Homily for the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

October 11, 2026

Reverend Billy Graham told of a time early in his ministry when he arrived in a small town to preach a sermon. Wanting to mail a letter, he asked a young boy where the post office was. When the boy told him, Dr. Graham thanked him and said, “If you’ll come to the Baptist church this evening, you can hear me telling everyone how to get to heaven.”

“I don’t think I’ll be there,” the boy said. “You don’t even know your way to the post office.”

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In today’s gospel passage Jesus tells a story about a royal wedding in which, by the end, pretty much everyone is invited. What I wanted to focus on is those who, like the boy in Billy Graham’s story, had excuses for not attending. According to the story, some ignored the invitation and went away, “one to his farm, and another to his business.”

In the context of Jesus’ time, we note right at the start of the gospel the ones Jesus is aiming his story at. We read, “Jesus again in reply spoke to the chief priests and elders of the people…” At that time, they were the ones who, when confronted by Jesus’ teaching, always seem to have an excuse. Like Billy Graham, Jesus was telling people how to get to heaven, and they had excuses and refused to show up.

Now, we can take these insights and apply them to ourselves. Are there ways in which we don’t show up when we are invited? One of the things I hear people complain about is that they are too busy. Young families have to deal with school schedules, sports practices and games, hectic work schedules. It’s overwhelming at times for many of us, isn’t it? I have found this out for myself. It seems that I have the most time for prayer, for example, when I’m sick and can’t do much else. But, under normal conditions, I can become so busy that time for God gets squeezed out of the schedule.

One of the obvious applications of Jesus’ story has to do with our Sunday celebrations. I have seen posters which say: You are invited to a banquet that God is having in honor of his Son. Since there is so much in the news now about AI, I decided to try it in relation to reasons people give for not making it to the Sunday Eucharist.

AI came up with seventeen different reasons, but boiled it down to three underlying issues. First, is discomfort, if people feel they are being judged, feel unwelcome, or out of place, don’t have the right clothes, etc. Second, is competing priorities, including work schedules, sleep needs, sports, or social life. And third, is disconnection, not feeling spiritually fed, not feeling part of the community, disagreement about politics.

Our job, of course, is not to judge other people. But I think we all might reflect on how we can be as inviting and life-giving as we can. I recently watched a film about Pope Francis in which there was a young woman who had the job of translating Francis’ homilies into English. She said that because he thought in Argentinian Spanish, and then translated it into Italian, this was sometimes difficult. For example, one day Pope Francis said, literally, that Christians should not have pickled faces. Now, how do you translate that?

Luckily, the translator figured it out. Pope Francis was teaching that Christians should live their faith with joy. When you translate pickled faces into English, what he was saying is that we shouldn’t have or be sour pusses. In other words, our faces should radiate joy because God has invited us to the banquet. And it’s not a banquet just for this world; it is a foretaste of the eternal life promised us in heaven! So, Pope Francis was saying: rather than judging the actions of others, let’s try to reach out to them. Let’s be like the servants of the king in the story, spreading the invitation. Let’s be like Billy Graham, who may not have known the way to the post office, but wanted to make sure others knew they were invited to heaven.