My mom gave me a book recently that her book club read and enjoyed. It’s called The Partying God: Discovering the God of Extravagant Celebration.
I’m guessing most of you are not going to gravitate to a book with a title like that. Being smart, serious, and globally minded folks, you might be more apt to look for titles like Ignorance, Intention, and the Possibility of Forgiveness: A Study in the Remissibility of Sin in Second Temple and Early Christian Sources. (Sound like a doctoral dissertation? It is.) So in case your mom doesn’t give you this book, I want to give it to you. Or at least the main idea.The author, Robert Herber, invites us to see the joyful, celebratory aspects of God. This is a good time of year to do that.
Herber says God celebrates because he has to. It’s his nature. When the Prodigal Son comes home dirty, shame-faced and smelling of swine, the dad throws a party. He tells the older brother, “We have to celebrate. My son was dead and is now alive!” And in Luke 15:10, Jesus says, “There is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” God is the King of Celebration!
When Jesus enfleshed this great partying God and walked among us, he celebrated: Jesus made wine at a wedding, he invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’s house, he asked another bad guy to be his disciple then went to a party the bad guy threw with a bunch of his bad guy friends (and presumably some bad girls as well). If we’re going to follow this Jesus, I guess “go to parties” and “host parties” need to go on our list along with “stop cussing,” “tithe,” and “drive no more than five miles per hour over the speed limit!”
One last thing Herber mentions, and this I love: God is insistent on inviting all kinds of people to his parties. Jesus tells a remarkable story in Luke 14 about a guy who throws a banquet and through an odd series of events ends up beating the bushes to urge all sorts of overlooked outsiders to come, eat their fill, and celebrate. I really like that about God. And I like that God puts a fistful of invitations in our hands and ask us to go fill up the party room.
Let me close with a party story that first appeared in Missions Catalyst more than a decade ago when some of you were still putting out milk and cookies for Santa Claus…