Christ Lutheran Church: Welcome

Invitation - October 12, 2008

Invitation

Matthew 22:1-14, Exodus 32:11-14

October 12, 2008

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

(after reading Exodus 32:11-14 about God relenting from His plan to punish the Hebrews at Mt. Sinai)

THAT might just qualify as a close call: God decides to wipe out His own chosen people as punishment for making the Golden Calf...but then Moses talks Him out of it.

I said that this MIGHT qualify as a close call...because when Moses himself sees what they're doing, he himself burns with anger. He no longer intercedes for the people. And God now actually DOES drop the hammer on them - three times. First He has the priests slaughter three thousand of them with the sword, then He sends a plague on a few thousand others, then He makes them wander in the desert for another forty years until all the rest die off. THAT is what happened when Moses refused to intercede for the people again.

All I can say is, thank God we have Jesus interceding for us and not Moses. Now, I'm not blaming Moses a bit - I myself would have had it with these people long before that. Moses' anger at them was more than understandable.

But Jesus is our go-between with the Father. Jesus is the One who does with us what He told us to do with one another - to forgive seventy times seven if necessary. JEsus is the One who, after all the betrayals and tortures hanged on the cross and then begged the Father to forgive His executioners, "for they did not know what they were doing".

Jesus not only pleads on our behalf to the Father, but gave His life to pay for our sins...rather than having us slaughtered by the sword or wiped out by plague, the result of our sins is the death of the One who took the bullet for us...and still intercedes for us.

And yet, the Gospel Lesson which is our Bible Focus for the day, is where Jesus himself says that the kingdom of heaven is like a king who had "had it" with his subjects and wipes them out. At least that is how it COULD sound because Jesus ends up the parable by saying, "For many are called but few are chose". THAT sounds kind of scary.

But, when Jesus told that parable, He told the story where the king wiped out the people who had killed the king's messengers. Likewise, twelve hundred years earlier God wiped out the people who deliberately tried to replace God with the Golden Calf that they actually worshipped.

Now, in a sense, we do those kinds of things to God every time we depend on things other than God and every time we go against His will. But I don't think too many of us have actually carved out a figurine and worshipped it or have slaughtered too many pastors around here.

So, I do not think that we can take these lessons and warn people that unless you do this or that, God is going to wipe you out.

What DID Jesus say the kingdom of heaven is like? He started off this way: "The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to throw a wedding banquet for his son and so invited his subjects to come. The kingdom of heaven is like a king who invited his subjects.

So the kingdom of heaven is about being invited. And yet, Jesus capped it all off by saying that the point of the story was that "many are called but few are chosen". Among us the reason that so few are chosen is not that God kicks us out or wipes us out. It's simply because so many of us fail to RSVP for one reason or another.

This whole parable was about a wedding banquet. Many of us have first hand experience with sending out invitations to wedding banquets. An increasing problem these days is that more and more guests are failing to RSVP at all. It drives brides and their mothers absolutely bonkers! How can they plan the right amount of food and all the table setting paraphernalia if they don't know how many are coming? the other problem is that people will say they are coming and fail to show. I have been involved with weddings where there have been as many as fifty no-shows. Do you have any idea what that costs?

And the biggest cost is no in the checkbook. The biggest cost is in the hearts of the wedding families. What does it say to them? It hurts.

Jesus could just as well have told the parable this way: "But when the king's messengers delivered the invitations, many of the guest ignored them, others went back to their fields, others to their kids' Sunday morning sports activities, others to their cabins, and yet others stayed in bed. And others have split the moment they or their last child have presumably confirmed their faith."

I think the reason that so many people fail to show these days is that they do not realize what we mean when we sing, "This is the FEAST of victory for our Lord." Worship is the foretaste of the feast to come. We fail to realize that this really is an invitation to a wedding banquet, sent out by a very real person who is truly present, who truly loves us, who has given us everything of himself, who only asks that we accept the invitation, and who notices when we fail to show.

ALL of us who are baptized have been called. Few are chosen simply because so many fail to show for one reason or another.

But the invitation is good. It is always good. Because the One who sends it is always good.