A God of Welcome, Not Wrath

The 17th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
Sermon for September 20, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Church of the Epiphany. This coming Saturday, I’m presiding at my first wedding as a priest. If you were listening to the gospel reading this week, you might see why that’s unfortunate timing. (Ha.) It has been an especially busy season for me as your priest, there’s a lot going on this month; a big thanks to Jim and Bob for preaching these last two weeks. But this coming Saturday, we have a wedding, Gloria Garner’s son Eric and his fiancé Meg, they’re flying in from their home in California on Tuesday. We also have a renewal of vows tomorrow for a certain couple celebrating their 20th anniversary; happy anniversary. And today is the 15th anniversary of my proposing to Abbey at the Shoe in Columbus, October 11, 2011. We had a thing for 11s. The joys and commitments of marriage have been on my mind with these events on the horizon; then today, we get this troubling parable of the wedding banquet.

Not a small number of fellow priests told me they’re skipping this text this week, or at least the last paragraph of it, instead focusing on the Philippians text: “Rejoice in the Lord, always; again I will say, Rejoice.” I understand that urge, but with weddings on my mind, knowing that I’d have to read a parable that appears to turn God into a wrathful king, enraged, sending troops to destroy, burning cities, willing to throw underdressed guests bound into the darkness, well, I could not pull away from this one. I think it deserves some explanation, some investigation at the least. This does not feel like God.

We begin with Jesus saying the phrase, according to Matthew, “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.” Though some commentators deny it, or at least sidestep it, it’s clear to me in this parable that the king here represents God, one who is prepared to throw a huge dinner: the animals have been slaughtered, everything is ready. We know, from the creation of the world, that God has desired relationship with humans, from Adam and Eve to covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, through David and Solomon and all the way to the incarnation, to the one preaching this parable, Jesus; God with us, around us, in us, even throwing a party for us. God desires relationship, if we only would choose to spend time in God’s presence.

“But they made light of it, and went away, one to his farm, another to his business,” and others, the text says, to violence. We so often reject that divine invitation to relationship. We have other things to do. This part resonates with us, it surely resonates with me: there are always other things to do. I need to do the work, I need to make sure the tasks are finished, I need to secure my family’s future, I need to do, do… everything.

There’s little room for God in a world where we need to do, need to act, need to worry, need to fix, need to be everything to everyone. So often, we all reject the invitation to sit at God’s banquet, to enjoy what’s on offer. I’ve preached about it before, but the joys of songbirds, of waves, of changing leaves, of falling snow, the joy of laughter and friendship, love and connection, the joys of waking, breathing, resting, existence: we miss them, far too often.

And so, in this parable, with the invitation to relationship with God, to celebrate with God, with the divine invitation rejected, this king becomes enraged. I won’t skip over this part, nor the part at the end when the king notices an ungrateful man and banishes him, but this is where context matters most for us this morning, where a simple proof-texting, cherry-picking of Bible verses, where a bad hermeneutic is so dangerous. This morning’s text comes in Matthew 22: Jesus enters Jerusalem at the beginning of chapter 21. His prophetic call ramps up here in the days before his death. He cleanses the temple and curses a fig tree here before delivering a string of three difficult parables in a row.

After the first two, the Pharisees knew he was challenging them directly, and they wanted to arrest him. In the first parable, those who actually lived the way of love were rewarded the kingdom, not just those who said they would. The lowest of the low, the tax collectors and the prostitutes, were getting into the kingdom of God ahead of the religious leaders. In the second parable, the tenants who killed the owner’s son, who selfishly hoarded the wealth of the kingdom, they were put to “a miserable death,” and the kingdom was given to those who produce fruits. The Pharisees would be crushed by the cornerstone of love embodied before them; these hypocrites building systems of law and religion to divide people from their loving creator, Jesus said they would never inherit the kingdom of God.

And so now we get the third parable in a string of parables, another direct challenge to the Pharisees, but one with even more forceful language about God’s fury with those who try to place barriers between us and our feast-throwing creator. Yes, God wants relationship with us; yes, there is evidence of God everywhere we look and we are simply invited to enjoy it; yes, all are welcome at this banquet table.

So stop trying to make the path to God so difficult!

The Pharisees are the masters of the law, the ones who used systems of power to control, the ones who told the people that grace is earned, that their strict adherence to codes of conduct would earn them favor in heaven. Today’s gospel tells us that God is very not interested in that. Still today, we create systems of religion that oppress, that enforce rules and codes rather than constant invitation into a loving family, that make us feel superior to those who do not follow them. In this parable, God forcefully destroys those systems. Jesus comes into Jerusalem as a prophet, he is still coming to us today, to say the feast is ready, invite everyone you can into relationship. When you do, when you go into the streets and gather all you can find, the wedding hall will be filled with guests, with those interested in what God has and with what God’s church has to offer. In an age of shrinking churches and dismissal of religion, may we the church hear this charge loudly this morning. “All are welcome here” is not just a slogan for our bulletins and bumper stickers; it is our true calling. We invite everyone to God.

In the last, difficult paragraph of this deeply contextual parable, we see that some may still come to the party and refuse to accept it for what it is, a true wedding feast where all are welcome. They may come in and eat and enjoy the food but not put on a robe. This is not, friends, a call to wear nice clothes to church or to join a choir with robes. That would be more rules, more barriers to relationship. Instead, though again commentators have different takes on this, instead, I think this is another rejection of the Pharisees directly, another chance for Jesus to say that if you don’t fully realize this is God’s open invite table, if you think this is just a party and the true religion is elsewhere, in your rules and codes and guidelines, you’re still not getting it, and your systems will still be cast down and thrown into the darkness. A helpful reframing of the last sentence for our ears today could be: All are called to be with God, precious few will be able to get over themselves.

This has been a text/context heavy sermon thus far, let me zoom out a bit before I close. The entirety of our scripture, our gospels, tells of a God of love, not wrath. Many read the Old Testament and a selection of Jesus’s parables and claim otherwise. They read the story of God and the Israelites, of a people interpreting God’s “wrath burning hot” not just again Israel’s enemies but against Israel too, like when they make golden calves in the desert. But that is not the fullness of this story. Ours is a God who created us, who again and again calls us into relationship, who sends Jesus to be with us, and even though we crucify him, then sends the Spirit to be with us too. Ours is a God of the Beatitudes, of the Prodigal Son, a God of lifting up the lowly, of forgiving our debts, of pursuing the lost sheep, a God of love, not just for our neighbors but even, radically, for our enemies too. Ours is a God who feeds the sparrows, who clothes the lilies of the field, who knows the numbers of hairs on our heads… that’s how much God loves you and me.

Ours is a God who so loves the world that the banquet feast is open, we are simply to go into the streets and invite everyone we find to come celebrate. Ours is a God of love, of joy, of welcome, not wrath for us; God reserves wrath for any who try to come between us. It is our calling to recognize the goodness of this God, to live into that and to share it endlessly and abundantly with all those around us, not to build barriers between us and God, but to live into and invite all into this loving relationship with the creator of all things.

When we do, when we live in this kind of love and welcome, the direction of Paul to the church in Phillipi will make sense to us and to all we meet: “Rejoice in the Lord always, again, I will say, Rejoice.”

May all, and we mean all, join us in such rejoicing.

Amen.