hidden behind the veil, this message has something to say.
When we wear the garment of joy, we can go directly to God to have our needs met.
In Philippians 4:6, Paul says, “Let your requests be made known to God.”
You see, the original design of creation was that God was to personally meet or even exceed all of our wants, all of our needs and all of our desires.
We were supposed to live and be of the same mind, living in a peaceful community called Eden, but sin has removed us from that, and it blocks us from ever finding it again.
There’s a veil. There’s a shroud of shame that covers us and keeps us from God.
Isaiah describes this shroud in chapter 25, verse 7. He talks about this shroud that covers the gentiles and he speaks of the day of the Lord when the Lord will remove this shroud and he will destroy the shroud that is cast over all the peoples, the sheet that is spread over all the nations.
The shroud is death and death has no place in the kingdom.
Isaiah 25:8 says, “he will swallow up death forever.”
But God goes a step further. He says the disgrace of His people, the disgrace of His own people, the shame that is covering His own chosen people, the shame they have brought upon themselves for killing the slaves, for rejecting the Son, for murdering the prophets, from idolatry and following the ways of the nations around them has brought them shame.
Ancient Israel, like modern America, was full of individuals who seek their personal vindication and self-justification.
We seek to justify ourselves and our way of life and the lies that we tell ourselves and the sins that we have recourse to (to get our needs met). We seek to place all of that over and above God’s word of salvation.
What do you think is going on here in this little detail in Philippians 4:2, between Euodia and Syntyche, two women who have helped Clement and Paul to spread the gospel?
These are two women who have helped Paul in his ministry, but now they’re fighting with each other.
Something has happened to their relationship, and I think it probably went something like this: One of them hurt the other. One of them offended the other. One of them misunderstood the other, and they both dug in their heels.
They spoke in their own words. They spoke words to justify themselves, perhaps to save face or to save their reputation.
Maybe their sentences began with phrases like, “It’s okay that I do this,” or “It’s natural for me to be this way,” or “Everyone does this.”
Maybe their words were self-justifying. They were speaking very different words than the word that says, “I obey you, Lord, for your word is my salvation.”
You see, it is this word of salvation and not any word that we can speak about ourselves or to ourselves that saves.
Isaiah 25:8-9, it is God who must speak this word of salvation. He must speak his word over us.
Salvation doesn’t come from our lips but from God’s.
“For the Lord has spoken,” Isaiah says.
IV.
The Lord has spoken and when the Lord speaks, He creates, and when the Lord speaks He redeems, and when His word goes forth it does not return in vain.
So, Paul says, “Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
Jesus has written our names, He has written our names, each of your names. He has written your names in the Book of Life.
This is proof, this is proof of your acceptance, not of your rejection. This is proof of your acceptance and it’s the cause of your joy.
(I should have put “My name written in the book of life” on my mood chart. I need to remind myself of that!)
Paul says that Euodia and Syntyche along with Clement and himself are those whose names are written in the book of life, and this acceptance by Jesus is the cause of Paul’s — and it should be the cause of our — joy.
Paul calls each of the people to whom he has written, which is, by extension, all of us, he calls us his joy:
“Therefore, my brothers and sisters whom I love and long for, my joy….”1
Jesus removes the shroud of shame that covers our hearts.
V.
What is it like when that happens, when Jesus takes away that veil?
Isaiah 25:8 tells us when that veil is removed, we will experience the comfort of God.
“The Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.”
We are His chosen people, so He removes our shame and after the shame is removed only the joy remains.
Now, this is the work of a lifetime. This is not something you get zapped with and are expected to be happy for the rest of your life. This is the work of the Christian. This is the work of the Holy Spirit in you sanctifying you, and it’s also the work of this community here, and every church, every community gathered in Jesus’ name.
Paul says to “help these women,” so we must help these women. We must help these men. We must help each other recover their joy, which is also our joy.
That’s the mark of a church that’s working well, that we’re encouraging each other, that we’re building each other up, that we’re reminding each other that our names are written in the book of life.
When we do that, we exchange our struggle with shame for the peace of God.
Say with me now in your hearts and pray this prayer: God speak your word of salvation over me. Lord, I am done trying to save myself. Amen.
Preached on October 15, 2023 at St. Peter’s Lithgow, Millbrook, New York.
"Help these women"