Saying Yes to God's Call
Sermon preached by Dn. Jeff Smith on Sunday, December 14, 2025
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This morning, we heard the parable of the Great Banquet from the Gospel of Luke, a story that reveals the power of our attachments—to possessions, obligations, and even relationships. A man prepares a magnificent feast and invites many guests, yet when the hour comes, he begins to hear excuses. One has purchased a field, another five yoke of oxen, another has just married a wife. Of course, none of these things are bad in themselves. Land, work, and family are gifts from God. But Christ exposes how even good things can become chains if they prevent us from responding to Him. St. Cyril of Alexandria noted that the invited guests “preferred earthly things to heavenly, and therefore they deprived themselves of the blessings prepared for them.” The tragedy is not that people were busy; it is that they allowed their hearts to be possessed by what they possessed.
This is not the first time that Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a feast or a banquet. The parable mirrors the Wise and Foolish Virgins that we hear about right before Pascha, and it makes sense that we hear this parable right before the Feast of the Nativity. There, ten virgins are invited to meet the Bridegroom, yet only five are ready when He arrives. The others have no oil because, although they expected the Bridegroom, they failed to prepare themselves. Again, an invitation is given, and again it is not embraced. Where the guests at the banquet cling to obligations and comforts, the foolish virgins cling to complacency and delay. But the result is the same: the door is closed, not because Christ desires to exclude us, but because they excluded themselves.
The fields, the oxen, and the newly married spouse symbolize all the demands that fill our minds and consume our energy. The danger is not loving our families; the danger is letting our gifts overshadow the Giver. Christ does not call us to abandon our relationships and responsibilities but to hold them lightly. When our possessions become our identity, when they become the sources of meaning that we cling to tightly, they, of course, become our idols. St. John Chrysostom warns that “whatever we prefer to Christ, even if small, becomes our master.” When we cling too tightly, our hands are too full to receive the invitation to the heavenly banquet.
When I read this parable, I am terrified. How many times have I received a call to follow Christ that I have politely declined? You all know that we were invited to serve as missionaries in Fiji and New Zealand. I was also invited to serve as the librarian of Patriarch Bartholomew on Halki, near Constantinople. But I too have a house, a family and responsibilities. I too have endless excuses and attachments. Excuses are familiar. We all say in our hearts, “Not now. I’m busy. Later, when things settle.” But life never settles. Our lives are constantly moving.
In direct contrast, those who had no claim to the banquet—the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame, those from the roads and hedges—they respond immediately. They carry nothing, so there is nothing to hold them back. In their poverty, they are free. Their lives may be difficult, but their hearts are not tangled up in excuses. They show us the freedom of detachment: the ability to say yes when God calls us.
With the virgins, this freedom appears as readiness. The wise virgins refuse to let their lamps go out because they nurture the inner life—the oil of humility, repentance, watchfulness, and love. The foolish virgins who wanted to be at the feast did nothing to prepare for it, but the Bridegroom comes at midnight, revealing whether our hearts are illuminated or empty.
Taken together, these parables urge us to examine our attachments. What absorbs our thoughts? What governs our time? What anxieties or comforts keep us from prayer, from worship, from repentance, from love? The banquet is ready. The Bridegroom is near. But Christ’s invitation must be met with our readiness. We cannot feast in the Kingdom if our hearts and minds are full of other things.
St. Augustine wrote, “God does not shut the door on those who knock; we just have to enter in time.” And there is still time. I am here at St. Mary’s Church, and we can prepare a heavenly feast and build a heavenly kingdom together. In fact, we did just that last weekend at the Community Christmas Party, a feast indeed! So we can see that the Kingdom of God is offered to us freely, generously, even urgently—but it requires that our hearts are also awake, free, and willing.
The call today is not to abandon family or work, but to reorder them in the light of Christ. When love for God comes first, every other love becomes more genuine and more free. When we detach from possessions and worries, we become able to say, like the wise virgins, “I am ready, Lord,” and enter into His banquet without hesitation.
To conclude, let us ask God to grant us the grace to love Him above everything so that everything in our lives may fall into its proper and life-giving place. Amen.