Several months after I moved to China, a friend invited me to her cousin’s wedding in a remote village. When we arrived at the bride’s home, the family surrounded me and began a debate I couldn’t understand. Eventually my smiling friend turned to me and said, “As a foreigner, you are the most honored guest. You must be the maid of honor.” With that, the next several hours became a blur, as I was thrown into a celebration of food, music, dancing, and, yes, toasts. (“Say anything in English,” my friend instructed. “I will make you sound good when I translate.”)

But perhaps my favorite part of the day was when we traveled from the bride’s home to the ceremony site. Cars and buses and people on foot paraded across the village, honking and calling to neighbors. The whole community was welcomed—even compelled—to come join the celebration, from the poorest neighbor to this confused, awkward foreigner.

Jesus tells of a God who doesn’t just seek, sweep, track, and venture out to find the lost one; when the lost one is found and retrieved, God celebrates extravagantly. God throws parties, the kind where everyone is invited.

The question is this: Will we will accept the invitation? For some of us, we must let go of the pride that keeps us from dancing in the street. Others of us, like the Pharisees, must overcome our sense that we (and others) must earn the right to be celebrated. We may have to let go of our biases that keep us from associating with the sinner/wanderer/lost one who has been found. But God is there, in the middle of the party, dancing with the sinners and the wanderers, inviting us to join the celebration, and compelling us to extend the party to our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our nation, our world.