Sunday, October 11, 2026
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Readings
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It’s kind of fun that we have a story about a wedding for today in our gospel reading, because I was actually at a wedding exactly 12 years ago today! I had just started seminary in Chicago. And I had just met and started getting to know some of my seminary classmates. And already, one of my lovely new classmates – my dear friend Preston – was inviting us to be part of one of the most important days of his life!
We were all very excited to be included. We helped decorate the seminary chapel and tried to make it look as wedding-y as we could. And between the 20 or so of us, we managed to conjure up a truly obscene number of desserts. It was a good day.
But as much fun as it was for all of us to get to celebrate this day with our new friend, there’s no denying that this setup was far from ideal. It certainly would not have been Preston’s first choice for celebrating such an important day: to get married at school, so far away from home.
The sad reality was that, at that time, back in 2014, it was still illegal for Preston to marry his husband Wesley in their home state of Tennessee. So instead, their only choice was to get married in front of a group of strangers, several states away from home, with only a handful of the friends and family who had known and loved them over the years present to witness it. (They did later get to have a big party and ceremony to celebrate with family and friends back in Tennessee – but it still wasn’t the actual wedding itself).
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In our gospel reading for today, Jesus tells one of his many parables about weddings. And of all those parables, this one has often baffled me. There are a couple of strange details in it that just leave me with questions; for instance: Who on earth wouldn’t want to come to a wedding party thrown by royalty?? I mean, that is literally the beginning of a Disney movie! (A party for the “son of a king”? As an “eligible maiden,” I’d be all over that!)
And as for the guy who gets kicked out at the end – the one who apparently showed up to the wedding wearing whatever was the first century equivalent of jeans and a t-shirt – what is his deal? Guests at a party like that would’ve been provided with everything. Not just food and drink, but lodging and even clothing. Who passes on the chance to wear fancy rich people clothes? What is your life??
Just imagine it all: the fancy clothes, the dancing, the spectacle, the BUFFET! What schmuck would pass on a party like that???
But then I think about Preston and Wesley’s wedding. There were lots of family members who couldn’t come to their wedding. But there were also those family members who wouldn’t come to their wedding – family members who refused to join the party.
We know, sadly, that this is not an uncommon story.
Today is a particular day of celebration in the queer community – it’s National Coming Out Day. (Happy National Coming Out Day!) It’s a day for folks to celebrate who they truly are in their heart of hearts, and to celebrate getting to share it with the people who matter most to them. It’s a day to celebrate our God-given identities, to celebrate the people we love. It’s a day to rejoice together that God’s creation and God’s people are more varied and wonderful than we might think
But this day of celebration also comes with painful stories of rejection: stories of trusted friends and family members refusing to accept a loved one for who they are; stories of teens and young adults winding up on the streets after being kicked out by their families; stories of so many trans people beaten and even killed – not unlike the messengers in Jesus’ parable.
It’s a human struggle – one of the ways we often fail to imitate Christ. We struggle to draw our circle of hospitality wider. We feel threatened by difference. Even when we ourselves know what it feels like to be rejected – and I suspect that many (if not all) of us have known exactly what it feels like to be rejected at one point or another – we struggle. Even with the best of intentions, it still happens sometimes that we let our fear, our distrust, our biases get in the way of welcoming others as God has welcomed us. God calls us to do better.
The good news is that we daily have God’s example to follow. Even as Jesus tells this parable that might convict his hearers, he is extending an invitation: the invitation to us to keep practicing a Christlike welcome, a Godlike welcome. A welcome like that beautiful one we read in our first reading from Isaiah, where the whole world is invited to sit down together to a “feast of rich food” for all people. Christ invites us to keep practicing a welcome like the one in our own welcome statement: “a welcome for people of every age and ability and size, of every sexual orientation, gender expression and identity, of every ethnic background and race; lefties, righties, cat people, dog people, doubters, dreamers, addicts, advocates… and you!” And me! All of us.
Because God welcomes all of us with unconditional love each and every new day. And God sends us out to do the same – to keep pushing through the uncertainty and the distrust and the fear, to keep broadening the circle of our welcome, to keep broadening the reach of our love.
And today especially, we are blessed! Because today after worship, we’ll get the great privilege of hearing one such story! Our wonderful guest, Virginia Unverferth – who is a spiritual director and friend of the congregation – will be sharing her story about how she and her husband learned to fully embrace and celebrate their trans daughter Teagan! Virginia gives a great faithful example – responding to the uncertainty of her daughter coming out by asking herself, “How does God want me to grow in this? How will God use me?” I hope everyone will stick around for it!
At the end of the day (and the beginning of the day!) our God welcomes all – the welcoming and the unwelcoming alike – gay and straight, tall and short, cis and trans, liberal and conservative, even Huskers and (yes) Hoosiers. God loves and welcomes all people across the entire diverse spectrum of humanity. And God keeps inviting us to the party again and again and again – God won’t stop until everyone’s in.
It is our sacred and joyful calling to be like those servants in Jesus’ parable who the king sends out into the streets: to invite everyone we encounter to the party. We are called to let everyone know, whoever they may be, that there is a place for them at God’s table.
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