As a deacon, I get to go to more weddings than the average person, and frankly I had gotten to the point where very few of them met my rather picky standards of excellence. But two weeks ago that changed. Two friends of mine, both of them getting married rather late in life, if you know what I mean, had a wedding I’ll never forget. It had everything. There was a Jewish ritual that brought tears to my eyes, so many words that reminded everyone about commitments and joy and sadness, and of the bittersweet taste of life even in the midst of such happiness. And then, what a party — huge quantities of food and drink everywhere, wild dancing, carrying the bride around in a chair high in the air, and then the groom too, which I didn’t know was part of it, he’s not a small guy; but by that point I think no one was paying much attention to the rules. Every generation of these two families, old people, kids, all cheering and talking and telling jokes and stories, dancing like crazy people, and just generally being an incredible supporting cast. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
And you know the strangest thing about that wedding? I almost didn’t go. It was late Sunday afternoon. I was beat. I had plenty of other things I hadn’t done. I knew I had to go, I had said I would, but you know, one more little annoyance in my life and I might have not shown up, the whole thing was just too much trouble, there weren’t that many people there I’d know, it was a lot easier not to drive an hour and just stay home and deal with my own problems.
This gospel today is about a Jewish wedding, and you probably noticed it is a story about staying home and missing that wedding. But the point of this parable from Jesus, as always, isn’t immediately obvious. Jesus is not worried about us missing a great party, and I’m not here to tell you to make sure you never miss one — although frankly, from the looks of some of you I see at the train station, that advice wouldn’t kill you. But the wedding in Jesus’ parable isn’t just a party — it’s life, life is what he doesn’t want people to check out of and stay home from.
All through the gospels, Jesus is concerned that we will think that living life is about preserving life and staying secure and being immune from disappointment. What other point is Jesus driving at with all these stories, about Pharisees who only care about the rules and about their role enforcing them, about the rich young man who couldn’t risk giving up his identity, about the workers who were so concerned about their salaries. These are all people who wanted things to be stable, who wanted to build a wall around themselves where they wouldn’t have to engage with life in the way Jesus was trying to get them to, engage with it in a way that might call into question the way they had up to that point been living and spending and working. In contrast to them, life to Jesus is about risking everything, over and over, and risking it not because we’re told to, but because God and the world both need us to serve them.
If our resistance to that kind of risk and change sounds human, of course it is. All of us want safety and security and some established ways of doing things. In addition, many of us are a little tired, at least that’s what we tell ourselves, we don’t feel quite as eager as maybe we once did for everything that following Jesus seems to us it might involve, we’re maybe been burned a little by things that we think haven’t worked out too well. We all have plenty of good reasons to stay home.
But the story of this wedding in the parable is: serving God is like going to a lavish wedding thrown by a king, it’ll bring us a taste of a life that makes our old life seem one-dimensional. Once you are part of it, you’ll be glad you didn’t miss it. And not only that, Jesus says, if it is risk and unhappiness you are worried about, then you’re in for a big surprise, because staying home and not being at that wedding, not doing your part as the king’s guest, or just putting in an appearance without wanting to work very hard, not even bothering to get yourself a proper wedding garment, that is a greater risk. Put a priority on saving your life and you’ll wind up with something that someday you might feel doesn’t look like life at all.
In the end, why does God need us to be at this wedding? It turns out that God needs us to live life for him the way this king needs a crowd in order for this wedding to be a wedding. At the wedding I was at a couple of weeks ago, the rabbi told the people in attendance at that wedding that we were not just guests. By being at that wedding, we were part of the foundation of the life of that couple. All that hard work celebrating made the whole thing happen just as much as the contract and the promises made by the couple.
I wish I could tell everyone what God wants from us, what it means to live life at the wedding and not holed up at home. Your life and my life all have ways in which we hold ourselves back from the invitations we hear, whether that invitation comes in the form of people who obviously need our help or whether or you nagged by a talent or a desire or a mission that you have long neglected. The gospel isn’t telling us the specifics. But the picture is clear, and actually very specific in a way. The king needs us to be at the wedding, and your presence is not optional.