Trinity 19 Year A – Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.
These words form the refrain of a song we sometimes sing when we gather together from across the Kings Ridge parishes.
One of the key Christian messages has got to be that ‘All are welcome’
A few years ago, someone snapped a picture of a sign at Coventry Cathedral and uploaded it to social media. The image was soon hailed as lovely and brilliant, you may have seen or heard it before, the sign read.
We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, widowed, gay, confused, filthy rich, comfortable or dirt poor.
We extend a special welcome to wailing babies and excited toddlers.
We welcome you whether you can sing like Pavarotti or just growl quietly to yourself. You’re welcome here if you’re ‘just browsing’, just woken up or just got out of prison. We don’t care if you’re more Christian than the Archbishop of Canterbury, or haven’t been to church since Christmas ten years ago.
We extend a special welcome to those who are over 60 but not grown up yet and to teenagers who are growing up too fast. We welcome keep-fit mums, football dads, starving artists, tree-huggers, latte-sippers, vegetarians, junk-food eaters. We welcome you if you’re having problems, are down in the dumps or don’t like ‘organised religion.’ (We’re not that keen on it either!)
We offer a welcome to those who think the earth is flat, work too hard, don’t work, can’t spell or are here because granny is visiting and wanted to come to the Cathedral.
We welcome those who are inked, pierced, both or neither. We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down their throats as kids or got lost in the city centre and wound up here by mistake. We welcome pilgrims, tourists, seekers, doubters … and you!
All are welcome.
In our reading from Matthews gospel this morning, we heard a parable that Jesus told about the kingdom of heaven. When the invited guests failed to attend the wedding banquet of the kings son, even on the second time of asking, the king sends out his servants to invite people from the highways and the byways until the banqueting hall is full.
The invitation is extended to everyone, the good and the bad … all are welcome.
And if the parable had just stopped there, as indeed it does in Lukes gospel, we would be left thinking that’s great … everyone is welcome.
But in Matthews gospel there is an unexpected twist in the tail, when the king spots one of the guests, who is not wearing the right clothing, the kings reaction is astonishing, as he throws him out, where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Here the parable becomes quite puzzling, after all the man who attended the wedding feast was invited off the streets, how is he supposed to have the right clothes for such an occasion as this?
As a teenager, it might surprise you to know I was quite rebellious.
As children we went to church every Sunday with our parents, my dad played the organ, my mum helped with the Sunday school, I, along with my sister, was in the church choir my younger brother managed to dodge that, and every Sunday we wore our Sunday best. A dress, or a skirt which had normally been made by either mum or nana.
As a teenager, I decided that I had had enough of wearing dresses, I wanted to wear my skin tight, stone washed jeans to church … I was a lot thinner then 😊. My mum was not at all impressed, but I argued back that, surely God is more interested in what is going on in my heart, than in what I look like on the outside … and to my great surprise I actually won the argument.
So, off I went to church, triumphantly wearing my skintight jeans, straight into the vestry, where I got robed up and went out to sing in the choir.
Quite frankly, I could have been wearing absolutely anything underneath … clearly nothing changes 😊
Our parable this morning however, might suggest though that my mum was right. If the king in the parable, represents God, then God is very interested in what we are wearing.
But perhaps we need to understand a bit more about the culture of the day.
A wedding feast in the time of Jesus would have been very different to a modern wedding. And one of those differences was that as you arrived, you were given a robe to wear, a bit like my choir robes as a teenager, or indeed the ones I wear today. It would have covered whatever you were wearing underneath, and made all the guests equal in appearance …. role and status becoming completelty irrelevant.
The invitation was open … all are welcome. The feast was an unearned gift, and so was the necessary clothing which was provided for you.
For the first Christians, the parallel was baptism. The early church placed robes on those coming out of the waters of baptism. The white robes were an outward sign of the inward grace of being clothed in Christ. Candidates for baptism were washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb as Jesus’ righteousness covered their sins.
The wedding banquet in the parable is the judgment at the end of time, the robe expected of the guests was this baptismal robe. The grace is that the guests, both good and bad, did not have to provide the robe. The king wants the man to explain how he is improperly attired after having been offered the garment needed for the feast. He was given the team jersey for the Kingdom of Heaven and had refused to wear it.
It wouldn’t fit with the rest of Jesus’ teachings to decide that the point of the story is that we already have our baptismal robes and therefore can afford to be smug. No guest to the wedding banquet should enjoy seeing others who were invited failing to join the feast. The cost of the free gift of grace is too high for us to feel self-righteous and to show no concern for others.
The gift is to see that even after having his gracious invitation rudely rejected, the king continues to invite others to the banquet. The feast is not reserved for the perfect, but for those willing to be perfected by the generous offer of the host to cover our imperfections with his own robes of righteousness. Far from making us arrogant, this is cause to be humble, knowing that we neither deserved nor earned our invitation.
But as the last line, “Many are invited, but few are chosen” hangs in the air, we also see that those who have been robed in Christ are to live into that new life of grace. Having been perfected in Christ does not give us license to continue unchanged. We are to respond to God’s call by conforming our lives ever more closely to Jesus’ life.
To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you just have to receive the gift freely offered and then live into the life to which God has called us.
As I close, let me use the words of another hymn as our prayer:
Let’s pray
Only by grace can we enter
only by grace can we stand
not by our human endeavour
but by the blood of the lamb.
Into your presence you call us,
you call us to come.
Into your presence you draw us,
and now by your grace we come,
now by your grace we come…
Thank you Father, thank you Jesus…. Amen