You’re at the mail boxes in the building and you notice that your neighbor gets an thick envelope made of vellum with embossed calligraphy in gold ink as the address. You observe on the corner the words, “Admission to this event is by invitation only.” You think: my neighbor must be an insider. You are driving in an area of the city new to you and notice some houses with interesting architecture. You decide to check it out but when you try to turn onto their street there is a gate with a guard. Only insiders can enter into that neighborhood. You’re walking down the path along the lake and notice that a large cookout is being held with music and food and dancing at one of the picnic areas. You walk over to see what’s happening when someone stops you. “I’m sorry this is a private party.” You are not one of the insiders. We live in a world where there are insiders – those who know the passcodes, who have the right ID cards, whom the doorman knows by sight – and then there are the rest of us, the outsiders. We might laugh it off ala Groucho Marx – “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members” – but dividing the world up into insiders and outsiders, into those who belong and those who don’t, creates the potential for resentment, bitterness, conflict. Such a world does not make for peace.
Jesus envisions a different world, a world where everyone belongs. In the parable of the wedding feast Jesus says that in order to ensure that the party the king had planned would be a success he told his servants to invite “whomever you find, bad and good alike.” The parable continues “The hall was filled with guests.” Jesus told this parable to describe his expectation of his followers. The people who follow Jesus are not insiders, the ones who belong, and the rest as benighted savages. No, we are challenged to ensure that “the hall is filled with guests,” that his Church is open to good and bad, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, pious and partier, married and single, gay and straight, old and young, liberals and conservatives, sick and well, pessimists and optimists, heroes and cowards, handsome and homely, carefree and cautious, shirkers and workers. How does the song go, “All are welcome in this place.” Insider thinking – those belong who know their catechism, who follow all the rules, who don’t smoke, cuss or chew and run around with girls who do – does not reflect the vision that Jesus described in the parable. The pope is not any more of an insider in the heavenly banquet then the humblest toddler running around the church. We’re all in this together and it is important for St. James to create an atmosphere where that spirit of welcome, of hospitality, of belonging permeates all that we do.
However, that’s not the end of the parable. There’s that wedding garment thing. In the parable the way St. Matthew tells us (Luke’s version does not include this incident) a guest was kicked out of the wedding party because he was not wearing a wedding garment. If all are welcome how come he was excluded? Why not take everyone as they are even if their jeans are tattered and their t-shirt says “Go Cubs?” The short answer: because he wasn’t ready to party. If you’re invited to a wedding banquet, if the group around you is all geared up for having a good time and you are Sammy Sour Puss, you don’t fit in. The man without a wedding garment thought that all he needed to do was show up when, actually, he had to be ready to celebrate.
Let’s unpack how that applies to us today as followers of Jesus. The overall point of the parable is that all are welcome, that everyone belongs, that there are no outsiders. But the underlying presumption is that all who come must do so freely. No one is dragged kicking and screaming to the banquet. The people who came arrived because they responded to the invitation. As the parable makes clear, some did not respond. The ones who did are the ones who wanted to be there. That tells us that one characteristic of a follower of Jesus is freedom. While parents might cajole, encourage, bribe, persuade or even compel their teens to come to Church, in the end it is only a free response to the invitation that makes one a disciple. Jesus invites us to a banquet to be held in his honor and we can say “yea” or “nay” to the invitation. But when we say “yea” we are ultimately be asked to say “yeah!” Yeah, I’m so glad that there weren’t any pre-requisites to come to the feast. Yeah, I am so glad that Jesus would want the likes of me with all of my faults, failings and limitations to share life with him. Yeah, I am so glad that there are people who accept me as part of this community just as I am.
While there are no requirements for admission, all are welcome, there are consequences. If you come to the wedding banquet you’d better be ready to kick off your shoes and dance. Once we accept the invitation to be with the Jesus we must think and act and behave differently. We have to check our own tendency to exclude those who look or talk differently that I do at the door. We must make sure that we are bringing around nourishing trays of belonging to everyone, particularly those who are on the periphery, hugging the wall like eighth graders at their first mixer. We must dress ourselves in joy as we follow in the dance where Jesus leads us. All are welcomed and all are changed into the loving, generous, forgiving people God made us to be. Come to the feast.
