Who here has a bucket list? You know, the stuff you want to get to at some point. Things to experience, places to go. My bucket list? Travel. Travel with my wife Kathy to a bunch of places we want to see… when of course we have more time. Maybe after I stop working, when things slow down because we are way too busy now.

Does that excuse sound familiar? If I keep putting it off, I may never get to it. It’s not too late… until it is.

I think there is a flavor of this going on in the Gospel today. The King is having a wedding feast for his son, so he sends out his servants to summon the guests. They’ve been invited to a King’s feast, and how do they respond? Some despise the king and kill his servants, and some just ignore the request and, scripture says, they went away, one to their farm and one to their business.

Think about that, they were invited to the greatest of feasts and they were too busy. They said, “I have work to do. Maybe some other time.”

Well, we know that in this Gospel story, the King is God, the feast is heaven and we are all invited. How do we respond? This feast is something special. In the first reading, God speaks through Isaiah the prophet about that feast and says, “The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from every face.” We know that heaven is a place where there are no tears, no grief, no pain. That feast should be at the top of our bucket list! But are we answering the King’s summons? If not, why not?

For me, I sometimes don’t answer it because I get wrapped up in my to-do list, like fall yard clean up and work… and I blink and too much time has gone by. Or maybe we are weighted down with heavy burdens, hurt, or guilt. Maybe we are caring for a sick parent or child… and we go it alone and are too busy to respond. And we feel very alone.

And when we are reaching out to God in prayer, maybe our prayers are yielding answers that either we don’t want or weren’t expecting, or worse we feel like we are getting no answer at all. And sometimes, particularly this week, it is hard to make sense of what is going on in the world. We feel alone or maybe helpless. It is easy to feel that way and we miss the invitation to lighten the burden, to erase that guilt, to get his help, to make sense of the world. 

Well, the best news of all is that we are not alone. In the Psalm we all just sung, we proclaimed a familiar passage that we sometimes equate with a funeral, but it speaks of God walking with us here on earth. It says, “He guides me on right paths. Even though I walk in the dark valley, I fear no evil for you are at my side.” That is comforting and tells us we do not need to go it alone. 

In fact, Jesus is standing right next to us yearning for us to reach out to him. He looks at us and says, “I am right here! Come, come to me and rest.”

And he is talking about rest right here on earth, we don’t have to wait for heaven. This too is a feast. If the answer to your prayers has yielded a different answer than you were expecting, walk with Him. He loves you and will not steer you wrong. If your prayer is yielding no answer, simply call upon him to share the burden and together you will get through it. And when we yield to what he wants, when we respond to his, “I’m right here!” we find more peace, lighter burdens, a new path… and hope.

And think about this, this life we have here with him has more hope, more peace, more joy and it isn’t even the feast in heaven yet! It is like the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding feast. And if he can make our lives on earth so much more peaceful, imagine what that heavenly feast will be like. But to get there, we can’t wait too long. The first step isn’t directly to the heavenly feast, the first step is right here responding to his call to us and handing over our burdens while we are here on earth. And the reward is right here too – the better life with him sharing our burdens. That is a little heaven right here on earth. 

So, remember, while our time on earth is not infinite, the heavenly feast is. We don’t want to miss out on the summons from the King. But if our motto is I’ll get to it, remember that it’s not too late… until it is.