The Outer Darkness

A SERMON FROM ST. MARK’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH

NEW CANAAN, CONNECTICUT

The Outer Darkness

The Rev. Justin E. Crisp The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost ~ October 12, 2014 Based on Exodus 32:1-14, Psalm 106:1-6, 12-23 and Matthew 22:1-14

“Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

hat does it feel like when you know This one’s easy. The king equals the “Father,” you don’t belong somewhere? The and the son equals, well, the “Son!” That’s W example that first comes to my Jesus! Okay good. We’re ready. mind is middle school (who would have guessed?). When I was in middle school, So the king has invited people to this wedding I finally realized that people didn’t wear party, but they are refusing to come. So the brightly colored exercise suits and white king sends his slaves again to them with the turtlenecks year-round—including in ninety- following message: “People! This thing is eight degree July afternoons in the South. going to be awesome. I’ve already booked the Everyone else is wearing shorts and t-shirts, most amazing chef to cater the meal—we’re and I’m in my little turtleneck, sweating up a talking four courses—and the party favors? storm. iPhones!” But those whom the king had invited laughed his gimmick off. Some even All of a sudden, I get self-conscious about it killed the slaves the king had sent to extend around the age of twelve. You all know this his invitations. feeling. Your heart sinks, right to the bottom of your stomach—it’s like butterflies in your Okay—you’re thinking—I’ve got it. The stomach, except these butterflies are Father invites people to enjoy the amazing gift poisonous and demented! I caved, and I’ve of the Gospel, and people reject that amazing been wearing t-shirts and jeans ever since. But gift. It’s simple, regrettable but simple. Wait. I’ll never forget that feeling, the feeling of not The story continues, “The king … sent his belonging because I wasn’t wearing the right troops, destroyed those murderers, and clothes. burned their city.”

I’m trying to be cute about this, but I’ve got a After this, the king says, “Since my original serious concern here because in our Gospel guest list was ‘unworthy,’ bring in any rag-tag reading from Matthew this morning, Jesus thing you can find on the street, and invite seems to be on the wrong side of precisely everyone to my party.” So the slaves go out this sort of scenario. and do just that: they “gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding Jesus tells a parable: “the Kingdom of Heaven hall was filled.” Now that sounds a little more may be compared to a king who gave a like God’s grace, right? But just in case we get wedding banquet for his son.” And we’re all too comfortable now, the real doozy is yet to like—yes, yes, thank you Jesus. come.

The slaves have gone out and invited retaliated against those invitees who had everyone they see because the king is murdered his slaves not only by killing them desperate for guests. But as he strides into the but by razing their whole city. God’s that hall, he notices someone, a man who wasn’t angry at Israel. But Moses reminds God that wearing a wedding robe. It’s as if he is a God has made a promise. God has promised homeless man, invited in off the street. The to be faithful to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, king thinks to himself, “This guy had the gall faithful to this people Israel. So the Biblical not to show up in formal wear.” The king writer narrates, “the Lord changed his mind asks the man, “Friend, how did you get in about the disaster that he planned to bring on here if you weren’t in black tie?” Oh, I don’t his people.” know, because your people came out an invited me?! (I’m with the man who’s not in This so-called “change of mind” is, on a black tie… speechless.) What is Jesus doing? higher level, about a profound consistency. God promised to be with the Israelites, and Then it gets worse: the king says, “Bind him God stays faithful to that promise to the hand and foot; and throw him into the outer Israelites now because God doesn’t break darkness, where there will be weeping and God’s promises. gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.” What a jerk. What in the God makes a promise to us in Jesus Christ as world is Jesus doing? well, a promise that, in the words of St. Paul, neither life nor death, nor anything in all his does not sound like God at all, or creation, can separate us from the love of else it doesn’t sound like a God worth God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8.38- T giving the time of day to, does it? If 39). This is the God whom the Psalmist extols this is God, I don’t care for God. It doesn’t this morning: “his steadfast love endures sound like a God for the sake of whom I forever.” Jesus Christ is God’s promise to all would cancel out the agenda of my life, as Fr. of humanity. Peter preached last week, or like the God who, in the Parable of the Vineyard which we So what in the world is going on with this read a few weeks ago, gives the same salary to king flinging this poor man into the outer all those who come to work for him, darkness, where there is weeping and regardless of how many hours they work. gnashing of teeth? What happened to “Grace isn’t fair; it’s free”? In short, it just doesn’t sound like the God It seems to me that if Jesus is anywhere in this revealed to us in Jesus Christ. parable, he’s got to be right there: Jesus should be with this man who is rejected, with And that intuition makes a case that we ought the one who doesn’t belong because he’s not to re-think what’s going on in this parable and wearing the right clothes. With them even in the how we’ve assigned the characters. outer darkness.

I mean, it also doesn’t sound like the God The outer darkness. Jesus invokes this place depicted in our first reading today from three times in the Gospel of Matthew, each Exodus, so let’s go there first. Recall that God time together with this catchphrase of his: is furious with the Israelites because they’ve “where there will be weeping and gnashing of melted down all their jewelry and made this teeth.” The outer darkness—or what we, in a golden calf statue to worship just because less-embarrassed age, called “hell”—is a place they’re impatient. Moses was just taking too of separation from God, a separation from long communing with the God of the the God whose life and communion we are universe on Mt. Sinai, and they got bored. created to enjoy, a separation that causes the And God is ready to destroy them—to damned to gnash their teeth. And what an destroy them just as the king in Jesus’s parable image that is! I scarcely know of anything more frightening or discomfiting than teeth Good Friday’s crucifixion and Easter Sunday’s grinding themselves into bits. resurrection, Jesus descends into hell to be with even the damned. Jesus storms the gates Hell is what happens when human beings are of hell, putting salvation on offer even to separated from that which alone can provide Adam and Eve, because not even hell can them satisfaction and wholeness and integrity: keep our God from keeping God’s promises. God. They come unglued. They literally fall apart. There’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. Of this Holy Saturday, the early church father St. John Chrysostom declared, “[Christ] We all know that experience of being destroyed Hades when He descended into it. fractured, even in our lives on earth now, He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of don’t we? That feeling we get when we have His flesh. … Hell was in an uproar because it told so many lies that we become irrevocably was done away with.… Hell took a body, and tangled up in their web, that no matter which discovered God. It took earth, and way we go, no matter which strand we tug, we encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and just can’t seem to get free of them. Or that was overcome by what it did not see.”1 feeling you get when something utterly tragic befalls you or someone you love: when See, it is the divine “Son” who is leukemia snatches up a child who hasn’t even unrecognizable at the wedding banquet had the opportunity to live; when a car ostensibly thrown in his honor by his father accident takes not just Mom, not just Dad, the king. It is Jesus who is bound, hand and but brother and sister too; when I can’t see foot, and thrown into the outer darkness. It is outside my anxious self-talk anymore, because the “Son,” who, in his dying breaths on the I’m the only one trapped inside my head, Cross of Calvary, cries out, “God, my God, inside this head that tells me “You’re all alone. why have you forsaken me?” Not even God can find you here.” Life beats you, life brands you, and life leaves you for The Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, dead—alone. defeats the power of darkness, the darkness of hell, the wreckage wrought by separation from We come un-glued in states like these: God, by re-routing this darkness into the separated from God by the evil we have done heart of the Trinity itself. The Trinity bears or by the evil done to us or to which we are our separation from its communion of love subject in a fallen world: we fall apart. That’s within that communion, the Cross hurling the one of the forms the “outer darkness” takes. “Son” into the depths.

But do you all realize that Jesus went to the God bears our God-forsakenness, which outer darkness? That Jesus went to hell? We means that our separation, our forsakenness, profess it in the Creeds, actually. In the our hells here on earth and otherwise, aren’t Nicene Creed, which we say in the Eucharist, we proclaim “he suffered and was buried; and 1 You can read St. John Chrysostom’s Easter sermon the third day he rose again according to the online at Scriptures.” But in that narration we skipped http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom- something. In the Apostle’s Creed, which is easter.asp; he too invokes 1 Corinthians 15.55, as I the older of the two and which we profess in do at the end of this sermon. I first heard Chrysostom’s marvelous words in a Good Friday our baptismal vows and at confirmation, we sermon delivered at Christ Church, New Haven by put something between Jesus’s burial and Father Joseph Britton, my dean at Berkeley Divinity Jesus’s resurrection on the third day. We School at Yale, to whom my exposition of the proclaim: “He descended into hell,” or “He ‘harrowing of hell’ is indebted. I’ve also been much descended to the dead.” It’s what the early inspired by the theologies of Hans Urs von Balthasar church called the “harrowing of hell.” It’s and Jürgen Moltmann; if you’re interested in these themes, see von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale and what happens on Holy Saturday: in between Moltmann’s highly celebrated The Crucified God. properly “separations” at all anymore: God is from the love of God in Christ Jesus our present to us in our forsakenness; God is Lord: not even hell. God made sure of that. present to us even when we separate ourselves Because our Lord has been there, and its from him, and even when we suffer hellish darkness stood no match for his inexhaustible situations on earth. glory. “O death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?” Because God keeps God’s promises, and there is nothing, nothing that will separate us Amen.