The Second Sunday After Trinity (June 13, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

When I was in elementary school, I went with a homeschool group on a field trip to the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh during the administration of Gov. James B. Hunt. Prior to the trip, I remember being very excited to meet the governor and my mom was tempering my expectations. He’s a busy man, after all. But while we were there, the governor’s wife introduced herself to us and my mom and her started talking. My mom called me over and introduced me. And I shook hands with her, told her my name, and then immediatley turned to my mom and asked if we could go to Chick-Fil-A afterwards with some of the other kids.

The point is that we are sometimes caught off guard. It is very easy for us to get distracted by lesser concerns so that we miss the important things. Today, in our Gospel lesson, we are given a parable that teaches us a lesson in this regard: we should rightly prioritize ourselves so that we can answer God’s call with urgency.

Luke 14 details a sabbath dinner party that Jesus attended in the home of a Pharisee. There are three panels in this story. In the first part, we’re told that a man with epilepsy was present at the party. So Jesus poses the question: is it lawful to heal on the sabbath? He says, “Which of you, having a son or an ox fall into a well on the sabbath, would not pull them out?” Technically, this is work but to let your own child or even a helpless animal flounder in a pit would violate the principle of Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. If you have the power to help someone in a dire situation on the Sabbath, you should do it. So Jesus, who has the power to heal people from their afflictions, can heal on the Sabbath.

In the second act of Luke 14, Jesus sees that the Pharisees are angling for seats of honor. So he warns them against this: it’s better to take a lower seat and get called up to a place of higher honor by the host than to take a higher seat and be publicly embarrassed by being asked to take a lower seat.

The third panel in St. Luke 14 is what we read this morning: the Parable of the Great Banquet. A Pharisee follows up the warning about unduly taking a seat of honor by proclaiming: “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!” This prompts Jesus to tell the parable. A man throws a feast and invites many. He sends his servants to tell those who had been invited “Come; for all is now ready.” But no one shows up because they make excuses: The first man cannot go because he bought a field and has to go see it; The second man excuses himself from the feast because he just bought five yoke of oxen and needs to examine them; The third man does not attend because he just got married. So the jilted host sends his servants out into the streets and lanes of the city where he instructs them to bring in the poor, maimed, blind, and lame. Even after the marginalized come to the feast, he still has room so he sends out his servants again, this time even further out to the highways and hedges. Meanwhile, the excuse makers who were originally invited lose their invitation. They have been supplanted.

The parable explains the unfolding of salvation history. The man throwing the banquet is God. The banquet highlights God’s generosity and, the fact that its a meal accentuates the fact that God wants intimacy, fellowship, and communion with people. So he sends out an invitation to those who had been invited. Ethnic Israel was invited to this banquet first. St. Paul explains that his mission was “To the Jews first.” They had the Law, they had the Prophets. As Jesus states in John 5: “If you believed Moses you would have believed in me.” So when the Messiah came, they should have been able to recognize him and been aware of his significance. But, the initial invitation is rebuffed and the reasons seem drab in comparison to the great feast: checking a newly purchased field, examining a new acquisition of oxen, and tending to a new wife. Each of these stand for concerns that prevent the people of Israel from embracing Christ as their Messiah and following after him: material goods and pleasure. A concern for material goods takes our eyes off that which is transcendent. “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Pleasure does something similar in that it places our self-satisfaction at the center and subverts our attention from our mission.

So what happens? God sends out invitations to those who would were excluded by the Jews. The poor, marginalized, oppressed, and the sick. And even then, there’s still room at the feast so he sends them to the highways and hedges, this stands for the inclusion of the Gentiles. God is drawing all men to himself. In Ephesians 2:13-15, St. Paul proclaims that the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been torn down, “now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace.” He summarizes the implication of this in Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

What does that mean for us? It means that we are invited to the great banquet. But our invitation comes with an expectation: it means we need to be vigilant to heed the word of our banquet host. When he calls, we must respond. We must not be like those who excused themselves because they were distracted from the banquet. This means giving up worldly pleasures and material goods in order to follow the call. And it plays into the second panel of the story in vv. 12-14: “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” Because we recognize that we were distant, we were the people in the highways and hedges, we were the lame, blind, poor, and maimed, we should be inclusive of those who are in a similar position. “What you did for the least of these, you did for me.”

This focus is not purely temporal: we do these things because we have eternity in view. In fact, the parable is told with this perspective in mind given the Pharisee’s proclamation. As we saw last week, how the rich man treated Lazarus impacted his eternal fate. So how we treat each other now has a bearing on eternity. The eternal is here: we can heed the call and join the feast or we can reject it and be supplanted by others who heed the invitation. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves by turning inward, away from others.As members of Christ’s Church, we are promised a seat at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. But only if we persevere in the grace we have been given at our baptism.

Who are the poor, maimed, blind, and lame that we need to care for? Who are those that we know (or even those that we don’t know) who have been marginalized in our families and communities? What do we need to do to show them the same love and care that we were given?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.