A Place On Earth: The Guest List

To begin 2025, we are looking to Jesus’ parables as a lens through which we might better see and live into God’s Kingdom in the messy here and now; not a distant destination, but a present, parallel reality which we have a hand in cultivating.

We live amid a culture that glorifies and covets exclusivity, who’s in and who’s out. When all that the expected guests can muster are excuses for their absence, whom might the gracious host invite in their place? Spoiler alert, it’s everyone.

Scripture & Quotations

• Luke 14:15-24

• Matthew 23:4-7

  “… this meal was supposed to be a sacred theater of Sabbath righteousness. Instead, it is really only a carnival of the prevailing culture’s prejudices, ambitions, and social barriers.” 

  - Thomas G. Long, Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God

Jacopo Tintoretto, Marriage at Cana, 1561, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, Italy