The first said, ‘I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.’
¹⁹ “Another said, ‘I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’
²⁰ “Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’
                                                                                                -Luke 14:18-20
 
In the ancient world of Jesus’s time, the banquet guests would have known for many, many days that this event was coming. And to Jesus’s audience, these excuses would have sounded rude and trifling—the rough equivalent of “I can’t make it, I gotta’ pluck my eyebrows.”
 
The reality is if they had valued the invitation, they would have made the banquet a priority.
 
We clear the decks and re-arrange our schedules for the things that really matter to us: family weddings, family graduations, office parties, kids sports, and unique opportunities--if someone had offered me free Superbowl tickets last week, I would have done everything I could to get there!
 
Throughout Jesus’s ministry, the metaphor of a great feast or banquet is one of his favorite images for the kingdom of God that he has come to inaugurate. And here Jesus is communicating a sobering truth: we can easily under-estimate the value of what he has come to give us and get distracted by smaller, much less important things.
 
Let’s be honest and say that for most of us the kingdom of God doesn’t feel as urgent and pressing as most of the items on our to-do lists today.  And yet in this parable Jesus warns us that it is extremely possible to get so hung up on our to-do lists that we miss out the most important thing in this life and in the next.
 
Today, there’s an invitation for us to name and recognize our immediate interests that might swallow us up and to fight to keep those in perspective. Ten days from now, you won’t remember the vast majority of things that feel so urgent today. 
 
Let’s fight together to not let the eternal things get swallowed up by the temporal, passing, and often trivial. Today, let’s fight to build our lives on the joy that lasts and fix our eyes and our hearts on the kingdom of God.
 
That to-do list still needs to eventually get finally-done. But life is more than endless to-do lists. And if we don’t fight for kingdom perspective, Jesus warns us that we can get swallowed up in the bottomless pit of smaller matters and miss out on the solid joys of his banquet.
 
What are the pressing matters in your life that are most likely to swallow you up today and would keep you from acting on the invitation to enter into Jesus’s joy?