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Sermon October 9, 2005 |
A Sermon Preached at
“You know, Preacher Will, that church of yours and Mr. Jesus is like an Easter chicken my little girl Karen got one time.” So begins a parable in the voice of a radical Southern newspaper editor. The parable is from Southern Baptist preacher Will Campbell’s heartbreaking book, “Brother to a Dragonfly,” and it explains why the editor, P.D. East, is skeptical about Christianity. It is a long parable, so bear with me. “That church of yours and Mr. Jesus is like an Easter chicken…Man, it was a pretty thing. Dyed a deep purple. Bought it at the grocery store.
“And it served a real useful purpose. Karen loved it. It made her happy. And that made her mamma and me happy. Okay? But pretty soon that baby chicken started feathering out. You know, sprouting little pinfeathers. Wings and tail, and all that. And you know what? Them new feathers weren’t purple. No sirree bob; that damn chicken was a Rhode Island Red. And when all them little red feathers started growing out from under that purple it was one hell of a sight. All of a sudden Karen couldn’t stand that chicken any more.
“Well, we took that half-purple and half-red thing out to her grandma’s house and threw it in the chicken yard with all the other chickens. It was still different, you understand. That little chicken. And the other chickens knew it was different. And they resisted it like hell. Pecked it, chased it all over the yard. Wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And that little chicken knew it was different too. It didn’t bother any of the others. Wouldn’t fight back or anything. Just stayed by itself.
“But little by little, day-by-day, that chicken came around. Pretty soon, even before all the purple wore off, while it was still just a little bit different, that damn thing was behaving just about like the rest of them chickens. Man, it would fight back, peck the hell out of the ones littler than it was, knock them down to catch a bug if it got to it in time. Yes sirreee bob, the chicken world turned that Easter chicken around. And now you can’t tell one chicken from another. They’re all just alike. The Easter chicken is just one more chicken.” End of parable, except remember the beginning: “You know, Preacher Will, that church of yours and Mr. Jesus is like an Easter chicken…”
Now, Jesus tells his own parable about the Church this morning and it is not too different from the parable of the Easter chicken. Jesus’ story is that the Church is like the folks a king invited to his son’s wedding. The original wedding guests were too busy with business to come, so the king sent messengers out into the streets and invited the ordinary people in: both the good and the bad—and that’s us, the Church.
We make a lot of this analogy: it is, by Jesus’ own command, the central drama of the Church. We re-enact the wedding feast of the King every Sunday when we invite everyone, all of us, the good and the bad, to come to gather around this table and feast. We mean this to be an event of breathtaking grace. We really don’t care who you are: old or young—even kids so young they can’t say the name “Jesus”—fat or skinny, male or female, black or white or Asian, from any country in the world, gay or straight or bisexual. And we really don’t care what you’ve done. You can be as good as gold or wicked as sin, and a lot in between. Everyone is invited to join in the feast.
And just like the Easter chicken, that makes us unusual, and it makes us happy. We are bright purple people, strikingly different from all the other chickens in the yard. It makes us unpopular in the yard. People out there in the chicken world think that lording it over chickens who are different from us is what life is all about. But we keep celebrating this banquet in which all are welcome and everyone has the same status.
Now Jesus ends his story of the great banquet with a warning to the Church. He says there is a guest that comes to the feast in a business suit instead of a wedding robe and that makes the King angry. The issue here is not what the guest could afford to wear. Cut-off blue jeans and a tie-dyed tee shirt would have been enough to signal that the guest knew he was at a party. The problem is that the guest didn’t treat the feast as a party, but acted as if it was a normal part of life. Like the Easter chicken, the guest started acting like all the other chickens: pecking the smaller and weaker ones and gobbling all the food. The warning is dire. Take the feast seriously, or else. Welcome all people, the good and the bad to feast with you—or you make a mockery of this banquet.
That’s fairly annoying, I know. It means that this experience of grace that can be so powerful to all of us can also be a source of discomfort. When I feel different and excluded—either because of who I am or because of what I’ve done—it is wonderful to be welcomed into this feast and to be reminded that I am loved. It doesn’t feel so wonderful to celebrate the acceptance of others. We want to go back to our old chicken world ways and peck the little ones and grab the goodies. It is uncomfortable to be accepting. We don’t have a lot of patience with the very young and the very old. We don’t like it when the church champions gay rights or world peace, and conversely we have trouble accepting people whose opinions on these issues differ from ours. No matter how accepting we are, the church is where we’ll be challenged to be more accepting than we are comfortable with.
If that is not so, we are not the church. If we are not so accepting that it makes us uncomfortable, then P. D. East was right, “that church of yours and Mr. Jesus is like an Easter chicken” who grew up to be no different from all the other chickens in the yard. But the good news is that P. D. East was wrong. There IS a place where everyone is welcome—the good and the bad. We call that place the kingdom of heaven. And every now and then the church is that welcoming. And whenever it is, heaven is here.
AMEN