The first worship service of the newly formed New Prague Lutheran Church was held on October 9, 2011, in the junior high school auditorium. They did not yet have a pastor, and asked me to preach that day. I was serving another congregation at the time, but was able to be with them that Sunday. In the fifteen years since then, the permanent name of Faithpoint was chosen, the congregation made two more moves, hundreds of people of all ages have joined, a new church was built, and, my wife and I retired and joined the congregation. What follows is the sermon I preached on that first Sunday. There was a community-wide invitation to that first service, and so my sermon had to do with the invitation to get to know Jesus.
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The text is from Matthew 22:1-10: Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’ But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
The parable begins with Jesus saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son.” My wife and I put on a wedding banquet one time, so I know a little bit about how that goes. My daughter and son-in-law got married ten years ago this past summer (now 25 years ago), and so I can tell you from first-hand experience that putting on a wedding can be a headache. There is no end to the details, there are lots of things that need to be paid for, and there are the unexpected complications, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings. It turned out to be a great day, but the planning of it was a bit of an ordeal.
Going on with verse three: “He sent his servants to those who had been invited…” There is one of the biggest problems. The invitation list. Who do you invite? How many do you invite? How many should the groom’s family invite? How do you draw the line, and then, what do you say the next time you see the ones you decided to exclude, or, those who you would have invited, but forgot all about? That was our problem. You can’t just invite everybody.
The king in this parable also had a problem with the invitation list. He sent his servants to those who had been invited, but, said Jesus, “they refused to come.” That’s a problem. You see, this was before the invention of the stamped, self-addressed, RSVP; and so here it was, the wedding day, the fattened calf had already been butchered, the steaks were on the grill, and everything was ready. But, says verse five, the people who had been invited “paid no attention to the servants and went off; one to his field and one to his business,” and so forth. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus tells a similar parable in which the invited guests all began to make excuses. One said, “I’m just closing out a big real estate deal, and I have to go see what I’m getting…” and another said, “I just got some new oxen” said another, “and I am anxious to try them out…” and another, “Well, I just got married myself, and, you know how that goes; my wife says we aren’t going, and so… we aren’t going.”
Immediately, the king revised the guest list. “Go on back out” he said, “and invite everyone you can find, good and bad included.” In Luke 14 Jesus says, “bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame– let them all come in; from the streets and alleys, from the dirt roads and country lanes, tell everyone to come. And hurry up; the food is getting cold.” Verse ten tells us that the wedding hall was then filled with guests.
What we have here in this parable of Jesus is a story of invitation. The Kingdom of heaven is like this, Jesus said as he began. Like what? Like a big party where some refuse the invitation, but where everyone, gets invited. A wedding feast was the biggest, most important, most fun, social event in the lives of those who were first hearing Jesus tell this story. Weddings can still be a pretty good afternoon and evening of fun. But parents back then did not just spend a pile of money on a deal that would last only a few hours, like we do nowadays. Wedding feasts back then lasted for three to five, to even seven days; sometimes not ending until the father was completely out of money. And Jesus is talking here about the wedding feast for a king’s son.
Who wouldn’t want to get in on that kind of celebration? Well, the ones who were first invited refused, if you can imagine that. Those listening to Jesus tell this story, most of whom would have never been invited to a king’s feast, would have been saying, “No way; who could ever turn down an invitation like that?” But that’s what happened, Jesus said. Then all the listeners would have leaned in close to hear what would come next in this outrageous story. And when Jesus said that the king invited everyone, good and bad, from every back alley and country lane, the people would have surely been saying, ‘I wish we could have that kind of king.’ (continued…)
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