Lots of people come to weddings who don’t come to church. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. Weddings (at least if you’re not involved in the planning and execution of them) are fun, festive occasions, in which you get to see people who are dressed up in special clothes say touching things that make people cry. And after that, you usually get to go to the parish hall, or some club, and eat finger food and drink wine or punch, and maybe dance. And people generally follow an unspoken rule that if they aren’t really having much fun at the reception, they’ll at least pretend to be having fun so as not to spoil it for everybody else. It’s sort of a demilitarized zone in which even avowed enemies will usually recognize a truce for the occasion.

And so everyone comes away with memories of a beautiful service (over the years, I’ve accepted lots of compliments on behalf of the Prayer Book), and food, and dancing, and customary photo-ops (with bride and groom feeding each other cake) and disposable cameras at the tables, and shrimp, and, generally, a pretty good party. And all for the cost of a toaster oven or a china teacup.

No wonder people who don’t come to church come to weddings. It’s also not too hard to figure out why lots of those people don’t come to church. To them, church represents rigid rules that tell them how they have to think, so they say, "I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious," (a philosophy which, of course, has the added benefit of allowing them to sleep in). To them, church is a place characterized by exclusivity; they turn on the TV and, for the most part, learn that (lip service to the contrary notwithstanding), God only really loves the particular group that happens to be represented on that channel in that time slot. There are probably lots of other reasons, but probably the number one reason that people who come to weddings don’t come to church is (drum-roll): it’s boring.

But y’all are different. You go to weddings, I’m sure, but you also come to church. Good for you!

Jesus tells a parable this morning about a wedding feast. He’s arguing with the temple priests, and this parable is the third of three that seem calculated to be a triumvirate of insult that will inevitably lead to death.

The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like a wedding banquet the king gave for his son. Now, if you’ve ever had anything to do with planning a wedding (and God bless us all who have), you know that a very important job, and one that is fraught with peril, is making out the guest list. The bride and groom argue over it; the bride and her mother argue over it; it gets too big: "Do we really have to invite that cousin I haven’t seen in twenty years?" It gets too small: "But I have to invite her." Issues relating to the guest list sometimes end up in my office, and sometimes I wish I weren’t in there with them.

Now, you know the story. It’s time for the wedding. All the preparations have been made, and the caterer has already arrived with the food. You can call it off now, but you’re still going to have to pay for everything.

The custom at that time was that the wedding invitation didn’t include the time. Since there was no refrigeration, servants would be sent out to round up the guests when everything was ready. You can imagine how excited the bride and the groom and the host family would be when at last everything is set, the finger food is out, and the servants are sent out to get everyone and at last get this thing started.

And then, it’s like the worst wedding anxiety dream ever. No one comes. The servants are sent again, and this time the guests not only refuse to come, but they treat the servants shamefully.

So the king looks at the ice melting beneath the boiled shrimp, and he says, "Forget the carefully negotiated guest list. Go out onto the streets and invite everybody. Run over to Wayfield's, and the Brake Pad, and up to East Point (get Keith out of the Sportsman’s Grill; get Debbie out of the bank), and invite everybody you see. Tell ‘em we’ve got shrimp."

What a wedding that would be. What a party. Imagine that you’re at the dry cleaners or the Brake Pad or somewhere when you get the invitation. "Come to a wedding at St. John’s." "When?" "Right now. They’ve got shrimp."

I’m thinking of all the folks who would show up. That would be an interesting crowd. Lots of them would be folks who don’t go to church, certainly not the Episcopal Church, folks very different from us. And I’m guessing it would not be a party where people have to pretend to have a good time; I think it would be a rip-snorter; I think people would have a blast. And you know why? Because it would be a surprise. Because everybody there would all know that they hadn’t been on the guest list; they weren’t "supposed" to be here. So when there were people at that party who weren’t "the right kind of people," or who annoyed you, or whatever, I think it would be pretty easy to just say, "Okay, that’s different," and enjoy the festivities. Because you weren’t supposed to be there either.

But then Jesus tells us that there’s someone at the party who gets in big trouble, thrown out in fact, because he isn’t wearing a wedding robe. That’s puzzling. The only way to make sense of it is to assume that the king was following a custom in which the king provided the wedding robe. So, here’s a guy who was invited off the street (actually, he was in that seedy filling station at the corner of Lyle and Main), and when he came he was offered a wedding robe at the door, and he said, "No, thanks." And they throw him out.

Now, we’re not people who come to weddings, but don’t come to church. I mean, after all, here we are. But I think this story of a wedding feast still speaks to us about coming to church. You see, we all show up, but with what attitude do we come? If we get nothing else out of this parable, we should not lose sight of how desperately God is trying to throw a party for us. If we focus on all the other details of this parable and miss that, we’ve missed the boat. The king in the story is frantic to have a feast, a party.

So, the question for us becomes, "How do we respond?" I’ve heard our liturgy recited as a dirge, and I’ve heard it recited as a love song. We’re here; our fannies are in the pews, but are we here to respond to God’s invitation to celebrate? Are we here for the party?

Or are we here because we know we’re on the invitation list? We are the "right people?" Our parents insisted that we always go to church? We were brought up to go to church? We’re "supposed to?"

When we know that we’re the "right people," the people on the invitation list, it’s pretty easy for us to become a little arrogant, especially with respect to who should be on the guest list and who should not. At clergy conference last month, I saw a video about class in America, and one of the upper class, well-healed, country-club-and-debutante-set people on it was describing a black-tie charity ball. Out on the dance floor, he said, was a short, fat woman dancing with a short fat man. They were having a wonderful time, dancing vigorously and sweating to prove it. "My first thought," he said sheepishly, "was, ‘How did people like that get in here.’" I wonder whether, when we know we’re on the guest list, we ever ask, even when we don’t want to, "How did people like that get in here?"

And I wonder whether some of us, in our hearts, stay away, even if our fannies are in the pews. I wonder whether some of us, probably all of us at some time or another, say, "I’ll come, but if you’re going to invite just anybody, I’m not going to celebrate."

Jesus reminds us that the party turns out to be for those who don’t deserve it. Most of us can usually rejoice in that for a little while before we start thinking that a good, upstanding person like me really ought to be on the list. Then we’ll find ourselves doing, or saying, or thinking something that’s maybe not so good and upstanding, and then we’ll be glad again that we get invited off the street.

But even then, some of us don’t ever bring our heart to the party, and probably all of us sometimes don’t. When we are offered the wedding garment at the door, we say, "No." Sometimes it’s "No" because, "I’m very, very busy. I really don’t have time to prepare for this; there really isn’t any time to change; I just came for the shrimp; don’t you have a drive-through window or something? I’m already running late."

Sometimes the answer is, "No" because, "Thank you, but I really don’t deserve to be here. I know I wasn’t on the guest list, and I know exactly why. I don’t know how I ended up getting invited to this party, but I certainly don’t deserve a wedding garment. I’ll just come in quietly and try to stay out of everyone’s way."

There are lots of reasons people don’t come to the party; there are lots of reasons they come but refuse to celebrate. But what I wish people who come to weddings but don’t come to church could understand, what I wish we could show them, is that we gather every week, and every week, we set the table. Every week, the preparations are made. And it’s not about mind control, or fear of hell, or condemnation, or sitting still for an hour; it’s about a celebration.

That’s what God does in this place, and they don’t come.

But you are here. Good for you!

But will you celebrate? I know you can come to church. Good for you. But can you come to the party?