Can you ever remember being left out of an invitation? I can remember as a child not receiving an invitation to someone’s birthday party and of course, in my childish way, felt very rejected and left out. I think many people feel left out of the mainstream.
For instance, it has been a busy few months for me in pastoral calling, because we have had three people in the hospital at various times, a funeral, and the usual older parishioners who are in nursing homes and at home and don’t get out. So I have seen the loneliness that some of them have expressed, the bewilderment of others that they are unable to do the things they normally do—to work in the yard or go shopping. Confronting illness can certainly put you into a box, away from your friends and family.
I can remember when my sister Peg was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in 1999. After a few weeks of treatment, she told me that some of her best friends had not contacted her, but others who she hardly knew came to her assistance. I have seen this phenomenon with others with chronic illness, whose network of friends seems to suddenly drop from sight. Sociologists and psychologists tell us that those friends who can’t be with someone they love who is ill are most often feeling the fear of their own mortality. Someone with serious illness may feel particularly alone.
The invitation of the king to attend his son’s wedding banquet today goes unheeded. His guests were not only rude, they were violent toward his slaves, for what reasons we don’t know. We only know that the king then invited people from the street whom he didn’t know, in place of these rude guests.
The wedding banquet symbolizes God’s invitation to all of God’s people to come to a feast prepared to celebrate the wedding of Christ with all creation, and especially with the church. Each of have been asked to come to this feast, each of us have been given fancy engraved invitations, but there is an RSVP.
The RSVP asks us to come prepared in our wedding “robe”, dressed not in jeans and t-shirt, but in our best wedding outfit, our best shoes. We don’t just show up to this wedding, but we come prepared to honor the groom, Christ. We come dressed appropriately, clothed in Christ, as we say.
What does this mean?
You perhaps know what it’s like to show up to a party underdressed—you misunderstood the invitation when it said casual and came dressed down too much, and perhaps you felt embarrassed or as if you missed something in the invitation. Just as in any wedding, we may come to the banquet of Christ dressed down: our minds are consumed with jealousy, or anger, or coveting what others have, or wanting revenge for what others have done or said, or conversely when we are overcome with guilt and cannot forgive ourselves--whatever has taken over our thoughts that keeps us from feeling the mind of Christ—those things keep us from being prepared to honor Christ.
One of the most usual things I hear from people saying why they don’t come to church or don’t want a pastoral visit is that they don’t feel worthy. Somehow they have the idea that they must be perfect to be Christians. That is not the message of the invitation to the banquet—for all are invited. The invitation asks only that you come freely, and come ready to honor the groom—come prepared with the right mind and heart—the mind of openness to the love of God and the message of Christ.
When our minds are filled with earthly things we cannot focus on the things of Christ. When we want what we don’t have, when we want to control others, when we are consumed with our own worthiness, we are not ready for the banquet, we cannot consume the feast of Christ’s body and blood.
To cultivate the readiness for Christ’s banquet, our worthiness must be left in the hands of God to deal with. We are worthy merely because of our humanness, and our acceptance of the invitation, our saying yes to God’s invitation, makes our hearts more open to contentment with ourselves and more open to loving and forgiving others in their humanness.
Our invitation keeps us close to God’s care for us, but we must respond. God is here in our own challenges, God knows our feelings of unworthiness and the feelings that we harbor about our situation. But God invites us anyway, with open arms and a large feast ready to serve us.
Do you come with violence or do you come ready in your best wedding robe? How can you make yourself open to the feast of goodness that God has prepared for you?
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