pReaching

Matthew 22:1-14 revisited in today's sermon

Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like a dinner party, here is one of the stories he told about that party, more or less.

He said the kingdom of God is like if the President of the United States decided to throw a wedding banquet for his daughter, right here in Wichita, in the middle of the country, in Wichita at the Hyatt hotel downtown. The President, or rather his people, sent out invitations to guests well in advance but on the day of the wedding, just to be extra nice, he instructed white house staffers to telephone the guests with a gentle reminder that the party would begin promptly at 7pm. There were plenty of important people on that list, city officials, religious mukity-mucks, plenty of pastors who normally never turn down free food, wealthy business people, the who’s-who of Wichita, they were all expected to attend and Bonnie Bing was prepared to cover it all on the Eagle’s society page. Surprisingly though the people who had been invited refused to come.

When the President got word of this, he sent out a fleet of secret service agents in big black Suburbans to call on these people’s homes and tell them, “look the president has everything prepared, the Hyatt is ours for the night, his personal chef from Washington has been flown in, the Wichita symphony will be playing the dinner music, there is an open bar!” But the guests refused to come. One said she really needed to tackle her e-mail inbox, another said he couldn’t think of missing the KU game on tv, others, well they were plain nasty and they tasered the secret service agents before they could even finish the invitation.

This was a bad situation for the city of Wichita. But the banquet was ready so the President told his chief of staff to go out on the streets, right in front of the Hyatt and start pulling people in to come eat. And that’s what the staffers did. They walked over to Gander Mountain and grabbed all the guys buying new fishing tackle. They went to the century two Expo Hall and brought in all the people setting up for the car show. They scooted over to the main library branch and rounded up the homeless who hang out there during the day. They went down to the river bike path and pulled in the joggers and cyclists for the meal. It was a big party so they had to fan out all over downtown to fill the tables, getting drug dealers and prostitutes off of Broadway and lawyers who working late into the night in their offices, they even pulled construction workers off the job as they working on the new arena.

It was a crazy scene but the tables were packed and the party was in full swing, just like the President wanted. As he roamed the party, pleased with all the fun everyone was having, he noticed one guy who refused to sit down and eat, in fact he hadn’t even taken off his coat and just stood against the wall. When the president asked him why he refused to actually join the party now that he was here, he had no answer to give. So the president had the man driven to Oklahoma and he was never heard from again.

Many are invited but not everyone RSVP's.