Sermon: "Everyone is Invited"

1st in the "Something to Celebrate" series.
Delivered December 3, 2006 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6

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Well good morning. I came to Central 3 1/2 years ago. So this is my fourth Christmas, my fourth Advent with you. One of the things that I discovered the first time I came here, the very first Christmas that I celebrated with you is that Central doesn't have a normal bulletin cover. Here is a normal bulletin cover, would you put a normal bulletin cover up? That is a normal bulletin cover. You know, a candle, some holly, a ribbon, it's got to have red and green in it. You know what I like about this? It's comfortable. It's predictable. It presents to me a Christmas that's just for me. It doesn't demand anything from me, except I go to some parties and I get a lot of presents. I like that kind of Christmas. But I came to Central Presbyterian Church where we get bulletin covers like this one up here. (shows bulletin) Okay? Something that actually makes me think, and this has been true every year I have come here. Here we've got at least three different generations of artwork put all together and here is Jesus and look at that guy right in the middle of the group. In the middle of this party these two pieces of artwork put together that guy in the middle is someone I haven't been to a party with since the keggar's in the college. Okay, I went to plenty of parties with him in college, but I haven't been to a party with him since. He is not the sort of guy I would be real eager to invite. And so here is a picture of Jesus who obviously does not seem like he belongs there, but there he is in the posture of a host in the middle of these people that I clearly wouldn't party with.

And that has directly to do with what Jesus says in his words today in the gospel of Luke. So I would like to go in to that together and take a look at what Jesus says. We go to Luke, Chapter 14 and I want to begin with one verse at the front of that, Verse 15.

"When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, "Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God."

Let's pray. God we pray now that as we go in to your word you will open our eyes to the things that Jesus said and then out of that what we need to hear and whatever is not from you, we pray that you will push that down in our minds and help us to focus in on what clearly comes from you, so that we might respond to you with obedience that comes through faith. For we ask it in Jesus name. Amen.

This guy is in this party with all the religious leaders of this community and they've got this special rabbi in the party with them. And as they enjoy this banquet together this man has a natural association in his mind because of Jewish teaching where he thinks about the fact that in the Old Testament there is a promise, there is a promise about a day when God is going to hold a banquet and is going to invite people to enjoy that party, that celebration with him forever. And so this guy naturally when he sees this party and people are talking about banqueting and things like that, he makes this comment to Jesus, "Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God". This is an idea that is all over the Old Testament. There is one place in particular that I want to point to and that's in Isaiah, Chapter 25. So if you will turn to that in your Bibles; it will also come up on the screen. Isaiah+25:6-8.

"On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine- the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth. The Lord has spoken."

What an incredible picture of the future: of the end of history as we know it and the beginning of an entirely new kind of history when God holds a banquet. Rich food, for whom? For all peoples. Best of meats, finest of wines; he will destroy the shroud, the sheet that covers all nations, he will swallow up death forever. So at this banquet one of the things that is swallowed up at this banquet is death. God deals with death and the sovereign Lord wipes away the tears from all faces. He removes the disgrace of his people from all the earth. The Lord has spoken. Look at all of the 'all's' in this passage. Everyone is invited. Now this isn't universalism. It doesn't mean that everybody accepts the invitation, because Isaiah also talks about punishment and so do all the prophets. But what it means is that there is no infirmity, there is nothing that you can do in terms of sinning, there is nothing that can be wrong with you because of your race or your nation that would keep God from reaching out to you and inviting you to this banquet. The invitation goes out to all nations. It's an amazing invitation.

Now this invitation was hard for Israel to accept. From the very first time they heard God say, "My heart is for all peoples" they resisted that. Let me give you an example of that. Here is an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew. This was written in Hebrew and then the people in Palestine who spoke Aramaic made a translation of this passage. It's called the Targum. Let me read this Verse 6. Are you ready? This is their paraphrase.

"Yahweh of host will make for all people in this mountain a meal and though they suppose it's an honor it will be a shame for them and great plagues will come; plagues from which they will not be able to escape. Plagues whereby they will come to their end."

Now, I see that in Verse 6 too, do you? No, it's nowhere there. Where did they get this idea? They got this idea because they could not accept the fact that the God of Israel would actually want the nations to be at the party. So they totally rewrite what they see in scripture.

In a book called "First Enoch" in the intertestamental period between the end of what we have in the Old Testament and what we have at the beginning of Matthew, there is another description of this meal that God hosts for the world, but in this meal the God of host grabs together the Gentiles, drives them out so that they can be punished by angels to be a spectacle for the righteous, which are the righteous of Israel and its after this destruction that the son of man sits down to banquet with the righteous people.

Then in Jesus time there is the Qumran community. That's the community that wrote what we know of as the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have all kinds of things written by them and in their description of this very same meal they gather all the wise and perfect men, assembled before the Messiah of Israel and they sit before him by rank. Very clearly they had an idea of who would sit closest to the Messiah all the way out to the very ends of the table. They had that all clear in minds and then they make it clear that Gentiles are not allowed, but neither are the paralyzed in hands and feet or the lame or the blind, or deaf or dumb or those smitten in his flesh with a visible blemish.

Isaiah's vision of all being invited is lost. Everyone is not invited in the mind of Israel. And so that's what is in the mind of this person that says to Jesus "Won't it be great when we get together in the assembly of the righteous?" He has in his mind this very narrow view that only a very select few from Israel are going to have the privilege of being with God at that banquet and the proper answer for Jesus would have been something like this. Jesus should have responded this way. "Amen. Lord, may we be among the righteous and be counted worthy to sit with men of renown on that day." And men is intentional. Because women aren't really coming to this banquet. That's what's in the mind of the person who is talking to Jesus. Oh yes, let us be worthy too to join these people. And in a typical way, Jesus does not give what they expect. Just like our bulletin covers don't give us what we expect at Christmas, because Jesus wants them to think and wants them to think about something really important. And so he tells them a story, a parable, a story that makes a point and drives it home. And so I would like to read that parable to you. First I would like to read Verses 16 and 17.

Jesus replied: "A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, 'Come, for everything is now ready."

There were two invitations here and this is a totally normal fact of life for people in Palestine at this time and even now in some parts of the world. You don't have refrigeration so you send out your servant to go and ask people, people at that point say whether they are coming or not, the servant comes back with a number and depending on the number of guests you decided how many animals and what kind of animals to slaughter. If you have 5 to 8 people coming you are going to use a goose. If you have 15 you will use a goat. If you have 35 or 40 you will use a calf. And so then the right animals are prepared for the feast and then the following day or later that day when everything is prepared, again the servant goes out to all those people who said yes already and says, "come now, the meal's prepared." So far everything is just a normal story for the people who are listening. The surprise comes in the next verse. Verse 18.

"But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, 'I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.' "Another said, 'I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I'm on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.' "Still another said, 'I just got married, so I can't come."

This is the big surprise of the parable. Jesus' parables often have a big surprise in them. This is the big surprise. This is an absolutely, horribly rude thing to happen. These people already said yes, they said yes less than 24 hours earlier and now when they are saying the feast is ready, we are on the edge of being able to celebrate together they are saying no. And not only are they saying no, but they saying no with ridiculous excuses.

"Oh, I bought a field and I have got to see it." With the paperwork that went along with the transfer or property even in this era, every single detail of the land was listed. If you had a spring on your land, if you had a creek on your land, if you had a well, if you had a cave, it was all written down and when you bought the land, you bought the land with this stream, this major tree, this well. It was all delineated and it sometimes took years to negotiate this, because land was so important. And so the idea of somebody buying a field and then having to go look at it is like us saying, "Oh I just bought a half millon dollar house, now I have to go take a look at what neighborhood it is in and what kind of house it is. I bought it on the telephone." It's unthinkable.

And the guy with the oxen: he's bought the oxen, but hasn't even seen if they work well together. People didn't do it that way ever. They would always go to the farm and watch the farmer use them. The farmer would let everybody know that "I am getting ready to sell these oxen. Come and check me out on Tuesday morning because I am going to be using them and they would actually try them out." This guy has done the equivalent of us saying, "Oh I just made a check out. I just laid down $100,000 for five cars and now I am going to go check out and see what kind they are and whether they start." It's just a ridiculous excuse. But at least these two guys are polite. "Please excuse me."

The third person is the rudest of the bunch, because he uses in this culture, he uses a private family matter having to do with woman in his family as an excuse not to live up to a social obligation. Absolutely unthinkable. You didn't even talk about women in your family in these sorts of cultures. It was a very private thing and so for him to even talk about it is rude and then he doesn't even ask for forgiveness. He just says, "So I can't come."

Everyone listening to Jesus would have been horrified at the behavior of these people. Now what is the master supposed to do? Cancel the party? The people he has invited have decided not to come. That is not what he does. Let's take a look at what this guy actually does. Verse 21:

"The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, 'Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.'

"'Sir,' the servant said, 'what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.'

"Then the master told his servant, 'Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.' "

He invites the people who expect to be invited: his peers. They turn him down and so he says "I am not going to cancel the party. Go out in to town and ask all of the people that no one would ever imagine inviting, the lame, the sick, the crippled, and the blind." And the servant goes out and gathers these people together. This is unexpected because any self-respecting person would take the shame and somehow try to rebuild his relationships with his friends, rather than invite the riffraff to come. And then the servant comes back. There is still room. And at that point he says, "so go out of town. Invite strangers, people we have never even seen before, people who are passing on the road, people who might be Gentiles, invite them in. Everyone is invited." It harkens back to Isaiah's vision that everyone is welcome. Now everyone listening to Jesus knows that Jesus is talking about God here. And Jesus is confronting some of the things they hold dearly in their imagination about what God is like.

First, Jesus points out how unbelievably big grace is. Israel wanted a comfortable, predictable messiah, a messiah made just for them, a messiah who was going to do just the political things they felt like they needed to become the nation they wanted to be. Nothing more, nothing less. But Jesus goes back to Isaiah's vision that God is doing something that's hurdling towards the end of history where all of the nations are going to be invited to something, to this big party. People who have no existing relationship with God, people who couldn't possibly have earned it, people that we look down on and he invites them to this banquet and on behalf of all of the people present, God deals with death and wipes the tears from every eye. That's the image of the end that Jesus is carrying when he shares this picture of the banquet. What an amazing picture of grace. So much bigger than the picture they were carrying around in their minds. A grace that was just big enough for the good people in Israel.

But Jesus also confronts their own response to him. That's the reason why he tells this parable is because they are in the process of rejecting Jesus, and through Jesus God is making the second invitation. Through Jesus God is saying the meal is just about ready, come now and join me. And so, they have a choice. They have to eat with Jesus because Jesus is the host. They have to make a choice to follow him, to believe him, to drop the other things that are important in their lives, to drop their image of what they think God should be doing and instead deal with Jesus as he is at that moment because there will be no other invitation. Jesus is it. Will they respond?

Jesus confronts us the same way. In this parable Jesus confronts us with the incredible size of grace. Grace is enormous. That's why we are a missions church because the whole world is included in what God is doing. But grace even extends to that guy on the bulletin, that silly goofy guy right in the center. The person that we would never invite to our party, God's grace even goes out to them if they will only turn and believe.

So who are the people that God is willing to go out to that we are not? The people that we are uncomfortable with, who are they? Who are the people that we would rather not see on the invitation list? And what does God need to do to make our hearts like his? Because God's grace is bigger than our tolerance. Any who believe and repent can turn back to him no matter what their past is like, no matter where they came from, no matter what they look like or smell like, wherever they came from. God reaches out to them.

Jesus also in this also confronts us personally, because some of us are still struggling with this invitation from Jesus, because there are so many other things that kind of vie for our attention. And so what are some of the excuses we might be holding out, to keep from committing ourselves to Jesus? Maybe it's the idea that it can't be only one way to God, God must have other ways to do this. Maybe it's that to follow Jesus is going to mess up my life. Sex, money, drugs, the approval of our friends; that could be standing between us and saying yes. Maybe, you say, "I am too young. I have plenty of time to change. I don't have to deal with this right now" or maybe you are saying that you are too old to change. But whatever it is that stands in our way, is it really a good excuse? Is it a good enough excuse to stand the test of eternity? Because that is what is at stake.

Jesus confronts us the same way he confronted them, but he confronts us in one more way than he did even the people that were listening to him, because at the end of this parable he tells them to go out in the streets and alle's of the town and he tells them to go to the roads and country lanes, Verse 23, and make them come in. It says there, "compel them to come in, so that's my house will be full." You know what is interesting about this parable? Is it doesn't end with the house being full. It ends with the fact that Jesus, that the master of the house is telling the servants, go out now in the streets and roads and compel them to come in. He is talking about something that is going to happen in the future. He is talking about something that is actually happening now, when the word is going out beyond Israel to the rest of the world and he is telling the servant, which is us now to compel them to come in.

Now this idea of compelling has nothing to do with force. It has to do with the fact that someone who is one the street if they came and said there was this major rich guy in town here who wants to invite you to a party, the person would not believe him and, in fact, in that society the only polite thing to do was to say no. And so anytime you had to overcome this societal distance, what you would have to actually do is spend maybe 10 or 15 minutes arguing with the person and letting them know that it is really true that they want you to come and, in fact, it wouldn't be beyond them to grab the arm and try to escort them gently to come, to make it clear we are serious, this guy really does want you at his party. And we are given that task. Not to compel with force, or law or even logic alone, but by our lives and by our love.

So what can we do to be more available to the master? That is how I would like to end. Jesus confronts us to go out and invite more people to come, because everyone is invited, and what can we do to be a part of that? Well Andy mentioned some of the things that are coming up and that's an easy way to start. This is the card that talks about the concert coming up. The reason why I have a copy of this is not for the sermon, it's because there is a person that I am going to invite, you know I am not really good at this whole thing, going out in my neighborhood, we've got some people in this church who are really good at this, talk to their neighbors. We are going to celebrate the fact that someone talked to their neighbor who was walking by and led them to Christ. That has never happened to me. I have to work up to this. I have to kind of get up my courage. I have to pray for the people. Well there is a person at a restaurant that we go to every week, she is the hostess and I want to invite her to come, because she is working on every Sunday and she can't come to church, maybe she can come to this. Maybe there is somebody in your life that you can give a card like this or you can let them know about this concert. A little risk. Great quality and we've got room for everybody to be invited. That's one thing.

We have also got the Advent services that are especially focused in trying to reach out. We've got the Christmas Eve services that again are a great time to invite someone else to come and celebrate with us. How about your small group party? Are there people that should be invited to that that aren't a part of your small group? Maybe like some of the people in this congregation, you should be hosting if not this year, next year, a party for people in your neighborhood. Maybe there are other ways you can invite people personally or maybe other ways of supporting the ministries that are reaching out to the people who are really on the streets; the battered women, the people with AIDS, the people in prison.

There are ways we can respond. What this parable tells us, is that now is the time to invite others to come the party; the party that will happen at the end of this age, because God's grace is wide and every one is invited, that includes us, and it includes who knows who else.

Let's pray. God, as we prepare our hearts to continue in worship, we pray that you will help us make our response to you and then to be useful to you in whatever way you choose, for we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

© 2006, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org