Sometimes people say that we don’t know very much about what kind of a life awaits us after this life here on earth is over. And of course on the one hand that’s true, because no one here has ever seen it. But we do actually know something about what it’s going to feel like. There’s one consistent image that God has given us over and over in the scriptures, and it’s the image of a wedding feast. It’s a real disadvantage to be up here preaching about wedding feasts at a time like this, because right now it’s hard to remember what’s it’s like to be at a celebration with other people, and also an occasion where there is simply nothing but good news to celebrate, wonderful positive feelings about the future. But use your imagination and try to remember what a great wedding feast is really like, because it represents the end of everything we’ve been experiencing these past few months. It’s an occasion when everything is focused not just on the joy of the couple celebrating but also on the comfort and happiness of all the guests. Everyone who comes is important, there’s equality, close family and distant relatives, even the ones you aren’t so crazy about, and everyone comes from everywhere to attend, nothing else matters. Conflicts and the past are put aside, they’re drowned out by the music and the stories. No one would miss a good wedding party.
But it turns out that’s not really the case that no one would want to miss it. Because in this parable in today’s gospel about a wedding feast, there’s a king who finds that people don’t really want to come to his feast. He has to send soldiers out to force people to go, because so many people seem stuck in something else. They all have different reasons, but in general the excuses seem to suggest that the people who don’t want to go are all stuck in something private. Some kind of distraction keeps them from celebrating, some private worry or business. Or maybe they just don’t want to be at a party where everyone shows up, it’s too exhausting or maybe it’s just not exclusive enough. Everyone would rather be with their own people, it just seems easier. Whatever excuse people have, they’re looking at the feast as something they’d be giving something up to attend, not a place they are amazed they get to go to. Something has narrowed them down, made their world smaller without them realizing what they have given up.
Unfortunately those people who can’t respond to the invitation might be us. There is something about the feast that we stay away from. It’s hard for us to see the ways in which all of us here take invitations to a greater and richer life and decide that our current life doesn’t have room for a gathering of everyone. The kingdom of God, not just in the future after death but right now, it is a great communal gathering, but somehow we aren’t ready to join it. Last week Pope Francis issued his third encyclical since becoming the pope, and it’s called Fratelli Tutti, an Italian phrase that St. Francis used, and it basically means we are all brothers and sisters, and this entire document is a reminder that what Jesus was always reminding us is that we can’t be fully alive without a sense of the common bond that unites us in this world, a vision that means no one is really foreign to us. What else was Jesus getting at with a parable like this than a reminder that a king like God is determined that we realize we’re all guests at a feast, and that no one on this earth matters more than anyone else. Everything we do in this world is made whole when our focus is on the common good of everyone, not some at the expense of others. In the end, in the kingdom of heaven, we’ll find out that we are seated at a table with people we never imagined were as beloved by God as they are.
These wedding invitations that we all get come in different forms for every one of us. I wish I could tell everyone what God wants from us, what it means to live life at the wedding and not holed up in a smaller place. Your life and my life all have ways in which we hold ourselves back from the invitations we hear These invitations come in the form of people who obviously need our help, whether they are forgotten at the border or living a lonely and forgotten life not far away. Or maybe they come in the form of a desire or a mission that you feel maybe is yours but it seems too hard or too new to do right now. But the strange thing about today’s gospel is that apparently God is not stingy with invitations; they arrive all the time, sometimes over and over. He is sending the soldiers and the servants to remind us that we need to be headed somewhere larger than the way we tend to see the world. Our destination involves an always expanding crowd. If you think you’re not ready, that you are not the kind of person who even has a wedding garment, it turns out that’s not an excuse either. In Jesus’s time, at a big wedding feast, it was the host’s job to provide a big rack of them, and as people entered, they found one that fit and went inside. God will prepare you for the place you need to go. All we need to do is open the envelope, and decide one day to show up.