by CCW | 14 June 2026 10:00
The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the critical matrix for our understanding week in and week out. It is no less so for this Sunday. The Gospel is Christ’s parable which likens the kingdom of heaven to a great supper to which all who were invited made excuses. But is the kingdom of heaven a good equal to our other desires and pleasures in our concerns about property or goods or states of life, even such as marriage? How can that be? Thus the consequence of our refusals would seem to mean not only “no feast” but equally a denial of God’s will and kingdom, as if our conveniences and interests really take precedence over God’s will for our highest good, our blessedness. Here our preoccupations about such concerns contribute to our indifference to the things of God through too much attachment to worldly concerns. Loving the things of the world too much, the things that are always passing away, leads to the neglect of the things of God, the things that are everlasting. It is one of the forms of the disorder of our loves that constantly need correction.
We have to learn, it seems, how to care for the things of our daily lives in the right way by learning to love all good things in God. “Teach us to care and not to care,” as T.S. Eliot puts it; in other words, teach us to care in the right way.
It might seem that our excuses must frustrate God’s will. But that cannot be. We can only frustrate ourselves; itself a kind of self-condemnation. God will have his house filled with those whom he makes ready as the Gospel shows, bringing them in who could not come on their own, compelling them to come in who would not come any other way. In a way, it is a strong statement of God’s love for our highest good, a strong statement about what God wants for us and which is prepared for us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” Now, in God’s time and will, not ours. But are we ready?
Yet the invitation nonetheless recognises human agency. God invites those whom he would have come willingly and freely out of love; those of whom it may truly be said, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It suggests hospitality and conviviality in our social joys as grounded in God’s purpose and will for us. It belongs, in other words, to human redemption. As John tells us, the first miracle which Jesus did at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee was to turn water into wine, an image of our social joys and pleasures but as belonging to God’s will for the good of our humanity; in short, our joy is found in him and his kingdom, the communion of saints. It is not simply about our private goods. To refuse the invitation is to deny the love in which we find the ultimate truth of ourselves, knowing ourselves as we are known by him, known in the radiancy of God’s glory and love which has been shown to us.
To be sure, our refusal of God’s grace is also the freedom of our will. But to be freed to our own pre-occupations and immediate interests is to be enslaved to ourselves and to the misery of our self-will. Recognising that results, at first, in self-condemnation, the condemnation of our hearts. Yet that is not what God wants for us nor what he wants us to want either. He wants us to be alive to something more and greater than either our preoccupations with our immediate concerns or our condemnations of ourselves in regret, self-pity, and misery in beating up on ourselves.
The purpose of the parable is to convict our hearts of our folly and foolishness but only so that we will be thrown back more fully and more freely upon the goodness of God. Even more, it is a strong reminder that the real truth of the freedom of our wills is the freedom to will what God wills for us; in short, to will the absolute good which belongs to God. Thus the Epistle reminds us of the superlative goodness of God: “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”. God is neither indifferent to our predicaments nor is he captive to our concerns.
As Thomas Cranmer so wonderfully puts it: “He that keepeth the words of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling place or temple of the Blessed Trinity.” But where shall we hear the words of Christ that we may keep them except in the holy places where the word is truly proclaimed and the sacraments duly celebrated? For “there”, as Luther says, “is the Church”.
Yet we are not to make idols of our churches any more than our possessions and worldly preoccupations or one another. Our churches are not ends in themselves. They exist for a purpose that always points beyond themselves and provides for our participation in the mystery of God revealed Not the false opposition of steeple versus people, as it were, but both together in the unity of God. Without that they are nothing. Our churches are the holy temples where the heavenly Jerusalem, the kingdom of God, is proclaimed and celebrated. “This is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of Heaven” as is written on the very walls of Christ Church. Here our blessedness is found in the eating of the bread and in the hearing of the word, the blessedness of our fellowship with one another in the overwhelming grace of the hospitality of God. It can’t be just one thing among a competing range of choices. It is paramount.
In the body broken and the blood outpoured, in the word proclaimed and celebrated, we are reminded of the steadfast love of the God who is greater than our hearts. Such is the mercy and the joy of our fellowship with God and to God and in God.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 2, 2026 (revised and reworked ‘02)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/06/14/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-after-trinity-15/
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