Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text is the Holy Gospel reading which has already been read.

Dear friends in Christ, over the past fifteen years or so I have been to dozens of weddings, and some of them were real duds. Sometimes it is the wedding service that is abysmal, with tacky music and tone-deaf soloists. I've heard more than one terrible wedding sermon that lacked the biblical understanding of love, and made no mention of Jesus Christ and what He has done for His Bride, the Church. I've seen a couple process down the aisle, not accompanied by Bach, but by the jazz singer Norah Jones. And if I have to hear Malotte's [Muh-lotes] Lord's Prayer sung by an off-key soloist again, I might just swear off weddings for good.

But, I can endure a bad wedding service if I know the reception will be good, with feasting and fun and joy. And today Jesus tells a parable about a great wedding reception, when He says, "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come."

The wedding feast Jesus describes in the parable is no lame one, like many of the ones we have been there. Look who is throwing it: a king! What if you got an invitation from a billionaire to his son's wedding at his mansion? All expenses paid for you and your family, a weekend of dining on nothing but the finest, and dancing to first-class live music. Just think of how the paparazzi descend upon celebrity weddings, because they know the opulence and fanfare to be seen. This would be the party of a lifetime. Would your reject the invitation? Yet in the parable, that is what happened. It was not any old wedding; it was a king's feast, but those invited yawned and said, "Nah. Not for me."

But the king is gracious and persistent beyond belief. Jesus continues, "Again [the king] sent other servants, saying, 'Tell those who are invited, See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.' But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them."

We see three similar but slightly different reactions to the king's persistence. All of them "paid no attention and went off," or a better translation is "they made light" of the king's invitation, again shamelessly snubbing the king, who not only gave a gracious invitation, but also was their ruler. The first guy went off to his farm, or to capture the Greek more faithfully, he went off to enjoy his possessions; he went off to his deer lease or out on his boat. The second guy went off to his business, or to get the nuance of the Greek, he went off to focus on acquiring more possessions. And the rest of the invitation-rejecters do great violence to the king's messengers.

So Jesus explains, "The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, 'The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.' And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests."

The king executed his wrath on those who rejected his invitation, but then the party was prepared, but no one showed up, so the king sent out an open invitation to all, the bad and good, the smelly and sweet, the ugly and pretty alike. He simply wanted to have a wedding hall filled with guests, to replace those who deemed themselves unworthy of the king's invitation.

So what does it all mean? First off, since the parable is about the Kingdom of Heaven, the king is God the Father, and the son is God the Son. The people invited to the banquet are all who hear the Gospel, who have been given the invitation to be saved by Jesus. Those attending the banquet are members of the Christian Church on earth, and the slightly confusing part is that the bride is the one, holy, Christian, and apostolic Church of all times and all places: the Bride of Christ.

We have to use the whole Bible to fill in the details that led up to this wedding and wedding feast. This has not been a fairy-tale courtship, where the bride was a pure virgin who was swept off her feet by a prince. This courtship has from the beginning been totally one-sided, and it is really hard to believe the great love of the Groom for His Bride.

In the Garden of Eden, God brought about a perfect marriage between the Bride and Groom, God and Mankind, but the Bride cheated on the Groom with Satan and tried to break off the marriage with God. Yet God did not give up, and sought to bring His bride back home. He chose Israel to be His people, His Bride, His beloved with whom He would dwell. He pledged His faithfulness, and Israel pledged hers. Yet again and again, Israel played the harlot.

The spiritual adultery of Israel chasing after false gods and embracing pagan practices is an ongoing theme in the Old Testament. It is shocking, but God's Word repeatedly speaks of His people whoring themselves out to idols. In fact, the prophets say that Israel was worse than a prostitute, because at least a prostitute gets paid for her sins, while God's Bride gave herself away for free. But amazingly, God did not give up. He sent the prophets to Israel to recall her to faithfulness, but Israel abused and even killed the prophets and continued to stray from her faithful Lord.

Finally, God took matters into His own hands, literally. God the Father sent God the Son to be conceived by God the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary in order to reclaim His Bride once and for all. The Groom was faithful in all the ways that the Bride had not been, by perfectly obeying God's Ten Commandments. Then Jesus willingly laid down His life to pay for the Bride's sins and purify her. St. Paul wrote, "Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish" (Ephesians 5:25-27).

Jesus did all that by dying for the sins of His Bride, and then rising again so that He could bestow the gift of Holy Baptism on His Church, the Baptism by which sinners are washed clean and guiltless in His holy blood. Instead of wearing filthy sins as a garment, the Bride now wears the perfect robe of Christ's righteousness. St. Paul wrote, "You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ" (Galatians 3:26-27, NIV). The Lord Jesus bestowed on His Church, on you and me and all believers, the garments of salvation, as Isaiah 61:10 says, "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for He has clothed me with the robe of righteousness."

That sets the stage for the wedding feast, and all of us have been invited, all of us have been gathered in, and all of us have been provided with wedding garments in Holy Baptism; the good and bad among us, no distinctions made by the King. Actually we are all bad. We have all sinned and fallen short of being worthy of this wedding banquet, so it is a total gift that we are invited at all.

And now that we're in the Kingdom of God, at His wedding feast, it is time for rejoicing. The outside world views the Christian Church as a dour and joyless community, and we can thank the teetotalism and Puritanism of some Christian groups for giving us that reputation. H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." But St. Paul wrote that we should "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice…The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

If the unsurpassable peace of God in Christ is not cause for rejoicing, then nothing is! We have no cause for anxiety this morning because of the Lord's promises that He will bring our salvation to completion. Don't let the chaos of this world shortchange your present joy, which is "a day of rejoicing that begins here in time and continues afterwards in eternity" (Luther). We have no cause for despair, even in the face of doomsday scenarios of economic depression and social devastation. Rejoice in your salvation in the Kingdom, greater than any stuff of this world.

I guess a brief word is in order about all of those who rejected the King's invitation to the feast. As you can guess, this applies to those who reject the King's invitation into the Kingdom of Heaven, into the Christian Church. The King summarizes what happens to all of these who reject Him by saying, "Those invited were not worthy." At one point they had been worthy because the King had deemed them worthy of an invitation; that is, He atoned for all of their sins by sending His Son to die for them. Christ died for all, He justified all. But so many have gone and declared themselves unworthy by rejecting the invitation. They basically have said to the King, "I don't want to be part of your Kingdom, I don't want to go to heaven; I just want to do my own thing. In fact, to hell with me. That's where I'm going."

We learn from the parable that there are different ways of rejecting the invitation and choosing hell. The one group was fixated on enjoying their possessions, so they said, "No thank you. That wedding banquet you are inviting me to sounds lame in comparison with the fun I can have elsewhere. Instead, on Sunday morning, I'm going to enjoy my lake house, my deer lease, my family get together, my grandkids, my vacation, my warm cozy bed, my television, etc."

Then another group was fixated on acquiring more possessions. They were convinced that the kingdom of this world, with its focus on gaining more and more wealth, was more important than the Kingdom of Heaven. They found their treasures in earthly riches rather than in the eternal riches that are given to us here in the Church, in the Word and the Sacraments.

As for the group that killed the servants of the King, well, that's hard for us to imagine, but these are the ones who have such a hatred of the King that they would kill His messengers, His prophets and apostles and pastors. That does happen, from time to time. But perhaps we can also apply that to those who seek to discredit the messengers of the Gospel and cast shame upon the Message.

So all of those who rejected the invitation place themselves outside the banquet, convinced that hell is preferable to the wedding feast. There will be great weeping and gnashing of teeth for them, but also for hypocrites who have come to the wedding feast. The last part of the parable is to warn us who have gathered this morning against hypocrisy.

It is easy to spot unbelievers who reject the invitation to the wedding feast-they have intentionally avoided Christ's church-but we cannot spot hypocrites so easily. Jesus said, "But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, 'Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?' And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, 'Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth' " (Matthew 22:11-13).

We have already seen that Holy Baptism is a wedding garment of Christ's righteousness that covers all of our guilt and makes us presentable to the King. That wedding garment is the King's gift to us, and an ancient king would have given wedding garments to all of his guests. Remember, he sent servants out to just round people up off the street. They would not have been dressed already for the wedding since they weren't expecting to go anywhere, so the king would have furnished them each a garment. That is precisely what He has done for us in Baptism.

Ah, but what about the rich traveler who happened to already have a beautiful outfit? What need would he have of the king's garment? He came to the wedding feast, but did not want the garment from the king; he was happy with his own.

This is the warning for us. We have all come to the feast, but our temptation is to want to provide our own clothing. Satan tempts us to think that the garment of our piety or good works or charity or generosity is more beautiful than the garment of Baptism into the crucified Christ, and so we face the temptation to take off the robe of Christ's righteousness and put on our robe of self-righteousness. We are tempted to think that we are somehow worthy of being at this wedding feast by our own merits, rather than as an utter gift.

Such self-righteousness would land us in the outer darkness, except our Lord calls us back to reality with the words of Isaiah: "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment" (Isaiah 64:6). Even our best self-produced holiness is like filthy rags, so no confidence can be placed in our own garments, but only in the garment of Christ and His righteousness, which is God's free gift to us in the forgiveness of sins.

And that is why there always is great joy in being gathered to the wedding feast of the Christian church. It is also why we invite people to church to hear of this marvelous news of the wedding feast in the Kingdom of Heaven. God's invitation is given through our lips, and we have an open invitation to extend, to the good and bad, the rich and poor, the pretty and ugly; all are invited, for all have been redeemed by the blood of Christ.

And so what if some refuse the invitation? You are servants of the King, with a royal decree to round up everyone you meet. So what if they treat you shamefully? All of your guilt and shame has been removed by the King, and you are protected by invincible, eternal life, feasting forever in God's Kingdom. So what if some of them refuse the wedding garment and choose to go back out into the darkness? That is not your problem. Let the King deal with that.

As for you, the invitation to the feast is for the purpose of your enjoyment, for your rejoicing at the King's wonderful grace. So this morning enjoy the banquet that has been prepared in God's Holy Word and in the Absolution: your sins have been forgiven. As St. Paul put it, "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God" (Romans 5:1-2).

There is even more fullness of joy to be had in the King's wedding feast on earth, the Lord's Supper. In Holy Communion, the great feast of heaven happens on earth each time we eat the bread and drink the cup, and we rejoice with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven who are already at the great wedding feast in Paradise. Why would we ever refuse such a gracious invitation? In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.