Tag: Wedding Feast

Rejoice! You’re Invited to the Wedding

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This is midweek advent 2 and for us the last of the Advent midweeks this year. A Short Season. Part of that is we are going caroling next week. I ran with LCMS worship’s themes for the season this year. And they did what most LCMS products do. They gave you two hours of stuff for something you want around 25 mins. That is much better than the flip which is 10 mins of content and you’ve got to fill an hour. (There is a reason BigEva places go through the refrains of the worship songs multiple times.)

The biggest problem for me with jumping off of someone else work – something I rarely do because of this – is connecting the theme and material to the lives of the people present. If I was only teaching the scriptures this wouldn’t be a problem, because most study of most things isn’t practical. You learn calculus because “it’s the next thing” not because you’ll employ it in the job. And the dirty secret of education is that the things we label least practical – say literature – are the stuff that is real. And preaching is supposed to be real. Theology is for everyday living. The bridge here is two fold. We all have piety practices and a shared one in advent is the candle wreath. There are lots of meanings given to each candle. And older form of that piety that we connect with theological virtues connected with the 4 last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. And the Wedding Feast is the biblical picture of Heaven.

The text, the parable of the wedding banquet, establishes a contrast between the invitation to the wedding and what those who refuse to go do instead and the outcome of the choice. It is the contrast between tragedy and comedy. The invitation you have – Come to the Wedding Feast – tells you about this life. All Comedies end in a wedding. The road may be laughter and tears and cringe, but it ends in love.

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An Invitation

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Biblical Text: Luke 14:1-14

Jesus’ invitation to a dinner party is a surprisingly deep text. For something that on the surface is a simple text about compassion and justice, it dives to the heart of the gospel. It opens with a view to a status game. Is Jesus clubbable? Which the answer is both “no” and “how ridiculous are you in thinking you have the ability to ascribe status to The Son of Man?” In Jesus’ first answer, the healing, he sets the real terms. The Son of Man has come to pull all of us out of the well on the Sabbath.

But Jesus then turns around and observes how we assign honor. He tells a parable to the entire guest list. And then he gives some advice to the host. In the parable the key point is that it is an invitation to the wedding feast. How we assign honor is inescapable in this world. And such civil righteousness might not even be bad. But we need to check realm we are thinking of when we show up. If we are talking about the wedding feast, forcing ourselves forward to the place of honor will just shame us. The advice Jesus gives to the host is to ponder who you want to owe you? Those of this world who can reciprocate in worldly status, or God. It’s a challenge to live into the grace and love of Christ, which is always costly.

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