June 9, 2013 Second Sunday After Trinity
Food That Sustains Us
Deuteronomy 20:1-9, Psalm 15, 1 St. John 3:13-24, St. Luke 14:16-24
In my first week in Durango, before my wife arrived, a couple in this congregation invited me over for Sunday dinner. And I’ll tell you one thing for doggone sure: They didn’t have to ask me twice.
Yet in the Parable of the Great Banquet we read in our gospel lesson this morning, that is precisely what the host must do. He has already invited a number of guests and received their acceptances. Yet when the day of the feast arrives he sends his servant to invite them a second time. A curious custom indeed.
Remember when your mom called you for dinner and you were so wrapped up in playing dodgeball in the street that you didn’t come in. Then she came out and “invited” you a second time, promising to beat your little behind if you didn’t get it in your chair at the table five minutes ago?
But these are grownups in our story, men who buy and sell and marry. Stories use symbols; to understand the stories we must grasp the symbols. When we look back through 2,000 years at a culture on the other side of the world, we must translate the symbols to tease the meaning out of the story.
Even today, the ways of other cultures are often elusive. When I was working in missions, I spent a month touring Central Asia. Various missionaries took me to gatherings of local people in their homes. Over time, I noticed a pattern: Each host gave me the place for sitting cross-legged on a mat farthest from the door. I speculated on what that might mean. In Uzbekistan, I asked one of the missionaries and he confirmed my guess.
As a visitor from across the ocean, and usually the oldest person in the room, I was given the seat of honor, which was the farthest from the door for good reason. If a hostile erupted through it brandishing a sword or dagger, I would have the best chance of surviving. There was little danger of that sort of excitement now – I think -- but the old custom stuck like the mud bricks they use to build their houses.
Our parable our Lord relates in St. Luke’s 14th chapter will yield more gold for us if we take the symbols as His hearers did.
The host issues two invitations because time is elastic. In the Middle East, this is so even today. When two men agree to meet at 6 o’clock, they both understand they mean 6:45 or 7 – or so. The one who arrives first loses face, so they play a guessing game, each trying to peg the other’s arrival time so he can appear a few minutes later.
This is simply the way of their culture. For us, who are so conscious of time – some say slaves to time – their practice seems juvenile and silly. And they don’t care.
The host sends his servant with the second invitation because, while the day of the banquet is set, no one is sure of the time. For one thing, it depends on when the cooking is finished. This is before the invention of the meat thermometer.
The host chooses the main course based on the number of guests. A small group will eat a chicken, a larger one a duck, a still larger one a kid and a really big guest list dictates a calf.
For that reason, and because the entire animal must be consumed that night, an acceptance is irrevocable. To fail to appear after having accepted an invitation is a grave insult. In a shame-based culture, face is everything. You would wait forever to be invited to a potluck. A host provides for his guests and he provides sumptuously.
Again, two millennia later, the custom lingers. Missionaries have told me of avoiding visiting local people at any time even remotely close to a meal. The host would kill his last chicken, if necessary, even at the cost of his family’s going hungry for a time, to provide for guests. Hospitality is a solemn duty.
So when the three guests inform the servant they will not attend they are slapping the host in the face. They are falling back on the regulations set out in our Old Testament passage from Deuteronomy 20. In time of war, men could remain behind for a number of reasons, such as having recently bought a field or taken a bride. Two of the three guests offer excuses from this list.
But this is not a time of war and these men would not be required to sally forth for an extended time. Their excuses are as thin as an anorexic teenager, stuffed with more deceit than a padded bra. No Israelite would buy a field or several brace of oxen without examining his purchase closely in advance. They do not say they have decided to get drunk or go wenching. Doing business and marrying are legitimate activities.
The host in the story is, of course, God, a sort of composite of Father and Son. Jesus is telling this parable to a high-ranking Pharisee who has invited Him to dinner on the Sabbath and to his well-heeled friends, scribes and other Pharisees.
The Lord is making the point that apostasy – falling away from one’s faith – begins not with unadorned sin but with making acceptable and even necessary activities more important than God. But these are men steeped in the law, wedded to the notion that those who keep that law are the most righteous.
Is the law not good? Did God not give it? Surely those who observe it most scrupulously will take the choicest seats in the His kingdom. But they love the law so much that they diminish the God who gave it. And once men take God down a peg or two, they find no problem at all in dragging down those He has made in His image.
These leaders of Israel have excluded from “their” kingdom all gentiles – even though they know Isaiah 25 very well. Verses 6-9 tell of a time when God will welcome all people into His kingdom. Here is v 6: “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.”
In the parable, the feast is the messianic banquet that our Lord will celebrate with all His people in the New Jerusalem. Step back for a moment and look at this picture: In His first coming, our Lord goes to a feast and tells a story of a feast that foretells the feast He will eat with us when He comes again.
The messianic banquet ushers in a new age – the age of grace – but these Jewish leaders are clinging to the law, or the version of it they have twisted into the shape of their gnarled souls. The law has served them well. Expertise in the law has meant the license to manipulate it and a rank far above the common people. The law has meant for them status and privilege. More than that, they have edited God’s law like a dime novel so that it allows them to justify themselves. And when men can atone for their transgressions, what need have they of God?
The law never had the power to save the Israelites. Only God has that power. And He has demonstrated it throughout their history. The Father provides the Passover meal for those He rescues from bondage in Egypt. He then sustains them with manna from heaven and delivers them into a land flowing with milk and honey. The Israelites’ food screams at them: O taste and see that the Lord is good!
This is the dictum Adam ignored. Adam ate the one fruit from which God had commanded him to abstain. He treated the food of the garden as something apart from God’s dominion, for man to take or leave at his pleasure. To play fast and loose with the food God gives is to gamble with the life God gives.
It is scarcely possible to overstate the importance of food in the biblical cultures and in the Scriptures. It goes far beyond nourishing the body. An anthropologist studied the dietary laws of Israel and reported, “The apparent trivialities of the domestic table may be as significant as poetry or other exalted forms of communication in ordering thought and experience.”
Food provided the orientation of relationships and community life. The Song of Songs presents eating and drinking together as the picture of sexual love. Elsewhere, those who “sit at meat” together at the sacrificial meal are on intimate terms and obligated to one another.
Those who do not eat together are not in fellowship and have no interaction through their religion – if they are not outright enemies. Recall that when Israel was in Egypt the Egyptians, who were farmers, would not eat with the Hebrews. They considered it an “abomination” to eat with animal herders.
Later, the Jews assembled at the temple to celebrate the great events in their history – the Passover, for example – on feast days.
When God sent rain, these Jews of old grew crops to consume and to feed their livestock. They shared meals and attended feasts. At their feasts they offered food to God, giving sacrifices of both grain and meat to acknowledge their dependence on Him.
They presented sin offerings to restore communion with Him and peace offerings to remain in communion with Him. Food expressed their relationships with their families, neighbors, friends – and their Lord. It ordered all of life.
This is the backdrop as Jesus comes . . . to feed the 5,000, to tell the people “feed on Me,” to refer to Himself as the “bread of life.” St. Paul will call Him “Christ our Passover,” the one who frees us from bondage when we take Him into ourselves. He liberates us not from the Egyptians but from our sin. Jesus who is the Christ is the life of the world. The messianic banquet is His salvation. And He invites sinners to join Him at His table. He excludes only those who are righteous in their own eyes.
In the parable, the host says to his guests through his servant, his mediator, “Come, for all is prepared.” And what does the Host say to you now through His servant, his mediator, as He invites you to come to His table to feast on Him? “Come, for all is prepared.”
Christ has come to offer salvation first to the Jew and then to the gentile. But the very Jews who are the most prominent, these self-righteous sons of Abraham, are the most attached to earthly things and thus the most blind to the heavenly treasures. They will not exchange the law in which there is no salvation at any price for grace, on which no price can be put. Grace is so dear that God gives it away.
Yet 2,000 years later many squander earthly treasure on a justification as flimsy as that of the Pharisees.
The Pharisees of our day have substituted therapeutic principles for biblical principles, psychology for theology. They feast not on what God provides but on their own delicious delusion. Self-esteem is their religion and self-esteem, as they define it, and humility cannot populate the same sentence.
One professor said that when she took a freshman aside and admonished her for a 40 on a test, the girl replied, “Oh, I don’t think I did that badly.” Maybe she thought that at semester’s end a passing grade would descend from heaven like a dove.
This attitude has leached into the Lord’s church through festering liberalism and the church-growth movement. If you want to fill the seats with fannies, tell ‘em how great they are and how to get greater. Trouble is, without humility there can be no discipleship.
The theologian and philosopher Dallas Willard observed, “For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian . . . Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership . . . discipleship is clearly optional . . .
“Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have not yet decided to follow Christ . . . Obedience and training in obedience form no intelligible doctrinal or practical unity with the salvation presented in recent versions of the gospel.”
Lord, have mercy upon us.
When the most prominent – those with the highest self-esteem -- will not accept God’s grace, He offers it to others. The poor and crippled and lame and blind are those outcasts among the Jews who dwell in the same city as the scribes and Pharisees.They do not have the resources to buy fields or oxen – and so they recognize their need for someone to care for them. The invitation to the banquet now falls to these sinners.
What has been the Pharisees’ incessant complaint about Jesus? He eats with sinners. And I say, Halleleuhah, brother!
More room remains at the table and the host sends out his servant again, this time to usher in travelers from the highways and the paths that follow the hedges. Here are the gentiles, those outside the covenant community, those the Jews revile as unclean.
Our text tells us the host instructs his servant to “compel” them to come in. The word does not suggest the use of force. The English word that better captures the meaning is “persuade.” It was the custom for one invited to decline out of politeness the first time, and these wayfaring strangers would be startled to receive such an invitation. They would decline over and again.
So amazing is God’s grace that the undeserving and contrite cannot believe He puts it on offer. How can it be that He has summoned them to feast with Him in His eternal kingdom? How can it be that He has called you and me? (In my case, “compelled” is the appropriate word.)
Our parable brims with symbols. Just as the banquet in this story represents the marriage supper of the Lamb, the ongoing feast we will enjoy with our Lord in the New Jerusalem, the poor and downtrodden and alien picture for us a group who do not necessarily live in physical poverty.
These are the ones the Lord identifies in the Beatitudes as the “poor in spirit.” Poverty of this sort characterizes those who know they can never repay God for the material and spiritual riches He bestows on them. They confess their sin and declare their grief over it. This is the humble spirit our Book of Common Prayer sets out so brilliantly:
“We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep . . . We have offended against thy holy laws . . . And there is no health in us . . . But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable sinners . . .”
These contrite and grateful ones know that God provides all we need for life and life – from the Passover meal . . . to manna in the wilderness and the water from the rock . . . to the loaves and fishes for the 5,000 . . . to His body and blood in the Eucharist . . . to the messianic banquet in heaven. O taste and see that the Lord is good!
The 17th-century French mystic Brother Lawrence wrote the devotional classic “The Practice of the Presence of God.” I wonder if he had the great feast passage in mind when he wrote:
“I imagine myself as the most wretched of all, full of sores and sins, and one who has committed all sorts of crimes against his king. Feeling a deep sorrow, I confess to him all of my sins, I ask his forgiveness, and I abandon myself into his hands so that he may do with me what he pleases.
“This king, full of mercy and goodness, very far from chastening me, embraces me with love, invites me to feast at his table, serves me with his own hands, and gives me the key to his treasures. He converses with me, and takes delight in me, and treats me as if I were his favorite. This is how I imagine myself from time to time in his holy presence.”
The Lord Jesus came to eat with sinners . . . but when His heavenly kingdom is fully come, He will eat with sinners no more. God is taking away the rebuke of His people by washing us in the blood of the Lamb. God will look upon us as though we had never sinned.
This is the promise of Isaiah 25: “He will swallow up death forever, And the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces; The rebuke of His people He will take away from all the earth; For the LORD has spoken.”
Let us remain in poverty, for it is the poor in spirit who will inherit the kingdom of God. Amen.
.
.
Food That Sustains Us
Deuteronomy 20:1-9, Psalm 15, 1 St. John 3:13-24, St. Luke 14:16-24
In my first week in Durango, before my wife arrived, a couple in this congregation invited me over for Sunday dinner. And I’ll tell you one thing for doggone sure: They didn’t have to ask me twice.
Yet in the Parable of the Great Banquet we read in our gospel lesson this morning, that is precisely what the host must do. He has already invited a number of guests and received their acceptances. Yet when the day of the feast arrives he sends his servant to invite them a second time. A curious custom indeed.
Remember when your mom called you for dinner and you were so wrapped up in playing dodgeball in the street that you didn’t come in. Then she came out and “invited” you a second time, promising to beat your little behind if you didn’t get it in your chair at the table five minutes ago?
But these are grownups in our story, men who buy and sell and marry. Stories use symbols; to understand the stories we must grasp the symbols. When we look back through 2,000 years at a culture on the other side of the world, we must translate the symbols to tease the meaning out of the story.
Even today, the ways of other cultures are often elusive. When I was working in missions, I spent a month touring Central Asia. Various missionaries took me to gatherings of local people in their homes. Over time, I noticed a pattern: Each host gave me the place for sitting cross-legged on a mat farthest from the door. I speculated on what that might mean. In Uzbekistan, I asked one of the missionaries and he confirmed my guess.
As a visitor from across the ocean, and usually the oldest person in the room, I was given the seat of honor, which was the farthest from the door for good reason. If a hostile erupted through it brandishing a sword or dagger, I would have the best chance of surviving. There was little danger of that sort of excitement now – I think -- but the old custom stuck like the mud bricks they use to build their houses.
Our parable our Lord relates in St. Luke’s 14th chapter will yield more gold for us if we take the symbols as His hearers did.
The host issues two invitations because time is elastic. In the Middle East, this is so even today. When two men agree to meet at 6 o’clock, they both understand they mean 6:45 or 7 – or so. The one who arrives first loses face, so they play a guessing game, each trying to peg the other’s arrival time so he can appear a few minutes later.
This is simply the way of their culture. For us, who are so conscious of time – some say slaves to time – their practice seems juvenile and silly. And they don’t care.
The host sends his servant with the second invitation because, while the day of the banquet is set, no one is sure of the time. For one thing, it depends on when the cooking is finished. This is before the invention of the meat thermometer.
The host chooses the main course based on the number of guests. A small group will eat a chicken, a larger one a duck, a still larger one a kid and a really big guest list dictates a calf.
For that reason, and because the entire animal must be consumed that night, an acceptance is irrevocable. To fail to appear after having accepted an invitation is a grave insult. In a shame-based culture, face is everything. You would wait forever to be invited to a potluck. A host provides for his guests and he provides sumptuously.
Again, two millennia later, the custom lingers. Missionaries have told me of avoiding visiting local people at any time even remotely close to a meal. The host would kill his last chicken, if necessary, even at the cost of his family’s going hungry for a time, to provide for guests. Hospitality is a solemn duty.
So when the three guests inform the servant they will not attend they are slapping the host in the face. They are falling back on the regulations set out in our Old Testament passage from Deuteronomy 20. In time of war, men could remain behind for a number of reasons, such as having recently bought a field or taken a bride. Two of the three guests offer excuses from this list.
But this is not a time of war and these men would not be required to sally forth for an extended time. Their excuses are as thin as an anorexic teenager, stuffed with more deceit than a padded bra. No Israelite would buy a field or several brace of oxen without examining his purchase closely in advance. They do not say they have decided to get drunk or go wenching. Doing business and marrying are legitimate activities.
The host in the story is, of course, God, a sort of composite of Father and Son. Jesus is telling this parable to a high-ranking Pharisee who has invited Him to dinner on the Sabbath and to his well-heeled friends, scribes and other Pharisees.
The Lord is making the point that apostasy – falling away from one’s faith – begins not with unadorned sin but with making acceptable and even necessary activities more important than God. But these are men steeped in the law, wedded to the notion that those who keep that law are the most righteous.
Is the law not good? Did God not give it? Surely those who observe it most scrupulously will take the choicest seats in the His kingdom. But they love the law so much that they diminish the God who gave it. And once men take God down a peg or two, they find no problem at all in dragging down those He has made in His image.
These leaders of Israel have excluded from “their” kingdom all gentiles – even though they know Isaiah 25 very well. Verses 6-9 tell of a time when God will welcome all people into His kingdom. Here is v 6: “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.”
In the parable, the feast is the messianic banquet that our Lord will celebrate with all His people in the New Jerusalem. Step back for a moment and look at this picture: In His first coming, our Lord goes to a feast and tells a story of a feast that foretells the feast He will eat with us when He comes again.
The messianic banquet ushers in a new age – the age of grace – but these Jewish leaders are clinging to the law, or the version of it they have twisted into the shape of their gnarled souls. The law has served them well. Expertise in the law has meant the license to manipulate it and a rank far above the common people. The law has meant for them status and privilege. More than that, they have edited God’s law like a dime novel so that it allows them to justify themselves. And when men can atone for their transgressions, what need have they of God?
The law never had the power to save the Israelites. Only God has that power. And He has demonstrated it throughout their history. The Father provides the Passover meal for those He rescues from bondage in Egypt. He then sustains them with manna from heaven and delivers them into a land flowing with milk and honey. The Israelites’ food screams at them: O taste and see that the Lord is good!
This is the dictum Adam ignored. Adam ate the one fruit from which God had commanded him to abstain. He treated the food of the garden as something apart from God’s dominion, for man to take or leave at his pleasure. To play fast and loose with the food God gives is to gamble with the life God gives.
It is scarcely possible to overstate the importance of food in the biblical cultures and in the Scriptures. It goes far beyond nourishing the body. An anthropologist studied the dietary laws of Israel and reported, “The apparent trivialities of the domestic table may be as significant as poetry or other exalted forms of communication in ordering thought and experience.”
Food provided the orientation of relationships and community life. The Song of Songs presents eating and drinking together as the picture of sexual love. Elsewhere, those who “sit at meat” together at the sacrificial meal are on intimate terms and obligated to one another.
Those who do not eat together are not in fellowship and have no interaction through their religion – if they are not outright enemies. Recall that when Israel was in Egypt the Egyptians, who were farmers, would not eat with the Hebrews. They considered it an “abomination” to eat with animal herders.
Later, the Jews assembled at the temple to celebrate the great events in their history – the Passover, for example – on feast days.
When God sent rain, these Jews of old grew crops to consume and to feed their livestock. They shared meals and attended feasts. At their feasts they offered food to God, giving sacrifices of both grain and meat to acknowledge their dependence on Him.
They presented sin offerings to restore communion with Him and peace offerings to remain in communion with Him. Food expressed their relationships with their families, neighbors, friends – and their Lord. It ordered all of life.
This is the backdrop as Jesus comes . . . to feed the 5,000, to tell the people “feed on Me,” to refer to Himself as the “bread of life.” St. Paul will call Him “Christ our Passover,” the one who frees us from bondage when we take Him into ourselves. He liberates us not from the Egyptians but from our sin. Jesus who is the Christ is the life of the world. The messianic banquet is His salvation. And He invites sinners to join Him at His table. He excludes only those who are righteous in their own eyes.
In the parable, the host says to his guests through his servant, his mediator, “Come, for all is prepared.” And what does the Host say to you now through His servant, his mediator, as He invites you to come to His table to feast on Him? “Come, for all is prepared.”
Christ has come to offer salvation first to the Jew and then to the gentile. But the very Jews who are the most prominent, these self-righteous sons of Abraham, are the most attached to earthly things and thus the most blind to the heavenly treasures. They will not exchange the law in which there is no salvation at any price for grace, on which no price can be put. Grace is so dear that God gives it away.
Yet 2,000 years later many squander earthly treasure on a justification as flimsy as that of the Pharisees.
The Pharisees of our day have substituted therapeutic principles for biblical principles, psychology for theology. They feast not on what God provides but on their own delicious delusion. Self-esteem is their religion and self-esteem, as they define it, and humility cannot populate the same sentence.
One professor said that when she took a freshman aside and admonished her for a 40 on a test, the girl replied, “Oh, I don’t think I did that badly.” Maybe she thought that at semester’s end a passing grade would descend from heaven like a dove.
This attitude has leached into the Lord’s church through festering liberalism and the church-growth movement. If you want to fill the seats with fannies, tell ‘em how great they are and how to get greater. Trouble is, without humility there can be no discipleship.
The theologian and philosopher Dallas Willard observed, “For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian . . . Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership . . . discipleship is clearly optional . . .
“Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have not yet decided to follow Christ . . . Obedience and training in obedience form no intelligible doctrinal or practical unity with the salvation presented in recent versions of the gospel.”
Lord, have mercy upon us.
When the most prominent – those with the highest self-esteem -- will not accept God’s grace, He offers it to others. The poor and crippled and lame and blind are those outcasts among the Jews who dwell in the same city as the scribes and Pharisees.They do not have the resources to buy fields or oxen – and so they recognize their need for someone to care for them. The invitation to the banquet now falls to these sinners.
What has been the Pharisees’ incessant complaint about Jesus? He eats with sinners. And I say, Halleleuhah, brother!
More room remains at the table and the host sends out his servant again, this time to usher in travelers from the highways and the paths that follow the hedges. Here are the gentiles, those outside the covenant community, those the Jews revile as unclean.
Our text tells us the host instructs his servant to “compel” them to come in. The word does not suggest the use of force. The English word that better captures the meaning is “persuade.” It was the custom for one invited to decline out of politeness the first time, and these wayfaring strangers would be startled to receive such an invitation. They would decline over and again.
So amazing is God’s grace that the undeserving and contrite cannot believe He puts it on offer. How can it be that He has summoned them to feast with Him in His eternal kingdom? How can it be that He has called you and me? (In my case, “compelled” is the appropriate word.)
Our parable brims with symbols. Just as the banquet in this story represents the marriage supper of the Lamb, the ongoing feast we will enjoy with our Lord in the New Jerusalem, the poor and downtrodden and alien picture for us a group who do not necessarily live in physical poverty.
These are the ones the Lord identifies in the Beatitudes as the “poor in spirit.” Poverty of this sort characterizes those who know they can never repay God for the material and spiritual riches He bestows on them. They confess their sin and declare their grief over it. This is the humble spirit our Book of Common Prayer sets out so brilliantly:
“We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep . . . We have offended against thy holy laws . . . And there is no health in us . . . But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable sinners . . .”
These contrite and grateful ones know that God provides all we need for life and life – from the Passover meal . . . to manna in the wilderness and the water from the rock . . . to the loaves and fishes for the 5,000 . . . to His body and blood in the Eucharist . . . to the messianic banquet in heaven. O taste and see that the Lord is good!
The 17th-century French mystic Brother Lawrence wrote the devotional classic “The Practice of the Presence of God.” I wonder if he had the great feast passage in mind when he wrote:
“I imagine myself as the most wretched of all, full of sores and sins, and one who has committed all sorts of crimes against his king. Feeling a deep sorrow, I confess to him all of my sins, I ask his forgiveness, and I abandon myself into his hands so that he may do with me what he pleases.
“This king, full of mercy and goodness, very far from chastening me, embraces me with love, invites me to feast at his table, serves me with his own hands, and gives me the key to his treasures. He converses with me, and takes delight in me, and treats me as if I were his favorite. This is how I imagine myself from time to time in his holy presence.”
The Lord Jesus came to eat with sinners . . . but when His heavenly kingdom is fully come, He will eat with sinners no more. God is taking away the rebuke of His people by washing us in the blood of the Lamb. God will look upon us as though we had never sinned.
This is the promise of Isaiah 25: “He will swallow up death forever, And the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces; The rebuke of His people He will take away from all the earth; For the LORD has spoken.”
Let us remain in poverty, for it is the poor in spirit who will inherit the kingdom of God. Amen.
.
.