Sermon Published for Preaching Excellence Conference 2008: Imagine a Feast and Give Thanks!

Melissa Langdell      Matt 22:2-14 (The Parable of the Wedding Feast) PEP 2008

Imagine, if you will, a wide hall, filled with many people, all having a fabulous time.  There are fine ladies twirling in colorful ball gowns and paupers in assorted rags and clowns and perhaps a gentleman or two, with a couple of hearty wenches thrown in.  As you stand at the entrance to the hall, you can smell the roast lamb and freshly baked bread gliding past you on platters and several people have fragrant goblets of wine.  There is merrymaking, and it seems like a pretty good party, with all the joyful jostle of such a crowd.   But one person is missing, the person who invited them all.  And a good chunk of the people there don't seem to mind one bit.

Some folks, on the other hand, are politely enjoying the party, keeping an eye out for their host, as yet unseen, so that they can graciously thank him or her.  They don't know who it is yet—they just heard an announcement in the streets that everyone was invited, and decided to come along—but they figure this must be someone pretty amazing, to be throwing a party like this.

            And then, the host enters, a person of power and majesty.   A pretty humble person, but whose air almost emits a sense of being the owner of all of creation.  After graciously greeting everyone, the benefactor of the evening’s festivities happens to notice that one person appeared to be especially inappropriately dressed and is acting in a disrespectful manner. 

Still, the host wishes to be courteous, and says "Friend, is this really the way you dress for a party?"  At the man's speechlessness, the host is offended.  The guest is then kicked out into the bitter cold, uncomprehending.  As the chill wind hits him, he realizes it was not so much just that he was disrespectful in the host’s presence, but it was also that, even faced with the host, he did not have the grace to acknowledge his benefactor.          

      I think that this acknowledgement is a lot of what Jesus is talking about in this parable.  John Donahue says of this passage that the parable of the Wedding Feast has two different functions: to discuss how much of the Jewish elite that Jesus was trying to reach out to rejected his message, and thus how he has begun to open up his invitation to others, and also, to show that the opening up of the invitation does not mean that everything goes.  What is required is not so much status as respectful engagement with God.

We none of us knows who God is, but we do know that God is throwing this big, elaborate party called life on earth and is the benefactor of all who are here.  I think what we are called to do is give thanks, more than anything else.

Note that the host does not select a party-goer because of skin color, nose shape, turban or yarmulke.  The creator singles the person out who is not wearing the garment of God—the appropriate emanation of love and respect needed for true living into the kingdom. 

Somehow, I think that this all goes back to prayer.  I don't know about you, but when I skip my daily prayer practice, I end up with a dragging feeling all day, a sense of God saying, you forgot something!  It is basically like I am walking around in one of those bad dreams and realize I forgot my shirt.  Or had my pyjamas on in class?  You know the feeling. 
            What I'm missing is the garment of prayer.  What I'm seeking is the help of the Lord.  Because any day I start off without prayer, I start off without thanking God, without acknowledging the host of the party of all creation.

 I want to give you another image presented me by my spiritual director the other day.  We were talking about how God is just waiting for us to reach out to God in prayer, just waiting for that connection with us.  She described it like this, saying: When you reach out to God, or even when you decide to pray with something that is good for you, God is there cheering you on, saying, yes, you got it!  I am so glad you are here.  And God eagerly awaits our connections back to our source.  If we miss that connection though, we are basically left in the dark.  I am not sure I even see it so much that God puts us in the dark, but perhaps it is more as if we leave ourselves in the dark, by assuming that we can do it alone, by forgetting how small we are.

I attended college at a seven sisters school on the East Coast, a place where you could get an excellent education and also party pretty hard.  My first few years there, I didn’t really “do” the party scene, and instead was very involved in the activist and Christian groups on campus.  This changed in my senior year, when the house I lived in with three other students wanted to throw parties on a bi-semesterly basis.  At first it was really fun and different, but I remember a time or two when, watching the crowd drink too much and get rowdy, I saw how much we often went from plain good times to a cheap kind of fun that usually ended up feeling empty at the end.  I was there with a hugely diverse and intelligent crowd, but we sure weren’t enjoying each other quite the way we could.  I learned then and there, that whether you are a partyer or not, there is a Christian way to have fun that feels more respectful of yourself and others.

And that is kind of like life, really.  There are cheap ways to get through life; cheap ways to make enough money to buy the house to go to the church on Sunday and the movie theatre on Saturday, to buy what society says to buy, etc..  Cheap in that they are the easy goal in this society but costly in that eventually you feel empty and left in the cold.

But the good news is that God has invited us to the feast, and the kingdom is much bigger than us.  So if we imagine ourselves back to the feast for a moment, we can take a moment to connect with the host and walk on in and enjoy the party.  Jesus is waiting!