![The steeple of the Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-02/160725ChurchCalArt4.jpg?itok=rG9ZvXzh) # Twentieth Sunday of Pentecost Sermon October 14, 2026 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By Elizabeth Propst MDiv '26* *Ministry Fellow, the Memorial Church* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Oct. 11, 2026)* Morning. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. An important thing to know about me is that I love thrift stores. I love sifting through piles of other people's junk. I love the serendipity of finding something totally unexpected. I love great deals. Two more important things to know about me for the sake of this sermon introduction are that I also have an overactive imagination, and I like to be prepared for anything. So 10 years of digging through bargain bins has left me with some particular pieces of clothing that I would call essential and unique acquisitions with specialized real-life applications, and that my friends and family would call wildly useless. I have a black Victorian mourning gown made by a company that supplies historical re-enactors in case I ever need to dress as a sad governess. I have a flapper dress from the 1920s, hand-sewn from a beautiful champagne-colored silk, and so fragile that I'm scared to sit down in it, let alone eat or drink, or dance, but still it waits in a box in my closet, folded up in tissue paper so that I'll be ready one day when I'm invited to a Great Gatsby-themed party where everyone agrees to stand absolutely still. I am ready for a rodeo, for a garden party, for a prairie homestead, or a 1980s prom, provided that the theme is Under the Sea. I even have a wedding dress, a beautiful 1950s number in heavy brocade, complete with a floor-length train and hardly any pit stains. I probably won't be using it anytime soon for a number of reasons, including that nobody has yet asked me to marry them and it's also two sizes too small. But if somebody does ask and if I find a really, really good tailor, I have about 15 pounds of ivory brocade stashed in a suitcase under my bed. All this to say, I dearly wish that we could take today's gospel reading absolutely literally because by the standards of this parable, I am the chosenest chosen that God ever did choose. Unlike the poor man at the end of this story, who neglected to store an extra wedding robe under his goat-skin bedroll, I will not be caught unawares. But much to my chagrin, though there are many meanings we can probably draw out of this parable, a divine endorsement of mild and very tasteful hoarding is probably not one of them. Martin Luther called this passage a terrible gospel, and proclaimed in public that he did not like preaching on it. I have to say, I get where he's coming from. What can we learn about a God of love here in this confusing and violent story of what sounds like the world's worst wedding? The Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus says, is like this: a king who sends his slaves to their deaths and then inflicts vengeance on their murderers and burns their city to the ground, and then, having finally gotten the guests he so desperately wanted, berates one of them for not wearing the right outfit and casts him into the outer darkness where there will be weepers and gnashing of teeth. Nobody seems to come out on top here, certainly not the weepers and teeth-gnashers languishing in the darkness, not the king's slaves who are beaten and murdered, not the city full of people that the king's army destroys, not even the chosen guests safe in the wedding hall whose good times will be forever haunted by the fear that at the tiniest breach of etiquette, the king might rescind his invitation and toss them into the dark with the rest of the unworthy. The essential message of this parable seems to be one of judgment, rejection, condemnation. "When God calls," this parable seems to say, "You better answer. Because if you can't hack it, God's going to go out and find someone else and you are going to go to hell." I will say at the outset here that I don't think we can or should escape this parable's essential difficulty, even its fearfulness, but what we can do and what we will do together this morning is try to better understand this passage itself as well as the gospel it appears in, and the history that this gospel arises from in hope of better understanding why and how this still unsettling proclamation of judgment speaks to us here and now. Harvard Memorial Church ยท Elizabeth Propst MDiv '26 - Oct. 11, 2026 | Sunday Sermon Let's start with some history, specifically the history of the Gospel of Matthew where this parable comes from. This gospel was written in Palestine somewhere around 80 or 90 CE by someone in the generation following that of Jesus's first disciples, the one that we read about in the New Testament. We don't know much about the person who composed this gospel, but we can tell by its content that the writer was a Jewish follower of Jesus, writing for other Jews who also accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Matthew assumes that his listener knows the history of Israel and its people. He assumes they know Jewish traditions, and law, and institutions, and assumes that his listeners know the Hebrew scriptures well enough to understand biblical references even when Matthew doesn't cite all of his sources. What we also know about the Gospel of Matthew is that it was written after Jerusalem and its central temple was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 AD. The destruction of Jerusalem, particularly the temple, was an unimaginable disaster for the people of Israel, a mortal blow at the very foundations of Jewish practice and identity. The temple and its priest served as the center, not only of spiritual life, but also political, economic, cultural life, and authority in ancient Judea. The temple and its priests were the most important figures across all aspects of communal life. And so, after the vast majority of these priests were executed or exiled by the Romans, a significant power vacuum arose, not only in terms of religious practice, but also in terms of governance, of group identity, of destiny, and self-definition. In the decades after 70 and the raising of Jerusalem, dozens of different Jewish sects arose, the early Christ followers with the writer of the Gospel of Matthew among them included. These sects began jockeying for power and debating which among them held true authority. It's into the midst of this massive chaotic crisis that the Gospel of Matthew is written by a Jewish sectarian who A, wants to make clear that Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah, so we should all get on board; and B, to lay out in detail how God through Jesus is calling the faithful to live. As part of this, given the political and spiritual insanity going on in the world around him, Matthew is very concerned with challenging and critiquing the authority structures of his own Jewish community and with laying out the particular understanding of authority and righteousness that Jesus' life and death give to us. So Matthew, Jewish gospel written for the Jewish community, but despite these origins, as a gospel fundamentally concerned with and committed to Jewish life, for most of Christian history, the meaning of this parable has been read as the exact opposite. John Calvin, preaching on this message, said that, "There is no room to doubt that this discourse is expressly leveled against the Jews." This allegorical interpretation reads the parable as a symbolization of God's rejection of the Jewish people. The king is God, the king's slaves are all the prophets that God sent prior to Jesus. The first set of guests are the Jews who have rejected or persecuted God's prophets, and so God destroys them and replaces them with the second set of guests, i.e., Gentile Christians. This kind of interpretation, as we'll look at in just a second, is only really possible if you approach the parable the way that we do in church on Sundays in a vacuum without reading the larger narrative that Matthew situates it in. If we look at this larger story, the audience to whom this parable is delivered, we can help see how the condemnation that Jesus strikes here is targeted, aimed at a particular vision of worldly power and not just anybody who crosses a divine line somewhere. This story comes right smack dab in the middle of a crucial part of Jesus' life in the Gospel of Matthew. He arrives in Jerusalem preparing for the Passion, and then spends two days in the temple starting major drama with everybody that he meets. The first day, he walks into the temple; he flips tables; he throws out the money changers; he heals the sick; and then he gets into an argument with the chief priests; and then he calls it a day and goes to bed. The next day, he comes back to the temple and seeing him, no doubt unpleasantly surprised, the chief, priests, and elders of the people come up to him and ask, "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?" In response, Jesus tells three parables. You've already heard the first two parables of these three preached about by Matt and Amy over the past few weeks. The third one, the parable of the wedding banquet, is the final story that Jesus offers to this audience of elite men, who in ancient Jerusalem sat at the very, very top of the food chain. These are the people for whom this story's meaning is most urgent and directed: big wigs in nice robes, standing in the wealthiest, most famous, most influential institution in town, questioning the outsider who's come with a message that they don't want to hear. As we start to see more about this story, who it's aimed at, I'm afraid that our discomfort with the condemnation and judgment that it proclaims might only grow deeper because the more that we look at the men whom this story targets, the more they start to look like us. These priests and temple scribes whom Jesus addresses are certainly meant to be paralleled by the first set of guests who reject this invitation. Like the guests, they choose to hunker down on their little patch of land, afraid of the world outside, guarding what they have, white-knuckled, afraid of seeding any morsel of power or safety. Something that gets lost in this parable too in our translation is that Jesus is not only critiquing anybody who turns into themself, but specifically also jabbing at those who exploit others in order to sustain their power. In this parable, the king sends his servants into the main streets to gather the riffraff, good and bad, for the wedding guests. But the word translated as main streets here, the Exodus, doesn't actually mean streets. It means the point where roads end or begin. So it's the word for where the main roads come together, like the big city squares, and intersections, and gates. Like the squares all around Cambridge and ancient Jerusalem, these were the places where the most marginalized communities congregated, where you would see the most people begging, the most people sleeping on the street. These were the places, as they still are today, where the hypocrisy of a city's ruling elite are laid most bare, the places in the very heart of a city where thousands live in exile. In fact, after Jesus delivers this parable, he gives up on figurative language because it's clear that his message isn't getting across, and just delivers a straightforward diatribe against all of the powerful men gathered in the temple, castigating them for their greed, for their vanity, for ladening the poor with heavy burdens, for neglecting justice and mercy. In essence, what Jesus says in this story before he has to do away with metaphor and speak straight up, what he says to these men in the temple is that the things that you think make you safe and happy are destroying you. God is on the side of the vulnerable nobodies whose pain sustains your power, and out of all the lost and lonely people in this city, you, standing here in the center of the temple, in the center of power, you are the furthest from where God calls you to be. So like I said, I don't think that anger, judgment, condemnation are things quite so easy to iron out of this parable. I also think that our discomfort with these hard things is often justified, especially when that condemnation is directed out against people who are not members of our community. But a lot of the time too, I find when I encounter discomfort reading these passages, it's often masking a deeper fear on my part that God's condemnation is just and that I am one of the ones who will be found unworthy. I look at my own life with its abundant security and love, with all the free time and money that I can use to buy clothes that I will probably definitely never wear, and know for a fact that I am afforded the most absolute privilege, and freedom, and safety that has ever been possible in all of human history ever. This is as good as it has ever been. But I also know, like these leaders looking out from the temple at a city full of people starving and suffering, like them, like those leaders, I know that my salvation has been bought and paid for, not by Christ on the cross, but by the exact opposite, by centuries and centuries of empire, and exploitation, and Christian dominance, and white supremacy in the American military industrial complex. Unthinkable, unspeakable things happen every day, not only in dark alleys or in war zones, but right in front of us, and often within us, in our choice to look away from suffering and our complicity in it. If there is hope to be found as we read this parable for those of us to whom it is most sharply directed, it's in the opposite kind of move that I hoped for at the beginning of this sermon. It's by remembering that this is a story, not a literal account of what the last days will be like. In this parable, the invitation's repeated only twice, maybe three times, but here in this world, it comes every single day. God invites us into the Kingdom of Heaven over and over again every time you walk through Harvard Square, or Inman Square, or Porter Square, or Central, or Union and see somebody sitting on the ground who by their very presence is saying, "Look at me, love me, be here with me." My prayer for us this morning is twofold. First, I pray that one of you is slightly smaller than me and getting married very soon. And if so, find me after the service. I have a dress for you. My second prayer, as each of us leaves this place today to encounter the call, the wedding invitation, wherever and from whomever it comes, that we might answer. Amen. ## Full Sunday Service See also:- [ Sunday Service ](/blog-categories/sunday-service) - [ Sunday Service ](/archive/sunday-service) - [ Sermon ](/archive/sermons) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)