{"id":4434,"date":"2017-10-10T20:18:34","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T20:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/?p=4434"},"modified":"2017-10-10T20:18:34","modified_gmt":"2017-10-10T20:18:34","slug":"accepting-the-invitations-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/accepting-the-invitations-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Accepting the Invitations of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"wedding<\/a><\/h5>\n
October 9, 2005<\/h5>\n

Matthew 22:1-14<\/h3>\n

Another week, another difficult parable from Matthew.\u00a0 Like last week\u2019s parable of the tenant farmers in the vineyard, this week\u2019s parable of the wedding feast includes parts that are not only violent, but difficult to understand.\u00a0 Why would you kill someone who is inviting you to a wedding banquet? Why would the king send his troops to destroy the city of those who refused to attend?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with what is clear and work from there.\u00a0 This parable is obviously about invitations: invitations to the banquet of life, invitations to the feast in the Kingdom of God.\u00a0 Invitations are significantly different from general knowledge.\u00a0 Many people possess general knowledge, but an invitation is personal and concrete and it demands a response. I am sure that in the world of the parable, every person knew that the king was holding a wedding banquet for his son.\u00a0 But that general knowledge was quite different from a personal invitation to attend.<\/p>\n

God sends us personal invitations.\u00a0 We call those invitations the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and those invitations arrive in the concrete circumstances of our lives.\u00a0 Every person here who is a regular smoker has the general knowledge that tobacco is harmful and should not be used.\u00a0 But every once in a while, you receive a personal invitation from God to stop smoking.\u00a0 It can happen as you are watching a medical program on television, or when you receive the news of a friend that died altogether too young.\u00a0 Perhaps some here this morning have the general knowledge that something is going wrong in your marriage, that something is dying.\u00a0 But every so often, perhaps when you are looking at old photographs or watching your children play, God sends you a personal invitation to do something about it.<\/p>\n

Many of you here have the general knowledge that you should make contact with an old friend, spend more time with your children, let a person know the truth of what I believe, find another job, or reach out and make peace with someone who has hurt you.\u00a0 Those ideas are in your heads. But every so often God puts in your mind a thought, or you catch something in the glance of another person, or you turn a corner and suddenly realize that God is personally asking you, \u201cWhy not do something about that now? I am inviting you to act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now God keeps sending these personal invitations because God loves us and desires that we have a deeper and richer life.\u00a0 But no matter how many times the invitation is sent, we retain the freedom to choose, the freedom to refuse the invitation. We often take it. We tell ourselves, \u201cYes, that would be a very good thing to do, and I\u2019ll get around to it.\u00a0 Yes, that is something that would be important for me in my life, but not today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is where the violence comes in.\u00a0 If we took a very literal reading of today\u2019s parable, we could interpret that the king who sent his troops to destroy the murderer\u2019s city stands for God punishing those who refuse to accept the invitations which are sent.\u00a0 But such an interpretation would be certainly wrong.\u00a0 There are simply too many passages in the scriptures that describe God as loving and forgiving, slow to anger and of great compassion.\u00a0 So we know that the violence in the parable is not describing God.\u00a0 It is, however, telling us something very important about the choices that we make.<\/p>\n

When we choose to refuse a personal invitation of God, there are consequences.\u00a0 Those consequences can sometimes be quite violent and destructive.\u00a0 In short, there is a price to pay for saying, \u201cno.\u201d When over and over again you refuse the personal invitation to stop smoking, God is not going to punish you, but you might be facing a future that includes a violent and painful death from cancer.\u00a0 When you refuse the invitation to take some action to heal your marriage, God is not going to attack you, but your choice might well lead to a life that is empty or to the upheaval of divorce.\u00a0 When we choose to put aside to some other day the opportunity to make contact with someone that we love, spend more time with our children, tell the truth, reexamine our job, or reach out in reconciliation to someone else, God does not become angry. But we have no guarantee that the same invitation will be offered to us tomorrow.\u00a0 If such opportunities slip through our hands, we have to deal with the consequences.<\/p>\n

God will not punish us, but life will.\u00a0 There is no more bitter pain than the realization that things could have been different if I would have chosen better, if I would have said yes to the invitation that was offered to me.\u00a0 This is why God keeps sending invitations, day after day, time after time.\u00a0 This is why the Spirit keeps personally prompting us in ways that we expect and in ways that surprise us.<\/p>\n

You know the things to which God is calling you.\u00a0 You can remember all the personal invitations that have been sent to you time after time in the past.\u00a0 This liturgy might be another invitation to add to the list. Do not set those personal invitations aside.\u00a0 Do not imagine that there will be time for another chance tomorrow.\u00a0 Accept the invitation that has been sent.\u00a0 Respond to life today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we choose to refuse a personal invitation of God, there are consequences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5879,"featured_media":4435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/files\/2017\/10\/wedding-banquet.jpg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4434"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5879"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buildingontheword.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}