Amy Jill Levine1 calls the parables, Jesus’ Short Stories. Well, this one for Sunday about the wedding banquet and the guest thrown out for not wearing the right clothes, is a doozy! This does not sound like the God of our understanding to throw out this second invited guest because of what she is wearing. One interpretation of this story is that it is an elaborate allegory where everything has a deeper meaning.2 Perhaps the under-dressed wedding guest gets bounced because she refuses to CHANGE. And the storyteller may not be talking about changing into different clothes either.
Like everything else in this story, the wedding garment has a deeper meaning. It is not a white linen suit lined with silk. It is a whole new way of life. For us, it is an invitation to a life in recovery, in sobriety, in a relationship with our higher power, a change where our life no longer centers on alcohol but on the God of our understanding.
This parable also reminds us of God's countless, daily invitations to come into our lives, opportunities for us to change. I remember so many chances I had to change but refused to act on them. I was driving after having too much to drink with my children in the back seat, and I heard a message in my head, “This is not right.” But I drove on. We often do not pay attention to those constant invitations, the moments of clarity, because our minds are deadened by drugs or alcohol.
We receive this invitation daily. Hourly we are invited to celebrate a new life with the God of our understanding. Our life before recovery was a constant refusal to CHANGE, refusing to believe that we needed help, thinking we could control our life, refusing to put our life into the care of God. We had become too comfortable wearing the old clothes of our old life, denying that a new life with tailor-made clothes was a possibility if we only sought help from others. I can remember walking through my kitchen and thinking, “I know I am an alcoholic, but I simply cannot live life on life’s terms without alcohol.”
Paul describes the wedding garment as "putting on the mind of Christ." Putting on God means surrendering, laying ourselves open to being made new. It means staying connected to God and being in relationship with each other. Most of all, it means living in the promise that we will know God and that God will indeed change us. My moment of clarity came when I had a realization that I could lose my job if I did not stop drinking. Then when I heard that the answer to staying sober was connecting to a higher power, I knew it was hopeless, for I had a relationship with God whom I called my higher power. In recovery, I learned that God was my copilot, but I was the pilot, petitioning to God to get done the things I thought should be accomplished.
God constantly is looking and reaching out and calling us truly to a banquet where we become happy, joyous and free, where we change into wedding robes sewn from patterns God has given us since the world began: patterns of surrender, of making an inventory, praying to God with another in recovery to turn our life and our will over to God, making amends, meditation, silence, forgiveness, caring about others, loving-kindness to those around us, especially to those still suffering from our disease. When we stitch these new clothes up and put them on, we are GORGEOUS, absolutely GORGEOUS. I DON'T KNOW WHY WE WOULD BE CAUGHT DEAD IN ANYTHING ELSE.
1 Amy Jill Levine in The Short Stories of Jesus.
2 Barbara Brown Taylor in "Wedding Dress," Home By Another Way, 192-196.
Joanna S.
