Audio recording Sermon manuscript: Birds of a feather flock together. People with the same tastes or interests gather themselves together. Oftentimes you can just look at a person and know a lot about them. What kind of clothes do they wear? How is their hair cut? Do they have piercings or tattoos? With simple questions like these you will have a pretty good idea of what their social class is, what kind of work they do or don’t do, who their friends are, what their family life is probably like, etc. You will also know if you are one of them. If they are from your class of people, then you are more likely to interact with them. If they are from a higher social class, then you might be a little bashful. If they are from a lower social class, then you mightdistain them. Nobody has to teach us to do this kind of thing. We all do it. We were already doing it by the time that we were in middle school. By the time we got to high school the social classes were almost set in stone. There were the rich kids, the poor kids, and the kids in between. Each group dressed and acted in a different way. Each group protected themselves from the others. Each group regarded themselves as the best for one reason or another. It was therefore dangerous to go from one group to another. If you left your own group and started associating with another group, you might not be accepted by the new group. Plus, you might not be welcomed back into your old group. Haven’t you ever heard the saying, “Be careful who you associate with”? If you start hanging out with losers, other people will see it, and then what will they think of you? People will start to say, “Oh, you’re one of them!” Some people don’t care what others think of them, but most people care intensely about such things. Let’s apply this to Jesus’s story in our Gospel reading. A man put on a great banquet. This must have meant that he was a man of means. It also appears that there were formal invitations that went out. This also indicates that the man was from a certain class. Finally, the excuses indicate that the people to whom the invitations went were probably from the same class. These were people who could afford to buy new fields and big machinery. But the man’s invitation was rejected by these people. Then an entirely different class of people ends up getting invited in. The servant is told to go out quickly into the streets and alleys. “Bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” The man needed to have more guests. But the servant had already done that! Now what? “Go and beat the bushes! Compel them to come in!” You won’t find members of the country club hanging out in alleys and in the medians of highways. If you round up people from such places you are going to find that they have different problems than the country club variety. So perhaps, when everything is said and done, everybody ends up being happy. The man who puts on the banquet ended up with a bunch of losers. They’re happy enough, getting a free meal out of the deal. Those originally invited are happy too. They weren’t hurting for food. If they could afford those big ticket items, certainly they could go to a nice restaurant. Plus they didn’t need to pollute themselves by hanging out with people who were poor, crippled, blind, and lame. They probably laughed at the man who had invited them when they heard about that ridiculous gathering. They thanked their lucky stars that they hadn’t accepted it. Everybody’s happy. But Jesus is not just talking about social dynamics with this story. He is talking about the kingdom of God. This banquet, you might say, is the wedding feast of the Lamb in his kingdom which has no end. These people are not being invited just for a meal. They are being invited to salvation. But there are social dynamics involved, even with the invitation to salvation. The old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” holds true here too. The thing that is different is the feather. What tas