Trinity 2

Luke 14:16-24 - Trinity II - June 2, 2013 

Come Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest

“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed.  Amen.” 

That’s what we pray before we eat.  It’s known as the common table prayer.  We invite Jesus to join us as we sit down to enjoy what He Himself has given us.  We usually don’t think of such things as coming from Jesus.  Of course, we know that there is one God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three Persons in one divine Essence, and that Jesus is God.  And all good things come from God.  But we tend to talk about the Father, not the Son, as being the One who blesses us with our material things, don’t we?  Well, it’s true.  It’s proper to speak this way since that’s how Scripture speaks.  The Father is the source of all things.  That’s why we call Him our Maker.  It is God the Father almighty who daily and richly provides us with all that we need to support this body and life.  This is what we confess in the Creed.  And all this He does only out of fatherly divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in us. 

But the merit and worthiness come from Jesus.  That’s why we pray the way we do.  It is Jesus who, by His obedience to the Father in our place, reveals the Father’s goodness and mercy toward disobedient sinners.  It is because of Jesus that the Father gives us what we have — everything!  Jesus has earned it even if we have not.  That’s why at our mealtime prayer we call our lunch and supper gifts from Jesus and then we ask Jesus to bless them.  Of course they come from the Father – everything does.  But it is through Jesus alone that we receive these things worthily.  He is the eternal Son of God who reveals His eternal Father to be at peace with us sinners on account of His own holy, precious blood, which He shed to redeem us.  And that is why it is Jesus whom we invite to be our guest every time we sit down to enjoy His Father’s bountiful goodness.  

Martin Luther once said that he who eats without praying is a swine.  He’s right.  And if you’ve ever seen a pig eat you know what he’s talking about.  They don’t care where their food comes from or even what it is.  They just want to eat.  Such is the ungrateful human heart that eats and drinks and enjoys life without thanking God.  God gives us everything.  And so it’s our duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him; this is most certainly true.  But it is likewise most certain that if God does not also give us Jesus in addition to our earthly goods, we’ll end up worshiping all this other stuff instead of God Himself.  It is not possible to have a thankful heart toward God or praise Him apart from Jesus taking our sin away.  That’s why we ask Jesus to join us. 

“Come, Lord Jesus, be our Guest.”  For a prayer that so easily becomes mere routine, it might come across as trite and simple to pray.  But it is not.  It is no joke or cutesy thing to ask Jesus to join us.  We ask Him to come not only because we need Him to, but also because He promises He will.  “Everyone who asks receives” (Matthew 7:8), Jesus says. “I will not leave you orphans;” He promises, “I will come to you” (John 14:18).  “Wherever two or three are gathered together in My name,” He assures us, “there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).    

Yeah, it seems simple.  But Jesus does not come to us because of our invitation.  He comes to us because of His own.  In order that we may call on Jesus and invite Him to be with us, we need Him first to invite us to Himself.  This is what it means to be gathered in His name — it is to receive and accept His invitation to come where He is and to receive what He has to offer.

His invitation is pure unmerited grace: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).  “I am the Bread of Life.”  Jesus says, “He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).  Jesus invites us to receive Himself.  He is the feast.  He invites us to receive the forgiveness of sins.  He Himself is the banquet that fills our deepest need, because it is He who, as the eternal Son of God, took on our own flesh and blood in order to fulfill all righteousness as a Man – as our Brother.  He did this both by obeying what we have not, and by suffering the punishment that God desires to save us from.  As Jesus also says, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world” (John 6:51). 

In order to receive our daily bread with true faith and thanksgiving, we must receive this living bread that creates faith and brings us to God.  We eat this bread by hearing and believing the Gospel.  That is why we must come to where Jesus serves us. 

Isaiah describes this feast in his 55^th chapter:

Ho! Everyone who thirsts,
Come to the waters;
And you who have no money,
Come, buy and eat.
Yes, come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without price.
Why do you spend money for what is not bread,
And your wages for what does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,
And let your soul delight itself in abundance.
Incline your ear, and come to Me.
Hear, and your soul shall live;
And I will make an everlasting covenant with you—
The sure mercies of David. (Isaiah 55:1-3) 

Jesus invites us.  This morning, we heard a parable He told about this invitation for mercy.  And in it we heard how this invitation is often rejected.  I remember when I was younger, it always troubled me that Jesus regarded these excuses as so unacceptable.  They seemed pretty legitimate to me.  And they do seem good, don’t they?  A guy bought land.  He had to tend to it.  That’s life.  A guy bought livestock, and he had to take care of them.  That’s the real world.  A guy got married.  Aren’t our family affairs important?  Is this not what life is all about?  Every young man or woman who expects to be treated like an adult learns soon enough that when duty calls, celebrations and parties and grand feasts sometimes have to take the back seat.  This is life.  Right? 

But the feast that God invites us to is not a distraction from real life.  It creates real life. It defines our life and gives meaning to everything we do. 

We call our jobs vocations, or callings, because it is God who calls us — to be an employer, a laborer, a father, mother, husband, wife, or child.  And all these callings come with their own set of duties that can make life pretty busy.  But we don’t call it a vocation simply because that’s what we feel called to do.  We call it a vocation because we are certain that it is what God wants us to do.  And how can we be certain?  We can be certain that God wants us to do what we do only when we are certain that He is pleased with everything we do for the sake of Jesus Christ His Son.   This means that all our callings in life must be subordinated to the call of the Gospel – as depicted in Jesus’ parable as a great feast. 

God calls us to our various stations in life.  He calls us to fulfill our duties with a good conscience toward Him.  It is impossible for these vocations of ours to trump God’s call through the Gospel, because it is in the Gospel that we learn that God is pleased with us.  God does not call us to do anything that would keep us from obeying the invitation of His Son to feast on the sure mercies of David.  It’s not possible.  We need the Gospel.  We need to go to church and hear it. We need that which gives eternal life.  And we need it more than anything else.  Jesus invites us.  

We cannot invite Jesus to join us in anything we do or enjoy if we do not first heed His invitation to come to Him for the forgiveness of our sins.  We do not live out our vocation in life, and then invite Jesus to join us here and there.  That’s not how it works.  We cannot say, “be our guest,” unless we first become His.  Apart from the call of the Gospel, there is no such thing as vocation.  

That’s why we need to know where Jesus calls us and what sort of person He calls.  Check the highways and hedges, Jesus says.  Look for the poor and crippled and blind and lame.  Look for sinners who have nothing worthwhile to keep them from coming.  And bring them in.  They will feast. 

Jesus said, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44).  The Father draws us by directing us to the cross where sin was punished – where sin is shown to be real – where God’s anger against us is in one event both revealed and satisfied.  Only in the cross of Jesus do we see the Father’s stroke of justice become His tender hand of mercy toward us His children.  There He takes our failures and acts of disobedience, our mistakes and negligence and laziness that we commit in our various callings, and He punishes them in the Person of His incarnate Son.  And then He takes the holy life of love and obedience and patience that Jesus lived as the perfect father and mother, child, worker and master and pastor, and He gives this life to us.  The Father draws us to Jesus by drawing us to where Jesus feeds us with the words of eternal life, where He strengthens and comforts us with His own body given, and His own blood shed.  He honors us here as His friends.  

If we do not know our poverty, our misery, our blindness, we will not come to where God has mercy on sinners.  But what is more important than that?  God knows our poverty, our misery, our blindness and everything we are ashamed of.  And He calls us here to exchange it for mercy.  

We might relate at times to the various excuses in Jesus’ parable.  We might accept the excuses of loved-ones when they seem reasonable.  They have their callings.  We all serve God in what ways we can.  But they were wrong in the story Jesus told.  And so are we.  We must not be foolish.  We must not scorn correction from our Lord.  Let us rather be wise and wiser still.  Let us His saints – who are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, who have tasted and seen that the Lord is indeed good toward us – let us increase in learning.  Let us return to what seems to our flesh to be a waste of time or maybe just a meal we can skip here and there.  It is not.

Because our life is not a waste of time.  Our lives are lived under a holy calling from God our Father to be His children.  Our lives are defined by what we receive here.  What we receive here makes us valuable and makes our lives valuable – so that every mundane and thankless thing we do is accepted by God as the most precious gift. 

Jesus invites us here.  “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.”  We come.  We receive forgiveness.  Our lives are made clean and holy and pleasing to God.  And Jesus invites Himself to us – Even before we say, “Come, Lord Jesus,” He comes and makes His home with us.  And the feast we enjoy here, the feast of mercy will translate in heaven to a feast of unspeakable joy, even as we ourselves will be translated from struggling sinners to saints who shine in glory. 

In Jesus’ name, Amen.