It’s party time again

I have no idea where you are going to be dining on Christmas Day.  I hope you are not going to be alone.  You might be with friends, or you might be with family or with loved ones.  You might be a guest at a hotel or you might find yourself in a shelter, not having a home.  You may be a person who actually serves food to the hungry on Christmas Day, or you may sit down at a glorious banquet with a family that are close to your heart.  You might have spread before you all the wonderful things that creation gives us, and you might find yourself for a moment alone in the midst of a crowd.  There is one reason why we have a banquet, one reason why we offer it to the world.  It is because for thousands of years whenever the people of God have gathered around a meal, they have gathered precisely because God has done something special, magnificent, inspirational or miraculous.

As I look at The Gospel and the stories of Jesus, I am struck by the sheer number of times Jesus himself reveals something about himself at a meal or banquet or a celebration.  Food always seems to be involved when Jesus is sharing something profound.  Look at the Wedding of Cana:  a marriage ceremony, a banquet in honour of the bride and groom.  There is Jesus turning water into wine – the first miracle is at a banquet!  Or Zacchaeus, who himself was an outcast, a tax collector, hated and despised by people, and Jesus says to him, “I want to come and have dinner with you tonight, Zacchaeus.”  There he reveals his forgiveness to his friends.  Five thousand people are hungry.  They are in need of food, and Jesus feeds five thousand, a symbol of his generosity and the outpouring of his spirit of concern.  Martha and Mary are having a dinner and they are sitting in their home.  Martha is busy cooking and Mary is sitting listening to the words of Jesus.  During this encounter with Martha and Mary, Jesus reveals the upcoming Resurrection and Crucifixion.  In an Upper Room with his disciples the night before he was betrayed, he broke bread.  He had the Passover feast, and they get to know right there and then that he is the long-awaited Messiah, who was going to die.  And then, on the road to Emmaus after his Resurrection, his disciples meet him and they don’t know who he is, and then finally he goes to their home for dinner and it is there they get to see who he is. He breaks the bread and he shares the wine.  It is at the meal that they realize he is the Lord.  This is the nature of Jesus’ ministry.
 
Whenever there was something powerful to reveal about himself, he often did it at a banquet and at a meal. Therefore, when Jesus tells a parable about a banquet and a meal we had better pay attention.  This is something that we should listen to carefully, because Jesus is probably telling us something in this story.  In today’s passage, there is this glorious story of the Parable of the Great Banquet Feast.  The setting is very important.  Jesus has dined with what we are told is a very prominent Pharisee.  They had been arguing about who should sit where on the dinner table.  Who should be near the host?  The privileged person should come and take that place.  But the problem is that if someone more eminent comes along, they would have to move and go further out.  So, Jesus says, “Why don’t you just start on the outside and then find your way up towards the host?  Don’t start with a position of power and get usurped by someone better!  Start off in the wings and then get closer to the Lord and to the master and to the servants.”  
 
There are other things that occur.  Some of the Pharisees try to trap Jesus to get him to talk about healing on the Sabbath.  They try to make fun of him in some ways, and the nature of his followers and the people who are following him.  Jesus, rather than just getting into a debate with them, tells a story.  One man who is there at this event says to him, “Happy is the one who breaks bread in the Kingdom of Heaven!”  And then, Jesus tells a simple story.  Oh, it has all kinds of hidden meanings for those who first heard it.
 
They all know about what was known as the Messianic Banquet, when the people of God would gather in heaven around the Lord, and the righteous would be there in the presence of God Almighty.  They knew what Jesus was saying, but on the surface it was just a story about a wealthy person who goes and invites other very prominent people to his house for a banquet only to realize that people started to make a lot of excuses.  One of them said, “Oh, I have bought some property and now I have got to go and look at it, so I can’t come.”  Another one says, “I have bought an ox and I have to go now and look at that ox, so I am not able to come.”  Another one said, “I have just got married and so I have all kinds of things on my plate” – and any of us married know exactly that person was talking about, don’t we?!

The first two were kind of absurd really, because in some sense who buys a plot of land or an ox without seeing it first?  They were just silly materialistic shallow reasons!  The marriage one, okay, we will give that person a little bit of freedom.  But the fact of the matter is that they made excuses.  So what does the master do?  The master says to the slaves, “I want you now to go out into the highways and the byways and the hedgerows, and I want you to bring in the poor and the lame and the needy and the outcasts.  I want them to come in.”  In other words, I want a new list.  Rather than starting at the top, rather than starting with the righteous and the powerful, God is starting now to have a dinner that he is sharing with those who are on the periphery.

Jesus is making a powerful point.  The powerful point that Jesus is making is that he is giving an invitation to the whole world.  The invite is for everyone.  “Come and dine with me” Jesus is saying through this parable.  “Come and let me be the one who dines with you.  You come and share in the banquet with me and the Father.  You be the ones, because everything is now ready, everything has been prepared.  There is nothing for you to do.  In fact, even the tab has been paid, even the entrance to the dinner, the cost, has been borne.  There is nothing more required of you than just simply to come and to receive what God is doing.”  This is what Jesus is getting at.  This is the powerful message he is sending the Pharisees.  “Don’t you start putting barriers up to the Kingdom of God.  I have come to extend the Kingdom of God.  I am inviting the whole world into the Messianic Banquet.  I am bringing everybody in.  All you have to do is come to the banquet, to accept the invitation.”

I was reading a wonderful piece by Steven Clark who I follow him on Twitter.  He is a minister in the United States, and he tells the story about something that he did in his church, or one of his colleagues did, on a Sunday morning.  What he did was, right at the front of the church where they have a big podium and a table, and on the table they put a poinsettia.  The poinsettia sat on the table and it had this wonderful coverage of a red plastic cover, and it is brand new and it is huge.  He invites the congregation and he says, “Why don’t you just come forward, anyone who would like to, come and take the poinsettia that is here.”

No one wanted to do it!  Everyone just sat on their hands.  He said, “Look, it is free!  All you have to do is come forward and take the poinsettia.  You can do it!”
 
One man finally urged his son to go and get it.  He nudges him, he says, “Go on, you go get it for me.”
 
The son is coming down the aisle, and the minister says, “No.  I am sorry.  You don’t send an envoy or offspring to come and get it.  You have to come yourself.  Young man, go back to your pew.”  

The young man went back.  The minister said, “All I am asking is that someone comes and gets this poinsettia.”
 
A university student who was home for Christmas and thought he was really smart cried out, “Well, it is probably glued to the table, and it is a big joke!”  And everybody laughed.  

The minister says, “No.”  He picked it up.  It is not stuck to the table.  

He says, “All you have to do is come forward and get it.”
 
One woman, after waiting all this time, finally decided she would come forward and get it.  She walked down the aisle and she picks up this beautiful poinsettia and she goes back and sits in her pew and she sees that it is beautiful, the most beautiful poinsettia she has ever seen!  At the end of the service, she goes to the minister and she said, “I want to thank you for this.  I have looked at it so closely (and she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a twenty dollar bill and she puts it in the minister’s hand) and I feel guilty taking this.  I am sorry!  It is just too beautiful!”  The minister rejected the twenty dollars.
 
He said, “You cannot buy what I am giving you free any more than you can buy what God has given you free.  Don’t you understand?  This poinsettia represents God and the gift of Christmas in Jesus Christ.  You can’t send someone else to come and get it!  You can’t see it as a trick!  You can’t buy it out of guilt!  It is just there for you!”

How reluctant we are at times to receive when we think we need to earn something, when it is given and we think it is something that has to be bought.  I think part of the reason that we do this is because at times we are embarrassed by Jesus.  People are embarrassed to come to the front and to take something that had been given freely.  It is the same thing with Jesus.  Many people think that if, for example, you accept the gracious invitation of Jesus Christ then it is a dark and a turbid and a horrible bane that is going to hurt your life like Swinburne, who talks about the grey face of Jesus and the darkness that he has brought into the world.  How utterly, utterly wrong this is!  For Jesus says at the beginning of the parable, “Happy is the person who takes bread and eats within the Kingdom of heaven.”  This is a joyful thing!  This is a free thing!  It is an open thing!  He makes all the excuses that people make seem so trite and so trivial and so dark.  Can the materialistic things of the land and the ox compare to the free grace of God in Jesus Christ?  Can even our commitment to our families, as wonderful as they are, even match for one moment the love that we find in Jesus Christ?  No!  And, the parable tells us so, because Jesus has invited the whole world.

It also means that Jesus has re-written the invitation list.  And, I’ve got good news for you this morning!  It doesn’t matter whether you are here in the sanctuary or you are listening on the radio or on the Web, your name is on the invitation.  It doesn’t matter what your life is like.  It doesn’t matter what the problems are that beset you.  It doesn’t matter how wonderful and affluent you are.  It doesn’t matter how poor and needy you are.  It makes no difference!  Your name is on the invitation.  And, I will tell you why I know that.  It is because of that wonderful passage in John where Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him might not perish, but has eternal life.”  I know you are on the invitation list!

You might have other things on your mind at the moment than the invitation.  You may think there are other things that are more important in your life than genuinely finding a place for Christ your life, but your name is on the invitation and you have been invited, for everything is now ready.  When you realize that your name is on the invitation, then you reach out to others then, because you want the world to know not only that you have been invited, but the whole world has been invited.

Sometimes, I love Facebook!   Sometimes I despise it!  Sometimes I connect with people that I would never imagine.  And I got an article from a Facebook friend from the Middlesbrough Gazette in the northeast of England, an industrial town, from just a couple of weeks ago.  It was a story about an eighty-seven year old woman who lived in a nursing home in Middlesbrough.  Middlesbrough, if anyone has ever been, is not one of the most beautiful places on earth by any means!  And, to write an article about an eighty-seven year old there would seem to have little or no power to it. But it was amazing!

This eighty-seven year old lady had at one time in her life lived in South Africa, hence the reason I was sent it.  Forty years ago, she belonged to a Methodist Church and a small prayer group.  They would meet for Communion once a week.
  Every time they would get together they would have Communion, and they would have a meal, and she was a lay reader, and there were other lay readers, and this small group of Methodist outside of Port Elizabeth would meet and they would pray for the world.  Just before Christmas forty years ago, they read the passage of the banquet feast, and one of them in this group asked a question.  The question was this:  “Who do we know who is not at this banquet feast with us who should be here?”

Marjorie Clayton, this woman said, “Well, there is one person I know who is so far from us here that it is impossible for him to see us.”  And that was Nelson Mandela, who was on Robben Island.

This woman determined on the basis of prayer, on the basis of our text today, that she was going to find a way to take Communion to Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.  And you know something, she found a way!  She talked to people who talked to people who talked to people, who bribed people, who got somebody else and finally, five hundred miles away, she gets on a boat and crosses to Robben Island from Cape Town, and she gets off and is allowed into the cell, because Mandela says, “I can receive a few guests” – and this woman is as harmless as you are going to get!  This white woman from Port Elizabeth brings a loaf of bread and a chalice of wine into a cell, and she finally, finally believes that she has fulfilled the passage from Luke.  But you go out on the highways and the byways, you go out to the places of the people who are not invited to the banquet, and you take it to them.

This woman, now eighty-seven years old, got a letter from Nelson Mandela when he visited the United Kingdom.  He had been with all the greats, had been received by Presidents and Queens, but he made sure he took a train journey to Middlesbrough, to a nursing home, to see Marjorie Clayton, who had brought him the gifts of communion.  Now, is that not rearranging the invite list?  Is that not overturning the way the world sees power and prominence and glory?  It is!  This is because of the nature of the love of God!  That is the power of it!  But there comes a point in our lives when we have just got to stop reaching for it, and just like that poinsettia that was given, receive it.  So much of religion has been about reaching, but not about receiving.  There comes a time in our lives when we just have to receive what has been given.

Years ago, I was privileged to visit the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne in Concord, Massachusetts.  I love Hawthorne!  Hawthorne is a great writer!  He also happened to be a devout Christian.  You know, one of the great problems in our lives is that we are always reaching and that we are not receiving.  For Hawthorne, however, true happiness comes from knowing that God is just like a butterfly.  You can spend all your time trying to grasp it and hold it, but every time it will fly away and will disappear.  If only you would be quiet and sit and stop trying to reach it, the butterfly can land on you and show itself.”  Such is the love of God, not something to be reached for and grasped; something to be received.
If there is anything that you should do this Christmas, it is to realize that you are on the invitation list, and all you have to do is see Him in your presence and welcome Him with an open life.  Nothing else is required of you; just the faith to receive the gift of the banquet that will change your Christmas. Amen.