October 11, 2026
Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14
I have to confess.
Matthew’s parable of the wedding banquet is a bittersweet passage for me.
It was the text for my very first sermon at my internship parish.
And it brings back a rather painful memory from my younger days.
Hopefully, I’ll do a better job this morning than I did twenty years ago!
You see, back then, I was all about one message:
God is love!
And that’s what I preached.
I argued that the king should have accepted the poor fellow, even though he wasn’t wearing a wedding robe!
After all, Scripture never tells us exactly what he was wearing.
So I asked,
What if his wardrobe was simply ahead of its time?
What if he was just too avant-garde for the king?
After all, people change.
Culture changes.
Fashion certainly changes!
Otherwise, ladies, you’d still be expected to wear hats and skirts to church, and gentlemen, suits and ties!
And in a church that talks so much about welcoming and affirming everyone,
why would we want to sound like the fashion police,
judging people by what they’re wearing?
I honestly couldn’t believe how petty the king was!
Perhaps I’d watched too many episodes of Project Runway back then.
I just couldn’t bring myself to tell the poor fellow to leave the runway!
I thought I had nailed it.
My sermon was creative!
Avant-garde!
Original!
At least, I thought so.
But instead,
I could hear a pin drop.
Nobody laughed when I expected them to.
My sermon went completely flat.
People tried to be nice on their way out,
but I could tell that my message hadn’t landed.
Neither did it with my mentor.
He asked me whether I’d spent enough time preparing my sermon.
Then he said,
“You might want to check out Philippians. The Bible has many good stories! You should read it sometimes.”
Ouch.
I was embarrassed.
Ashamed.
And, to be perfectly honest,
a little angry.
I had spent a long time preparing that sermon.
But instead of wondering what I might have missed,
I thought the congregation simply didn’t understand my message.
Perhaps I was ahead of my time, I arrogantly thought.
But today, looking back,
I realize just how young and inexperienced I was.
And that’s why this passage is bittersweet for me.
Because twenty years later, I can see something I couldn’t see back then.
God is love.
Absolutely!
God welcomes sinners.
Of course!
The Scripture doesn’t ask us to abandon either truth.
But this parable asks us to consider something more.
How do we respond to God’s incredibly generous invitation?
What are we willing to do in response to God’s mercy and grace?
Will we take God’s invitation for granted, assuming that being invited is all that matters?
Or will we allow God’s love to change the way we live, the way we love, and the way we treat one another?
Think about those who were invited to the king’s wedding banquet.
They refused to come.
Perhaps they thought they knew the king well enough to get away with it.
After all, they were the first ones on the invitation list!
VIPs!
They may have assumed that their place at the banquet was already secure.
So they didn’t take the invitation seriously.
And then there’s my avant-garde friend!
Unlike the others, he actually showed up.
But he wasn’t wearing the wedding garment.
Now, we don’t know why.
The parable doesn’t tell us whether he couldn’t afford one, didn’t have time to find one, or simply didn’t care.
But his appearance raises another question.
Is showing up the same thing as responding to the invitation?
Because an invitation to the king’s wedding banquet isn’t simply about getting through the door.
It’s about participating in something much greater than ourselves.
More importantly,
we are not the focal point of this story.
The king’s son is!
It’s his wedding banquet!
And perhaps that’s what we so easily forget.
We come to church looking for something.
We want to be welcomed.
We want to be loved.
We want to feel that we belong.
And there’s nothing wrong with any of that!
But at some point, we have to ask ourselves:
Is this all about what I receive, or am I also willing to become part of what God is doing?
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul speaks to two women, Euodia and Syntyche.
We don’t know what they were arguing about.
But we do know that they were both faithful workers in the Gospel.
And Paul urges them to be of the same mind in the Lord.
Not necessarily to agree on everything.
But to remember whom they serve.
To remember what brought them together in the first place.
Because the Church is not simply a gathering of people who want to be loved.
It is a community learning how to love.
And perhaps that’s what I couldn’t see twenty years ago.
I was so busy defending the man’s right to be there
that I never stopped to ask what it meant for him to be there.
Amen.
