{"id":21619,"date":"2022-08-31T08:09:37","date_gmt":"2022-08-31T12:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=21619"},"modified":"2022-08-31T08:16:09","modified_gmt":"2022-08-31T12:16:09","slug":"21619","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=21619","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\u200b\u200b\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CUBBIddm_rM\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Heaven Is a Great Party<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>In this homily, Father Richard considers the parable of the wedding feast and points out how few of us seem even to desire to attend God\u2019s banquet.&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/email.cac.org\/t\/d-l-fkitlhy-tlkrdrec-y\/\"><em>Click here to read the Gospel passage<\/em><\/a><em>&nbsp;<\/em><em>(Matthew 22:1\u201310).&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>God has always had a very hard time giving away God: No one wants seems to want this gift. We\u2019d rather have religion, and laws, and commandments, and obligations, and duties. I\u2019m sure many of us attend church out of duty, but gathering with the Body of Christ is supposed to be a wedding feast. Do you know how many times in the four Gospels eternal life is described as a banquet, a feast, a party, a wedding, the marriage feast of the Lamb? There are fifteen different, direct allusions to eternal life being a great, big party.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do you know how many parables there are about eternal life being a courtroom or a judgment scene? One. Matthew 25. And that\u2019s good. We need Matthew 25 because it makes it very clear that the ultimate issue is about how we care for the poor and marginalized. But we forget this good news of Jesus, sending a message out to the highways and the byways, inviting everybody who\u2019s willing to come to the banquet. It\u2019s that simple!&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus goes out of his way to mention the good and the bad alike. We don\u2019t like that either. We only want the good people to be there at the banquet, assuming, of course, that we\u2019re the good people. Did you ever see the irony of that? Don\u2019t you realize that every religion thinks that they are the ones that God likes? And we end up gathering at the party with that smug certitude; but when we do, it resembles something that very often isn\u2019t much like a party. I don\u2019t want to offend anybody, but sometimes only half of us even sing when we\u2019re at church; half of us don\u2019t even pick up the hymnals. I\u2019m not trying to be cruel, but let\u2019s just be honest and admit that many of us aren\u2019t excited to be at church. For many of us, the Body of Christ is not a party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Instead, we often believe that heaven is a giant courtroom scene. The good people win, the bad people lose, and almost everybody is bad except our group. That won\u2019t work! It gives no joy and no hope to the world. It tells people they\u2019re on the right side when sometimes they\u2019re very unloving people who don\u2019t care about the poor or the marginalized at all. And the statistics prove that Christians are no better than anybody else, in fact, very often\u2014I\u2019m sorry to say it\u2014we\u2019re worse.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do we want to be a part of the wedding feast to which all are invited? The only people who don\u2019t get in on the party are those who don\u2019t want to come\u2014so I guess we have to ask ourselves, \u201cDo we want to come?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"400\" src=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-10-500x400.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-21621\" srcset=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-10-500x400.png 500w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-10-300x240.png 300w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-10-768x614.png 768w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-10.png 1612w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u200b\u200b\u200b\u200b Heaven Is a Great Party In this homily, Father Richard considers the parable of the wedding feast and points out how few of us seem even to desire to attend God\u2019s banquet.&nbsp;Click here to read the Gospel passage&nbsp;(Matthew 22:1\u201310).&nbsp; God has always had a very hard time giving away God: No one wants seems [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21619"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21619"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21623,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21619\/revisions\/21623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}