Come to the Party

 October 11, 2026

Matthew 22: 1-14

Banquet
Hyatt Moore

 

We love this parable! Yay.

And it makes us uncomfortable.

 

There’s a banquet! It’s great! Yay.

And there’s destroying cities.

 

It’s a party for everyone, good and bad,

everyone that usually isn’t invited to parties! Yay.

 

But then there’s that poor guy who didn’t

wear a wedding coat, thrown into the outer darkness.

Dark Jesus is back again with another parable.

But don’t despair.

Remember, he’s still talking to the religious leaders.

And Matthew wants us to know that Jesus was very upset

with them and he told them directly and publicly.

And Matthew has a flair for the dramatic.

 

And remember, we don’t have to throw everything out

that we know and believe about grace.

We just have to remember that when Jesus talks like this,

it’s important to him and he wants them to know it.

 

Let me tell you, Luke’s version of this parable

is more palatable. It’s very nice and there’s no

city-wide destruction and no outer darkness

or wailing and gnashing of teeth, you can read that one Luke 14.

 

But still, we’re not in Luke this year, we’re in Matthew

And Matthew tries to grab us in with exciting 

descriptions and consequences. 

And this is the parable we’ve been given today

so we have to deal with it.

And maybe it’s not all bad news.

 

So let’s start with the basics:

Jesus says the Kingdom is like this:

It’s like a King who has wedding banquet.

The kingdom of God is like a party!   Yay!

 

I mean it’s nice to think of God as throwing parties.

For a couple thousand years, the church and God

and everything involved with it has been

depicted as a drag, a bunch of sad, serious, wet blankets.

The Church has been the ones telling  

couples on the dance floor to separate and turn down the loud music.

 

I remember one member in my last congregation saying that when

she was young she was told that she needed

to stop smiling when she was going up for communion.

People have confused spirituality with stoicism.

And joy with disrespect.

But that’s not God’s way, that’s our interpretation.

And that, I think that is part of the understanding of this story

I’m sure the religious leaders didn’t see God as throwing parties.

 

They were doing their own thing, and not God’s thing.

They forgot all the lessons their fore-fathers and mothers had

taught about God’s love, forgiveness, inclusion, abundance,

and all the rest of it, and they decided to take the easy way out.

The way of the world. The way of scarcity and fear,

threats and judgement,

in order to control people and get what they want.

 

But God’s way, God’s kingdom is like a celebration,

 

So the Kingdom of God is like a celebration.

With great food, and drink, and decoration.

And he invites the usual suspects, other important people:

politicians, business execs, doctors, lawyers, art gallery curators, 

celebrities, and of course, religious leaders.

But they’re not interested in the king’s party.

They want to keep doing their own thing.

As I said, Jesus is talking to the religious leaders.

They’ve been entrusted with God’s people,

and they’ve forgotten about God’s invitations.

They’ve used and threatened the poor and

hungry and sick instead of helping them.

They’re living in comfort, assured of their

own place in God’s favor, and the people they’re supposed

to be serving are starving for food and grace.

And since they presented themselves as the only way to God,

they’re blocking everyone’s way.

 

They’ve been invited to the party that the King

is throwing, and they’re not showing up to it.

Not only that, they’ve killed the people who

have invited them to the party.

 

This is foreshadowing Jesus eventual crucifixion

and Jesus is also referring to the many prophets,

like John the Baptist, who have been killed for criticizing 

the religious leaders and the government they’ve been colluding with.

 

This is one of Jesus biggest beefs with the religious leaders.

They are colluding with the Roman government to elevate

their position and control and intimidate the people.

Jesus is saying that God does not like that.

God does not like it when religious leaders collude 

with governments in order to control and intimidate.

God doesn’t like it when religious leaders do that NOW,

and he didn’t like it then. They traded in the way of life

and joy for the way of death and fear.

 

I must digress now to talk about something so

distressing in our own government.

I mean it’s like a firehose of distressing things lately,

but this one really takes the cake.

The pentagon has announced that the first military execution 

to take a place since 1961 will be livestreamed.

Made available on TV for anyone to watch.

Putting aside the debate about whether the United States

should still be persisting with the death penalty in the first place—

Using the death penalty for entertainment is actually frightening.

dictatorships do that.

 

The Secretary of State has claimed his Christian identity

publicly many times, and he’s forced service people to attend

Christian prayer services and sermons with his Christian

spiritual advisor, who has some very nutty ideas himself.

 

I’m not going to mince words here.

Putting a death on display like this is a dangerous path.

And putting death on display like this and using Christianity 

as a mantle at the same time does more serious damage to Christianity.

It’s barbaric. The Roman government did that with Christian martyrs.

And it’s what the Roman Government did with Jesus.

 

I’m horrified as a citizen and as a Christian.

As I was saying God does not like it when religious leaders

collude with governments in order to control and intimidate.

I think Jesus would have a lot of serious stuff to say to this,

so I feel I have to say something now.

 

End of digression.

 

So this King is mad at the people who rejected his invite,

and also murdered the ones bringing the invitation.

So the King has them killed and their city destroyed.

 

Now it may be difficult to believe that the way of

life is what Jesus is offering here when the

parable is so violent and threatening itself.

(Did I tell you that Luke’s is a lot better?

No cities burned in that one.)

But when these parables get crazy like this

we have to remember that Jesus is angry.

He’s taking this business very seriously

and he’s using the language of violence, which maybe the language

these religious leaders seem to understand best.

Do I believe that God is destroying people and cities

like the King in this parable? No I don’t.

But do I share a little of Matthew’s desire for a little earthly justice 

and retribution for the forces that defy God so blatantly?

Yes, a little if I’m honest.

 

But I like to interpret parables and stories like this

more hopeful for the future instead:

The places built on hatred and fear and violence,

and rejection of God’s way of love and grace are just not sustainable. 

They will not survive.

They either destroy themselves, or find their way back to God.

So that was the first distressing part of this parable.

 

So the party’s ready and the food is there but no one

that the King has invited wants to come.

So the King asks his people to invite everyone else

everyone else who might actually do things God’s way.

Everyone that no one would have thought to invite before.

 

And they do, they don’t care who they ask: “Good and bad” it says.

Luke’s gospel describes the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame.

 

This is how Jesus was operating when he came to town.

The religious leaders weren’t celebrating with God, so Jesus 

had to get other people, tax collectors and prostitutes to join him at his table.

He got the disciples fishermen and other regular joes

to join him.

 

We know who they would be today.

We know who our own normally uninvited are in our day.

In God’s way, the table – real and metaphorically,

is opened up to everyone.

 

And that’s the another great thing about this parable,

At God’s party everyone is invited. Yay!

  

The earliest church knew this, and it was known

for having rich and poor together, Jew and Greek, slave and free,

male and female, no one else did that at the time

and that was the earliest Christian calling card,

they were all one in Christ.

 

Rachel Held Evans, the popular millennial

theologian who sadly died in 2019 wrote:

“The apostles remembered what many modern 

Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive

isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in.”

 

Still, today, the thought of inviting everyone

to the table and to the party is a scandal to many.

Excluding people with threats of hell are powerful.

And people like to hold onto that power.

 

So the Kingdom of God is like a party,

and the party is happening whether we want to participate or not,

and everyone who normally isn’t invited to parties is invited,

(and those who ARE normally invited can come too.)

So Yay! For radical banquets that can’t be stopped!

 

But  that brings us to the other really concerning part of this parable,

the King and that guest and his wedding garment, or lack of it.

 

To us it might look like the king is just mad because someone

was not wearing the right clothes or didn’t have the right look.

I know some of those joyless preachers in the past

have used this bit of the parable as an excuse to tell people

they had to dress right in church.

But that’s kind of a ridiculous take.

  

So at the time, weddings at that time were kind of surprises,

the date wasn’t set a long time in advance.

When the time was right, the wedding started,

and someone would go out into the neighborhood,

and let them all know that the wedding was about to start,

and everyone was supposed to stop what they were in the middle of,

they would take their wedding robe out of the closet and go.

And if they didn’t have one,

the host would provide a wedding robe at the door.

 

The wedding robe was a garment that was simple

and non-descript, and everyone’s robe was similar,

meaning that everyone looked the same:

the king looked the same as the ditch-digger,

the farm hand looked the same as the business owner.

 

To wear the robe was a sign of solidarity, unity, humbleness

and honor for the host and for the rest of the guests.

As I said, if they were too poor to have one on hand,

they would have been given one at the door.

 

So the man who came in wasn’t just flighty

and forgot, or too poor to afford one,

he would have had to reject it.

To not wear it, was a snub, it was arrogance even.

 

With Matthew’s own flair for the dramatic,

he’s saying that everyone is invited to the party. Yay.

But it’s not just a free-for-all, anarchy party.

Yay still.

Those kind of parties make me nervous.

 

God’s party is open to all people, it’s true.

And when we come to God’s party,

we’re asked to behave differently than before.

We’re not asked to change our identity, or our gifts,

or our uniqueness,

we’re not asked to conform in those ways.

 

But we are asked to wear

The garments that cover our status and,

our superiority, our self-righteousness

and our judgmental nature that we left the house with,

and we are asked to be imitators of Christ:

and we are asked to put on Christ’s garments of

abundance, love, forgiveness, joy, inclusion,

service, self-sacrifice, and care for everyone around us.

Welcome everyone at the table. Yay again.

 

Putting on that robe, and following Christ’s way

is how we keep this party going for everyone.

 

So don’t dwell in the outer darkness,

don’t worry about the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Don’t worry about those things.

Just know that Jesus is really serious about God’s party.

Jesus really wants us to believe in God’s abundance.

 

Just put on Christ’s garments,

and come to the banquet that God

has prepared for everyone.

 

What Does God Want?

 Matthew 21:33-46  October 4, 2026

 

Wicked Tenants
James Jangknect

This is the point in Matthew where 

Jesus starts getting a little dark.

His stories are kind of threatening. 

Not much good news here.

We have to remember, Jesus has entered into Jerusalem at this point

and he’s confronting all the religious leaders there

And he’s obviously not happy with what they’re doing.

He wants to stress this to them. And so we get this kind of reading.

The “Dark Jesus” parables.

 

Martin Luther once said that sometimes you have to squeeze

a biblical passage until it leaks the gospel.

This is one of those weeks.

 

There’s the landowner, there’s the tenants, there’s lots of killing.

This parable ends, basically with Jesus saying that the kingdom

of God is going to be taken away from those who don’t bear fruit

and given to someone who does. And they would be really sorry.

Not too much grace going on here.

So, even though this particular parable might

not be easy to take in, we still shouldn’t avoid

the point that Jesus is making here.

 

When Matthew gives us “Dark Jesus”

we don’t have to avoid it or ignore it,

OR trade in our Lutheran understanding

of God’s grace when we hear it.

 

We just need to remember that at these times,

Jesus is being very serious.

These things are important to Jesus.

And when Jesus gets really dark and forceful,

he’s always talking to people of higher status,

people in control, people with power.

Not the sick, not the poor, not the outcast.

 

Jesus was talking to the

Chief Priests and the Pharisees, The ones who questioned his authority.

He’s questioning the leadership of the church, not the poor widow.

 

And now when we read it, we need to look at ourselves.

We are the tenants in the vineyard.

We are the keepers of the church now.

It applies, bishops, pastors, church leaders

and even members of the Christian Church.

 

The question that it asks all of us: How are we doing?

What are we doing to bear fruit for the kingdom?

What are we giving back to God?

Are we doing what we’re supposed to be doing?

 

Are we giving the landowner what he wants?

or are we turning God away empty-handed.

It’s a legitimate question to ask.

If we’re here as a church for a purpose

are we doing that purpose?

 

The way the church has often evaluated how well it’s

doing its job is by looking how much we have.

Do we have a lot of people? and do we have a lot of money?

If so, then we’re automatically doing good.

If not, then we’re falling short and we’re the bad tenants.

 

Kelly Fryer, a Lutheran Church developer said it best:

She says that, even if we don’t say it out loud,

churches evaluate themselves in terms of “butts and bucks”

 

The first church I served had 300 people on a Sunday

which was quite a lot in my estimation.

30 young people in confirmation. Over 50 in Sunday School.

But they were always down on themselves because

they USED to have 700 on a Sunday and 100 in confirmation.

“Why can’t it be like it used to be in the good old days?”

Now, they look at the 20 years ago as the good old days.

Butts and bucks.

 

But is that what God wants?
Is that what Jesus thinks is so important?

 

When we evaluate ourselves this way,

we end up comparing ourselves to other churches

Those churches over there who have a giant building

Or need security to direct traffic in the morning.

They’ve got a lot of people, they must be doing something right.

 

And then, of course we compare ourselves,

to the “glory days” of the church,

Whether it was the 1800’s or the 1950’s or the 1980’s or the 2010’s

Those good old days. And then we try to recreate the “old days”.

Which is never genuine to the context a church is currently living in now.

 

Or, we end up comparing ourselves to other churches

Those churches over there who have a giant building

Or need security to direct traffic in the morning.

They’ve got a lot of people, they must be doing something right.

They must be doing what God wants.

 

But a bigger, wealthier church is not necessarily a church that

Is doing God’s will and following God’s mission.

In the time of Jesus, the temple was very wealthy.

They had a lot of people who attended and gave.

But Jesus was still very clear that they were not pleasing God.

 

But still the myth of butts and bucks continues.

But some churches have traded in God’s plans

in order to appeal to the most people.

 

Some Christian pastors have given up on Jesus message

and made themselves into self-help gurus in order to appeal to

the most people and have made heaps of money for themselves.

 

Some churches have turned faith into a mandate instead of an invitation. 

Threatening people that they’re going to hell if they

don’t show up and give enough money to the church.

Converting people with fear and threats.
Which has gotten them good attendance.

Some churches preach hate every Sunday morning:

hate of people of other races, Religions, LBTQ people,

which seems to appeal to a certain segment of our population

right now, and some of them are very crowded

and have lots of money coming in.

Butts and bucks don’t necessarily add up to fulfilling God’s will.

 

Now, there are plenty of churches that do have a lot of people

that do follow God’s call and many people have joined

to live that out that plan with them with them.

It’s not that large churches are bad.

But it’s not necessarily true that churches that are

large in number and in their budgets are always doing God’s will.

But we still often see it that way.

 

Krister Stendahl, was a professor at Harvard Divinity

and then he went on to be the bishop of Sweden,

he wrote extensively about Christianity in the world.

He spoke at the seminary when I was there, and I still remember

this little story from his lecture. He said:

 

“When God comes into the office in the morning, he doesn’t ask for

Christian growth statistics, he doesn’t ask

how many people have we added to the ledger

God asks ‘What have my Christians done for the Kingdom?’”

 

God isn’t interested in the raw numbers of

Christians in the world or members in our churches

God’s interested is in the mending of the whole of creation.

God doesn’t care about numbers.

God needs to get things done.

And maybe God can do that better with fewer people.

 

He added, “Jesus said to us,

“you are the salt of the earth”

But no one wants the whole world to be a salt mine.”

So as tenants in God’s vineyard, we are not judged by

how many people we have or how big our bank account is.

That is very fortunate for us at Christ Lutheran, isn’t it?

 

But at the same time,  our small size or bank account

is not proof that we’re doing anything right either.

Size does not matter to God. But what does?

 

Isaiah, in our reading today says that

God expects justice and righteousness.

Micah 6 says: what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
    and to walk humbly with your God?

In Galatians, Paul says that the fruits of the Spirit are:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,

gentleness, self-control.

Later on in Matthew, Jesus tells one of the Pharisees that the greatest commandment was "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'

 

Nothing about butts and bucks in there.

But a lot about service. A lot about orienting our focus

on the good of others and not ourselves.

A lot about sacrificing our wants for the good of others

and the good of our community and the world.

 

Now at some points in history,

the Christian church has been huge and dominant in the world.

There were times when you had to be Christian.

We can remember a time when most of the people in the US

attended some sort of church on a Sunday. That’s not true any more.

Now there is a report that just came out that estimated

that 15,000 churches might close in 2026

and 100,000 could close in the next decade.

 

And over the course of this congregation has had

300 people on a Sunday and at another time,

it’s had 20 people on a Sunday.

Size doesn’t matter to God.

 

But whatever the size, the church – global and national-

 has been at it’s best when its leaders and people can put aside

their own egos and look outside the doors and say –

regardless of what’s going on in here –

we’re going to serve our community.

We’re going to love God and love our neighbor as best we can.

That is the rent we pay as tenants

 

We don’t need to be like that church down the street.

We don’t need to imitate another church in order

We don’t need to trade in the mission that we’re called

To in order to get more people and get more money.

We need to do what God needs us to do here

 

We may not always have the courage or energy or strategy

to do what we’re called to. We might fail.

We might even be too lazy, or jaded, or cynical to do it.

But as tenants, we always need to keep asking the question,

what does God want us to do now?

Where is the Spirit leading us now?

Who is in need? Who can we serve right now?

 

Not what’s going to get us the most people,

not what’s going to curb my anxiety about paying the bills,

but what is God calling us to do in this community.

What we do and how we do it, matters to God.

 

Now, we still have this story and this vineyard,

those tenants and that land-owner.

I still feel need to squeeze out some sort of Gospel

of God’s grace at some point.

And if there is a way to squeeze any more gospel out of it,

it might be this:

 

Every time those tenants broke their lease

and abused the servants that the landowner sends –

the landowner sends more, and more,

and then he even sends them his son.

 

Obviously, that landowner is desperate

to be in relationship with those tenants.

Obviously that landowner keeps hoping

that the tenants will turn things around.

 

And so it is with God and us.

We might not always live up to our

end of the bargain as tenants and care-takers.

 

But God loves us, and God loves the churches

that God has created,

and God has not lost hope in us.

and God will not lose hope in us.

 

Seventy times seven - over and over again -

God forgives and God reaches out.

 
Again and again.

God comes back to us.