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“Dressed for the Occasion” 

Matthew 22:1-14 

There are few phrases in the English language less helpful than the phrase “business casual.” 

Business casual.  

What does that mean? 

Can I wear a solid color dress? Or is a print dress acceptable? Do I need a jacket? Can I wear my nice sneakers? How casual is too casual? How business is too business? 

The frustrating thing about business casual is that everyone else seems to know what it means. And then you spot the one person who apparently interpreted business casual as I have an important meeting with the governor immediately after this, and suddenly you are reconsidering every decision you made while standing in front of your closet that morning.  

This phrase is stressful because there are occasions when what you are wearing matters.  

You probably would not wear a tuxedo to mow the law. 

You probably would not wear sweatpants to a wedding. 

And if an invitation says black tie, you probably would not arrive wearing your favorite Steelers hoodie. 

Even though we may not all agree on what business casual means, we understand that different occasions call for different things. Which makes the parable Jesus tells in our Scripture this morning particularly interesting. Because Jesus tells us about a wedding. 

There is a king whose son is getting married. The banquet has been prepared. The food is ready. The tables are set. The invitations have gone out. There is only one problem. Nobody wants to come. And these are the people who were invited first. The king sends his servants to tell them that everything is ready, and they simply refuse to come.  

So, he sends the servants again. And still, they won’t come. Some of them shrug and go back to their farms and businesses. Others do something far worse: they seize the king’s servants, mistreat them, and kill them. The king, angry now, tells his remaining servants to go into the streets and invite everyone you can find to the banquet.  

And suddenly the wedding hall is full.  

The king walks into the banquet. He looks around at this room filled with people who never expected to be invited in the first place. And then he notices one man. Friend, he asks, how did you get in here without a wedding robe? And suddenly, what seemed like a perfectly lovely parable about God’s extravagant welcome becomes a story about a dress code.  

And if we’re going to understand what Jesus is saying, we have to figure out why on earth what this man is wearing matters so much.  

But before we try to figure out what is wrong with this man’s clothes, I think we need to pay attention to something else.  

He is already inside. 

That matters. 

This man isn’t standing outside the banquet trying to convince the king that he deserves admission.  

He didn’t earn an invitation.  

He wasn’t on the original guest list.  

As far as we know, he was simply going about his day when one of the king’s servants found him on the road and said, Come. There is a place for you at the table. Matthew says the servants gathered “all whom they found, both good and bad.”  

I love that little detail.  

Because apparently when the king said everybody, he meant everybody. And apparently the servants understood that their job was not to decide who deserved an invitation. Their job was simply to invite. Because the invitation creates the conditions by which grace can begin.  

I think we have to begin here too. 

Because Christianity has sometimes become very good at making God’s invitation sound like something you have to qualify for.  

Get your life together.  

Then perhaps you can come inside. 

But that is not how the invitation works in Jesus’ story. The king tells his servants go find everybody. Good and bad. Put together and falling apart. People who know exactly why they’re here and people who probably can’t believe they got invited.  

The banquet hall fills with people who have one thing in common:  

Somebody invited them. 

And that means whatever Jesus is going to tell us about the wedding robe, we cannot allow it to erase what he has already told us about the invitation.  

Grace comes first.  

Grace always comes first. 

Now, grace coming first does not mean grace leaves us exactly where it found us. And that, I think, is where we must return to the man without the wedding robe.  

The man belongs at the banquet. The problem is that he accepted the invitation as though it required nothing of him.  

Now, scholars have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out exactly what this wedding garment represents. They seem to agree that Jesus isn’t particularly interested in giving us first-century fashion advice. The clothing is doing something bigger than that. Throughout Scripture, clothing is often used as an image for the kind of life God’s people are called to live. 

The prophet Isaiah speaks about being clothed with garments of salvation. Paul tells the church to “put on” Christ. And in Colossians, Christians are told to clothe themselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, and above all, love.  

In other words, if God’s grace has wrapped itself around our lives, eventually our lives ought to look like it. Not perfectly. Not immediately. And certainly not because we are trying to prove that we deserved the invitation in the first place.  

Remember, these people were pulled in from the streets. But an encounter with grace ought to change something. Matthew is sneakily asking us the same question he asked us last week with the parable of the Wicked Tenants. What does a life touched by God’s grace actually produce? 

If I have received mercy, does mercy begin showing up in the way I treat other people? 

If I have been forgiven, does forgiveness become a little easier for me to offer? 

If I have discovered that there was room for me at God’s table, do I become more willing to make room for somebody else? 

Because there is a version of Christianity that wants the invitation without the transformation. We want grace that comforts us but never challenges us. A seat at the table without having to think very much about who is sitting beside us. But Jesus loves us far too much for that. The grace of God says Come in. There is a place for you. And then that same grace begins opening the closet. Here. Put on some compassion. Let’s try some forgiveness. And over everything else, put on love.  

Not because these things earn us a place at the feast. But because this is what people who have been welcomed to the feast are learning to wear. We dress for the occasion because, by the astonishing grace of God, we’ve been invited to the feast.  

So maybe figuring out what to wear to this particular occasion isn't as complicated as we thought. 

No standing in front of the closet wondering whether we're too casual. 

No worrying that everybody else somehow understood the dress code and we didn't. 

No wondering whether we're good enough, faithful enough, respectable enough, or put together enough to walk through the door. 

Because the invitation has already gone out. 

Come to the feast. 

Come from the highways and the intersections. 

Come from wherever life has taken you. 

Come with your doubts and your questions. 

Come with the parts of your life you're proud of and the parts you would rather nobody else see. 

Come because there is a place for you at the table. 

And then, once you're here— 

get dressed. 

Clothe yourself with compassion. 

Put on kindness. 

Wear humility. 

Wrap yourself in patience. 

Try forgiveness, even when it doesn't fit quite as comfortably as you would like. 

And over all of it, put on love. 

Not so God will invite you. 

Not so you can prove that you deserve your seat. 

Not so you can look around the banquet hall and decide whether everybody else is dressed appropriately. 

But because you have already been invited. 

Because grace has already found you. 

Because there is already a place with your name on it at the table. 

And because when we have been loved that extravagantly, welcomed that generously, forgiven that completely— 

eventually, it ought to show. 

Friends, the feast is prepared. 

The doors are open. 

You've been invited. 

Now let's get dressed for the occasion. 

Amen.