Welcome to Bloom’s Sunday Mass for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Today the Church gives us the parable of the marriage feast: a king whose invitation is refused, a hall filled from the highways, and one guest found without a wedding garment. That garment has been used as a weapon for a very long time. This morning we are going to look at what it actually is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is offered in the Independent Catholic tradition, from the 1962 Roman Rite, and Bloom is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. We name that plainly, the way Old Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities have named it for more than a century, because you deserve to know exactly whose table you are sitting at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wherever you are, you are welcome here. If you came this morning worried that you are dressed wrong, in body or in clothes or in history, sit down. The king in this Gospel filled his hall with people who had been standing on the side of the road an hour before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vestments are green. This is the nineteenth Sunday of the long stretch after Pentecost, second class. St. Francis of Assisi falls today as a third-class feast and gives way to the Sunday entirely, so there is no commemoration, and every proper is the Sunday’s own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last Sunday<\/a> a man was carried in on a bed. This Sunday the doors are thrown open to everyone on the road. The Lesson is from the fourth chapter of Ephesians, and the Gospel is the first fourteen verses of the twenty-second of Matthew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Confiteor and Kyrie are said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We begin by admitting, together, that we have not come in perfectly dressed. Everyone in the room says the same words. No one is checked at the door before saying them, and no one is sent out for saying them badly. If you stumble over the words, the people beside you are stumbling too. That is how a confession sounds in a hall filled from the highways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Gloria is said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the wedding song, before a single reading. The Gloria is the hall already full, already singing, before anyone has been told who was invited or why. Praise comes first in this rite, every Sunday, as though the feast had already started before we arrived. It has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am the salvation of the people, saith the Lord: in whatever tribulation they shall cry to me, I will hear them: and I will be their Lord for ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attend, O my people, to my law: incline your ears to the words of my mouth.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The antiphon is the Missal’s own text and is printed with no Scripture source asserted. The psalm verse is the first verse of Psalm 77, without its title clause “Understanding for Asaph.”)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. The antiphon is repeated.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n God speaks first, and the first word is a promise without a condition. In whatever tribulation they shall cry, I will hear them. Not in some tribulations. Not for some people. Not only for the ones who arrive looking the part. The whole Mass opens on a God who has already decided to answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us pray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep away from us all misfortune, that, unhampered in soul and body, we may perform with peaceful minds the works that are Thine. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The Latin asks that we be expediti<\/em> in mind and body alike, unhampered, unencumbered, free to move. It is a prayer for people who are carrying too much, and most of us arrive at Mass carrying something: a week, a diagnosis, a name someone refused to use, a door that closed. It asks God to take the weight off before it asks anything of us. On a Sunday about who may come in, that order matters. God clears the road first, and only then sends out the invitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eph 4:23-28<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Brethren: Be renewed in the spirit of your mind:<\/p>\n\n\n\n And put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wherefore putting away lying, speak ye the truth every man with his neighbour; for we are members one of another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Be angry, and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Give not place to the devil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He that stole, let him now steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have something to give to him that suffereth need.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Two weeks ago we heard the opening of this same chapter<\/a>, Paul’s list of the seven things a church holds in common. Today we hear its practical end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul speaks of clothing, of putting something on, and then shows us what the clothing looks like: truth told to the neighbour, anger that does not fester, hands that work so as to have something to give away. Look at the last line especially. The thief is not simply told to stop; he is told to work so that he can give. Paul’s idea of turning around ends with someone else being fed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps. 140:2; Ps. 104:1.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight, O Lord.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2123. The lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alleluia, alleluia. \u2123. Give glory to the Lord, and call upon his name: declare his deeds among the Gentiles.<\/a> Alleluia.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The Gradual sings the second verse of Psalm 140, adding the vocative “O Lord” to its first half. The Alleluia verse is the first verse of Psalm 104.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That Alleluia verse was the psalm verse of the Introit on Ember Friday<\/a>, nine days ago. Today it is sung just before a Gospel about a king who sends out his servants to every road there is. Declare his deeds among the Gentiles is exactly what those servants were doing. And the Gradual before it speaks of an evening sacrifice, the language of the end of a long day, which suits a Mass for people who arrive tired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matt 22:1-14<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n And Jesus answering, spoke again in parables to them, saying: The kingdom of heaven is likened to a king, who made a marriage for his son. And he sent his servants, to call them that were invited to the marriage; and they would not come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again he sent other servants, saying: Tell them that were invited, Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my calves and fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come ye to the marriage. But they neglected, and went their own ways, one to his farm, and another to his merchandise. And the rest laid hands on his servants, and having treated them contumeliously, put them to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But when the king had heard of it, he was angry, and sending his armies, he destroyed those murderers, and burnt their city. Then he saith to his servants: The marriage indeed is ready; but they that were invited were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways; and as many as you shall find, call to the marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And his servants going forth into the ways, gathered together all that they found, both bad and good: and the marriage was filled with guests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the king went in to see the guests: and he saw there a man who had not on a wedding garment. And he saith to him: Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? But he was silent. Then the king said to the waiters: Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This is the same twenty-second chapter of Matthew whose closing verses were read two Sundays ago<\/a>. Today the Missal goes back to the chapter’s beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Nicene Creed is said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We say it together, the whole hall at once. Some of us came in off the highway this morning and are not sure we believe every line. Say it anyway, or let the room say it for you. The Creed was never a ticket checked at the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Begin where the king begins. He has prepared a feast for his son’s marriage, and he sends out the invitation. It is refused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So he sends it again, with more detail this time, as if the trouble might have been that they did not understand how good it was going to be. Behold, I have prepared my dinner. All things are ready. Come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hear the patience in that second invitation. The king does not change his mind after the first refusal. He sends other servants. He describes the food. He says come, as plainly as it can be said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a kind of love that keeps setting the place. It sends the invitation again after it was refused, and again after that. It does not stop because the chair has been empty a long time, or because the road between has grown very long. The table is ready. The welcome does not expire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then comes the turn in the story. The first guests will not come, and the king sends his servants into the highways. As many as you shall find, call to the marriage. And they gather everyone they find, both bad and good. Matthew puts bad first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stop there for a moment, because everything that follows depends on it. This hall was not filled by people who had prepared for a wedding. It was filled by people who were on the road that afternoon with no idea a feast existed. No one in that room had a wedding garment of their own planned. No one had been told in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which raises the obvious question. If the king gathered people straight off the road, how was any of them expected to arrive in a wedding garment? Hold that question. The parable does not answer it the way a dress code would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the king comes in to see his guests, and he sees one man who had not on a wedding garment. Friend, he says, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? The man is silent. He is bound and cast out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is one of the hardest passages in the Gospels, and Bloom will not soften it. But we will read it honestly, and that means saying out loud how it has been misused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Christians have taken the wedding garment and turned it into a dress code. Come in, the church says, but come in looking like us. Look like the women we recognize as women. Look like the men we recognize as men. Wear the right clothes, the right body, the right story, or be quietly shown out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trans people have heard that sermon without anyone ever preaching it from a pulpit. In the usher who stares at the dress. In the parish that will baptize you but asks you not to wear that to communion. In the polite note about what is appropriate for the choir. Each time, the wedding garment is made to mean the clothes on your body, and the king’s question is put in the mouth of the person at the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cruelty of it is that the wedding garment becomes the one thing a trans person can never get right. Dress as yourself and you are told it is a costume. Dress to avoid comment and you are told to stop pretending. Either way the garment is wrong, because the point was never the garment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We named trans people on September 21<\/a>, on a short list of verses produced at them as if the file were closed. Today’s claim is different and more literal. It is about the cloth itself, about a parable concerning a garment being used to police the garments trans people wear, and about who in this story is entitled to ask the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because look at who asks it. Not the servants. Their whole task was to go out and bring everyone in, bad and good. The question about the wedding garment belongs to the king alone. No one stationed at the door is given that job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what is the wedding garment? The Church has wrestled with that question for a long time, and one of the clearest answers comes from St. Augustine, preaching on this very Gospel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He asks it directly: What is that wedding garment then?<\/a> And he answers with Paul. The end of the commandment is charity. “The wedding garment is such charity as this,” he says, and then he reaches for First Corinthians, the chapter about a tinkling cymbal<\/a>, to make the point that every other gift profits nothing without it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sit with what that means for the man who was cast out. On Augustine’s reading, he was not missing the right clothes. He was missing charity. He was in the hall, at the feast, surrounded by people from every road, and he had no love in him for any of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And sit with what it means for the people who have stood at church doors measuring everyone else’s clothes. If the wedding garment is charity, then the person inspecting the guests for the right garment may be the one guest in the room not wearing one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not every preacher across the centuries has read the wedding garment exactly as Augustine did. But his answer is old, it is serious, and it was preached to a congregation of ordinary people from ordinary roads. It is worth far more than the reading that turned this parable into an usher’s checklist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not said to frighten anyone. It is said because it turns the old weapon around. The one thing a guest could not come in without was never a dress, or a suit, or a body that matches someone else’s expectations. It was love. And love is the one garment no usher can check.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul says it in the Lesson without using the parable at all. Put on, he writes, and then he describes what is being put on: truth with your neighbour, because we are members one of another; anger that is settled before sunset; hands that labour so as to have something to give to him that suffereth need. That is the wedding garment in working clothes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a man, a retired tailor, who kept a wooden coat rack in the porch of his parish church. On it hung four or five dark jackets in different sizes, a few scarves, and beneath it a cardboard box of ties rolled up neatly in rows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It started after a funeral. A young man had come straight from a building site in his work clothes, stood at the back the whole service, and left before the end because he felt underdressed beside the coffin of his own friend. The tailor saw him go. The next Sunday the rack was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He never put up a sign explaining it. People simply learned that if you arrived at that church feeling you were not dressed for it, there was a jacket by the door, and no one would ask whose it was. Over the years the rack grew. Someone added a box of soft shoes. Someone added a shawl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No one ever learned which jackets were his and which had been given by others. That was rather the point. The rack belonged to the church, and so did everyone who borrowed from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When he was asked why he bothered, he said that a church has no business making anyone feel underdressed. He said the clothes were there so that the question would never come up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That rack is a better reading of the wedding garment than many sermons have managed. The garment, in that porch, was something handed over, not something inspected. It was charity in the shape of a jacket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A woman who came back to Mass after years away said she cried in that porch, not because she needed a jacket, but because someone had thought ahead about people like her. That is what a wedding garment looks like when a parish puts it on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If none of the theology is yours, the point stands without it. Every community has a dress code it does not admit to, and every community decides whether to enforce it or to hang a jacket by the door. The second is harder and kinder. It is the only one worth calling a welcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look once more at the king’s word to the man. Friend. He does not call him an intruder. He asks him a question, and gives him the chance to answer. The man says nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many have wondered at that silence. Whatever it meant, the question was answerable, and it was asked by the only one in the story with the right to ask it. Then come the hardest words: bound, cast out, weeping and gnashing of teeth. Many are called, but few are chosen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We will not pretend those words are gentle. They are a warning, and the Church has long heard them as one. But hear what the warning is about. It is not a warning to people dressed differently. It is a warning to anyone who sits at God’s feast and will not love the people God has brought in from the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here is what this community, led by trans people and disabled people, takes home from this Gospel. We were the people on the highway. Many of us were told for years that we would never be invited, and then that we had come in wearing the wrong thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today the Gospel says the hall was filled from the road, both bad and good, and that the one thing needed is charity. We can wear that. Anyone can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are trans and you have been made to feel that your clothes were the problem, hear this plainly: they were never the wedding garment. Wear what is true. Put on charity over it. Come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you are the one who has stood at a door deciding who looks right, there is still time to put down the measuring tape and pick up a jacket for someone else. That is how anyone puts on the wedding garment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are disabled and clothes have always been a battle, with buttons you cannot fasten, shoes that hurt, a body that will not fit the outfit other people think is respectful, hear the same thing. Come as you can. The wedding garment is not sewn from fabric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you are simply tired, and came in off the road this morning with nothing prepared, you are exactly who the servants were sent to find. The king asked them to fill the hall. You are the filling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A word about limits, because it matters. None of this asks you to go back into a church that sent you out for how you looked. You are not required to stand in that porch again to prove anything. The king’s hall is larger than any building that turned you away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, carry this. Somewhere there is a table where all things are ready, a place still set, and an invitation that has been sent again and again. It has never once been withdrawn. Come in, and put on the wedding garment of charity when you get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Penitential Rite<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Gloria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gradual and Alleluia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Creed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
All things are ready<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The man without a wedding garment<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What Augustine said it was<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The rack in the porch<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Friend, and the garment given<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Offertory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n