Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart,
and knoweth all things”
What does this signify? Only that God knows us better than we do ourselves, however much we deceive ourselves. In a way, the Epistle and Gospel reading this morning not only complement each other but provide a pretty strong encouragement to enter into what has been made known to us in Jesus Christ. Or to put it in another way, our excuses are absolutely nothing worth when it comes to the heavenly banquet, itself an image of the soul’s enjoyment and fellowship with God. Our relationship with God cannot be simply what and when and if we please. What kind of God would that be? A God of our own devising, which is to say, no God.
Our excuses do not excuse us. This is a tough but obvious truth. Worship simply has priority. It is as simple as that. And yet to say it misses the greater point. Worship cannot be coerced; it cannot be forced. It is about more than mere duty. It is about what we love. It is about our love of God. In the long end of the day, if we don’t want to be here we shouldn’t be here because we have missed the whole point of being here. You can’t sell the Gospel. It isn’t a market commodity. God is not for sale.
But you can and have to proclaim the Gospel. The proclamation of the Gospel is the repeated invitation to enter into a life with God. Today’s Gospel story is about the invitation to the kingdom of God’s blessedness. What launches the parable about our excuses is the proclamation: “blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It is, to be sure, a blessing and not a right. The refusal of the invitation is a refusal of the blessing.