Towards Sunday, Oct 12, 2014 (Thanksgiving Sunday)

Scripture:  Matthew 22:1-14
Sermon theme:  Who wouldn't want to enjoy a wedding?  (please RSVP)

Why would someone not go to a wedding?  It's a privilege to be invited, and a pleasure to attend.

Or why would someone go not properly prepared for the occasion?  We diminish ourselves and cheapen the time when we fail to properly recognize and celebrate its meaning.

Jesus says this is how many treat the kingdom of heaven, though. 

Every day we are invited to a feast of God's love, a living marriage of heaven and earth (did you see that sunrise?  appreciate the beauty of those flowers?  feel awe before the innocence in that child's eyes?  feel warmed by that embrace?  feel freed by that forgiving word?  know the joy of forgiving another?  know the power of making peace with an enemy?  give in to that stir of new life in your heart?  sense the passion within that strain of music?  enter into the mystery of that moment of silence?)

The kingdom of heaven really is always as near as the present moment.  But every day untold numbers of people fail to show up for this on-going, never-ending feast of God's love.  We are too distracted by other business that at the moment seems more important. 

Or we try to enjoy God's feast in some only-half-prepared kind of way, on the run, only half-present.  We try to turn God's feast into fast-food take-out that we can pick up at a drive-through.

This Sunday is Thanksgiving Sunday in Canada.  I wonder if in our worship (of the Giver of the feast) we can grow into the luxuriatingly grateful spirit of this poem by e.e.cummings:

     i thank you God for most this amazing
     day :for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
     and a blue true dream of sky ;and for everything
     which is natural which is infinite which is yes

     (i who have died am alive again today,
     and this is the sun's birthday ;this is the birth
     day of life and of love and wings :and of the gay
     great happening illimitably earth)

     how should tasting touching hearing seeing
     breathing any--lifted from the no
     of all nothing--human merely being
     doubt unimaginable You?

     (now the ears of my ears awake and
     now the eyes of my eyes are opened)