Sunday, August 31, 2025, Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
“A Wedding Invitation”
Psalm 22:25-31; Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 19:1-9; Luke 14:1-14
A Service of Hymns and Prayers, with Holy Communion
Hymns: #812 “Come, Let Us Join Our Cheerful Songs”; #791 “All People That on Earth Do Dwell”; #790 “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”; #805 “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow”; #637 “Draw Near and Take the Body of the Lord”; #507 “Holy, Holy, Holy”; #632 “O Jesus, Blessed Lord, to Thee”; #671 “Sing with All the Saints in Glory” (to #851)
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We all love weddings and wedding banquets, don’t we? Christian weddings especially are such joyful things. God wants us to be happy, so He joins us together as husband and wife, so we can have long and happy lives, and have children and raise them to love Him, too. It’s not just about the wedding day; marriage is about hope for the future, and about family, and about joyful anticipation of all the years of being together with people we love, and who love us back.
At my Grandmother’s 90th birthday party, there were grandchildren and great-grandchildren everywhere. My grandparents Louis and Nora Meyer had eight children, 28 grandchildren, and more great-grandchildren than I can count off the top of my head. (We had to rent a hall!) My Aunt Elaine sat in a chair next to her mother at the party, watching all those children running around, and she said to her, “Mom, look what you did!” Isn’t God good?
And speaking of weddings, the whole cover-to-cover purpose in God’s Word is about bringing us all to a wedding celebration in heaven. It begins in the Book of Genesis with the first married couple, Adam and Eve, being blessed by God and called to “go forth and multiply.” And it ends, as we read from the Book of Revelation, with “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!” Through it all, through all the course of history, despite all the years of human sin, God has been working to build a family for Himself, children for Him to love who will love Him back -
until all God’s forgiven children get to sit down at that wedding feast in heaven than will never end. Jesus is the holy Bridegroom, and you and I, God’s holy Church, get to be His beautiful Bride. We have so much to be happy about, and to be grateful for.
When Jesus was here on earth, He liked to go to dinners, celebrations, weddings, and such. You remember the story of the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus saved the party by turning water into gallons of wonderful wine? You can imagine Jesus dancing at that wedding, spinning the bride around the dance floor, maybe doing the chicken dance or the hokey-pokey, or whatever version of those they sang back then at a Jewish wedding. That’s maybe not quite the picture people have of Jesus; but He wasn’t a grump or a stick-in-the-mud. He didn’t just stand there frowning, with His arms crossed, while everybody else was having fun. He lived His life on earth, I think, with a lively and happy joy. If He was invited to a dinner or a party, or a wedding, He was glad to go.
So, we read in our Gospel from Luke 14: “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, He was being carefully watched.” We know that Jesus often went to eat in the house of tax collectors, sinners, lepers, and such; but it’s interesting that He’d also accept an invitation to eat at a Pharisee’s house. The Pharisees were real joy-killers, always ready to slap rules on anything that looked like it might be fun. They seem to have been convinced it was somehow a sin to laugh or smile. They were suspicious of Jesus, I think, because we was just too happy. They called Him a winebibber and a glutton. He’s not a “serious person,” they said; He’s telling jokes and laughing all the time. There must be something wrong with Him, or He must be up to something.
Let me ask you this: is life to be enjoyed, or just endured? I read a story about a lady who came to church with her young son, a little guy about four years old. He was standing on the pew, like little ones will do, looking back and giggling and smiling at the people in the pews behind him, and they were smiling back at him. And his mother turned him around, sat him down, and gave him a pinch, and whispered, “Stop that smiling! You’re in a church!” That’s just sad; that’s not how it should be.
There in front of Jesus, says our Gospel, was a man suffering from dropsy. Dropsy is known these days as edema, a swelling or buildup of fluid in the lungs, or in the limbs and extremities. Edema, if you know anyone who’s had it, is uncomfortable, miserable, and painful, and can even be deadly; it’s often a sign of a heart condition or a serious disease. So why did the Pharisee invite a man with dropsy to his dinner? Maybe he was a family member or relative who lived there in the house - or maybe the whole thing was just a set-up and a trap for Jesus, to see if He’d dare to heal the man on the Sabbath.
So Jesus, seated with a group of stone-faced, humorless Pharisees and church lawyers, chose to ask them a legal question; and I’m thinking He did it with a twinkle in His eye and a smile on His face: "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?" That’s just precious, and it is kind of funny; because it’s a question they can’t answer one way or the other without making themselves look ridiculous. If they answer, “No, it’s not lawful to heal on the Sabbath,” they’ll show themselves to be the stodgy, hateful, unhappy, loveless grouches they are. But if they answer yes, their whole stack of laws, rules, and man-made regulations that they use to control people goes out the window. So they remain silent and don’t say anything, and Jesus lets them sit there and squirm; it’s just delightful.
Then, after a moment, Jesus does what He does. “Taking hold of the man, He healed him and sent him away. Then He asked them, ‘If one of you has a son or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull him out?’” It’s hard to argue with a miracle when it happens right in front of you, so again they couldn’t say a thing. Under their unhappy system, they would leave the poor man in his suffering, because “it’s the Lord’s day.” They had all kinds of rules about the Sabbath; no working, no walking anywhere but to church; no carrying anything, no working in your field, no doing your laundry, no mowing your lawn, no nothing. And certainly no miracles or acts of mercy. “Come and be healed on another day,” they told the people, “but not on the Sabbath.” “And we’ll be carefully watching to make sure everyone is keeping the rules.” (Which doesn’t explain why someone had to work to make them their Sabbath day dinner; but they’d created exceptions for that kind of thing!)
Such a sad, joyless Sabbath this would be, if that’s the way things are. Isn’t the joy in this place in the help and healing and acts of mercy that happen here? Isn’t that what Church is for? God’s joy and delight is to heal us, body and soul, and to give us back our joy, and to bring us back to laughing and rejoicing again with Jesus. Isn’t that the whole point of faith, and Church, and worship, and of our being together in this place? “You fill me with joy in Your Presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand,” the Psalm says. “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord’”. This Church ought to be such a happy place to be. Now it is a good thing to be conscious of your sin when you come up for Communion; a little sobriety and honest reflection and seriousness certainly does have its place. But one we’ve received God’s gift (oh, body and blood of Jesus!), shouldn’t we be doing a little dance on the way back to our seats and grinning from ear to ear for the joy of it all? “What great things God had done for me!
Now Jesus, looking around in amusement at the sour-faced people He was dining with, couldn’t help picking on them a little bit about their grumpy attitudes; so He tells them one of His parables: "When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this man your seat.' Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. When you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests.”
From His story, it looks like the Pharisee and his friends were a self-centered bunch. That might have been part of the reason for their joylessness, come to think of it. If all you’re thinking about is yourself – your own place, your own good, your own honor – your life isn’t going to be a happy one, nor is it likely to end well - and the people who have to live with you aren’t going to be happy either. The true joy again in marriage, and in family, and in having loved ones and dear ones surrounding you, is in giving ourselves to one another. It’s the joy of service! It’s the simple joy of doing something nice for someone you love that you know will make them happy, “just because.” It’s cooking a nice dinner for someone and watching them enjoy it. It’s the joy of expressing our love for each other in all the little ways we have to express it.
In Jesus’ parable, the idea is that if you’re willing to take the “lesser place” and the servant’s role, you’ll be blessed for it, and find joy and honor in doing it. And if someone loves you, they’ll be happy to take the lesser place for your sake, too. (That’s what Jesus did for us!) The point is that if we’re willing to humble ourselves for the sake of the people we love, we’ll all be lifting each other up. And that makes for a joyful family, and a joyful Church; and it sure would make for a better and happier world.
“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,” Jesus says. That’s our calling here on earth as the Bride of Christ, folks: To humble ourselves for the sake of our Bridegroom Jesus; to give of ourselves to spread a little happiness and joy in the world in His name, especially in places where joy is hard to find; to tell the good news about a God who really loves us - so much that He gave us His only Son on a cross; and to let people whose lives have been empty and sad know that “God sets the lonely in families” - and then to be that family for them. Again, isn’t that what Church is for?
Then Jesus said to his host, "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
“Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb,” Jesus says - and how blessed are we who get to do the inviting; that’s both our Christian duty and our everlasting joy! There’s joy waiting for us today on our Communion table - the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ for us to eat and drink, new life given, sins forgiven – and a foretaste of heaven and the feast to come (Hallelujah!) But there’s greater joy still to be had in seeing other people, other faces, more of God’s children, come to gather around the Table with us. Apostle John says, “I have no greater joy than to see that my children are walking in the truth.”
There’s a glorious resurrection, a heavenly wedding, coming, and that’s a fact. “So let us rejoice and be glad in our salvation,” Isaiah says. So why not live a little? Allow yourself be glad! It’s a good thing to be happy! It’s OK to laugh and smile, even in Church! Enjoy this life God has given you, and the company of your loved ones and dear ones and friends. Love them like God loves them, and let them know that God loves them, and hold on tight to them with everything you have. Then one day soon we’ll all be at that great wedding feast in heaven together, and our love for each other will go on - and what a happy day that’s going to be.
So if you’re happy and you know it - let it show! May the joy and gladness we have in knowing Him show through in everything we do, and bring others to want to know Him, too. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry G. Sheppard, M.Div.
St. John’s Lutheran Church, LCMS, Oxford, WI
Trinity Lutheran Church, LCMS, Packwaukee, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com