Love Feast

Luke 14.12-24

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 11^th September 2005

For the Micah Challenge Sunday

Among my mother’s treasured books was Mrs Beeton’s guide to household management. This indispensable aid to good etiquette included, amongst other things, the complete Table of Precedence for the English aristocracy showing where one should seat visiting dignitaries around the Table - from the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury through various Dukes and Lords Spiritual all the way to minor Barons and the lesser sons of the nobility. As things turned out, neither the Duke of Cornwall nor the Archbishop of York nor any of their ilk, ever popped in for tea around the family dinner table, but, in the finest Scouting tradition, at least we were prepared! From Mrs Beeton to the Good Weekend magazine’s Modern Guru, people are interested in etiquette. And it was so in Jesus’ day!

In Luke 14 Jesus engages in conversation about banquets and parties – where to sit, who to invite, how to make your RSVP. And when it came to parties, Jesus knew what he was talking about! He scandalized the good people of the synagogues of that day (as I suspect he would the good people of the churches today) with attendance at dinners and parties. Jesus knew how to party. The people of his day complained, “He eats with sinners and tax collectors!” - a sure sign of his decadence and poor character. He was found dining with people of ill repute. When good religious people were fasting and praying, Jesus suggests his disciples were feasting and celebrating. He broke the rules about harvesting food on the Sabbath. He flaunted the dietary rules about what you could eat and what you couldn’t. He upset the great and good by partying with the poor and the publicans. And in the dry and desert places he created miraculous feasts that fed thousands at a time. As much as ‘teaching’ Jesus’ program was about ‘eating’! Is it any wonder that what he commanded us to do ‘in memory of me’ was to eat and drink?

All this eating and drinking was not just socializing – it wasn’t just an indiscriminate throwing himself into the social round. It was a deeply symbolic and prophetic act. It was about living a new way. It was about turning social proprieties and expectations on their head. When Jesus ate and drank, it started to tear apart the normal way people treated each other and brought new social structures into being.

Take Luke 14.12-14 for instance. One of the basic social principles of all social interaction in many cultures is reciprocity: treat people the way they treat you. Ask people to dinner, and they’ll offer a return invitation. It’s just good manners.

“No!” says Jesus – forget all that. Invite the people who’ll never invite you back because they have nothing to offer. Instead of the four categories of friends, brothers, relatives or rich neighbours, he says invite four other types of people ; the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Jesus in his etiquette invokes a new world order, a new table of precedence. This is not really about manners. It’s about changing the world.

Banquets and parties as metaphors for a new world order were not unknown in Jewish tradition. Isaiah prophesied a great God-sized party on the holy mountain, richest food and finest wine as the sign of God’s salvation. In this party from God, even death will be swallowed up and the tears be wiped away from every eye. On that day all embarrassment and disgrace be taken away forever. In this kind of party the world is remade and new realities of justice and kindness embrace and hold people. This is a revolutionary menu, a recipe for social transformation as much as for a good dinner.

When it comes to Jesus and food, either his taking it, or his teaching about it, the re-shaping of the world is tied up with every mouthful. In the parable of the great banquet the re-ordering of the world is clear. Those originally invited to the party are too busy to respond, too engaged in business or financial speculation or the pleasures of marriage to get involved with the celebration. So the host rejects them and the invitation is issued instead to the streets and lanes, to the highways and the byways to whoever wants to come. The parable ends with a word of warning that the ones originally invited won’t get to taste a bite.

Jesus wasn’t just a teacher. We are so used to sitting in church and making and listening to sermons and reading the Book that we tend to associate Jesus with this kind of activity. We associate him with doctrine, with theory. But Jesus actually did a great deal: he healed people and calmed tempests, and he walked all over the countryside and he partied with disreputable people and fed people who were poor and far from home. He just got on with it. And his actions challenged head-on existing social relations and existing arrangements of power. We cannot follow Jesus, or be faithful to Him, just by believing in his teaching. Jesus was an activist, partying with sinners and feeding the poor with his miracles. His first followers were activists, sharing their goods and their food, celebrating their common meals as a sign of a new world that has dawned in Jesus. We too are called to activists, praying and calling for, and working towards the sharing of the world’s bounty with those who have little.

The consequence of action, rather theory, is that people have an experience, not just a statement, not just a theory. When Jesus ate and engaged with people something immediate happened. People were transformed, changed for ever, in those encounters. Its hard for us in talking about it to get in touch with what those meals were like, what the experience of being with Jesus in a wild party, or in the wilderness miracle of loaves and fish might have been like.

Perhaps a party in the spirit of Jesus’ parable is a not a bad idea. In the novel “Love Feast”, the hero Leo Bebb, con-man and preacher, hosted a great dinner in the university town of Princeton, New Jersey. Leo Bebb was a balding and enthusiastic Baptist preacher without a church. He had been in prison. He was in constant trouble with the tax authorities. His last church had burned down in mysterious circumstances. There seemed little point to his life. His paramour and traveling companion, Gertrude Conover, a rich widow in Princeton suggested they throw a Thanksgiving Dinner as a way of, amongst other things, cheering him up. She laid on a great spread: there was turkey with all the trimmings and ice cream in the shape of hats and buckets of Tropicana punch waiting for the crowd. When only a few turn up Bebb invoked Jesus’ parable from Luke 14 and sent them out to drag in people from all over the university town. By the time his press gangs had done their work the hall was filled with all manner people – young and old, black and white, “town and gown”. They were, the novelist says, “ants and anteaters, cats and dogs, lambs and lions, they were all stabled together there in uproarious harmony while outside the chill sky darkened”.

And then the Revd Leo Bebb, got up to speak.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a great feast. That’s the way of it. The Kingdom of Heaven is a love feast where nobody’s a stranger. Like right here. There’s strangers everywhere else you can think of. There’s strangers born twin brothers out of the same womb. There’s strangers was raised together in the same town and worked side by side all their life through. There’s strangers got married and been climbing in an out of the same four-poster thirty-five, forty years, and they’re strangers still. And Jesus, it’s like most of the time he is a stranger too. But here in this place there’s no strangers and Jesus, he isn’t a stranger either. The Kingdom of Heaven’s like this.

“We all got secrets. I got them the same as everybody else- things we feel bad about and wish hadn’t ever happened. Hurtful things. Long ago things. We’re all scared and lonesome, but most of the time we keep it hid. It’s like everyone of us has lost his way so bad we don’t even know which way is home anymore only we’re ashamed to ask. You know what would happen if we would own up and ask? Why, what would happen is we’d find out home is each other. We’d find out home is Jesus that loves us lost or found or any whichway.

“Eating. Feeding your face. Folks, I’ve eaten my way round the known world. I’ve eaten snails out of their own shells in Paris, France. I’ve eaten octopus in Spain and curry in India so hot it makes your eyes water and the skin on your head go cold as ice. I’ve eaten hamburgs pitiful and grey like the sole of your shoe…. I’ve eaten the bread of affliction, all of us has. We’ve got to eat – food, it’s life, but all the food in the world, all the turkey and fixings plus your ice cream the shape of hats, it’s not life enough to keep you alive unless you eat it with love in the heart. Dear hearts, we’ve got to love one another and Jesus or die guessing.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m not kidding myself what we got here is 100 percent guaranteed to last forever. There’s nothing in this world lasts’ forever. That’s the miserable sadness of it. Time will be when the party’s over. Time will be when all the good times of your life is over because they are like grass which in the morning it flourisheth and groweth up and in the evening is cut down and withereth. Time is the enemy, and the tick of the clock is the sound his toenails make pattering up on us for the kill. Friends, while we’re still here feeling good let us promise to remember how for a little bit of time we loved each other in this place. When the party’s over, let us remember the good time we had here with Jesus.”

If you’ve ever been to a party like that, when all the bravado and the barriers, the fears and the fibs that keep us apart as human beings get put aside, you’ll know what Bebb was talking about. And you’ll know what Jesus was talking about. It can be meal with strangers, or a party that unexpectedly creates real community. It might have been a meal around a campfire at the end of the day with mates in a fishing camp by the Lake. If you’ve traveled overseas you might have discovered it somewhere in the hospitality of strangers, some meal with the poor in a foreign land when something deeper than our nationality or our dress or our worldview takes hold of us and leads us into an experience of our shared humanity. And once you’ve been there, as Bebb says, you’ve got to hold on to it, you can never forget it. It’s an experience that somehow enters into your soul.

That’s what the Kingdom of Heaven’s about. Isaiah says the feast will be shared with all peoples, all the nations of the earth. Jesus says much the same, but he does warn there’s some hard-working folks, some diligent business people, and some happily married couples who might just miss out.

In this experience there is no room for poverty to remain. It is this experience that actually drives something like the Micah challenge: it’s not enough if it’s just theory, just principle. It’s about hungering and thirsting for justice, it’s about remembering those meals, those parties where somehow we tasted the future and knew that this spirit of celebration and unity and wholeness was touching something deeper, was destined to reach out and embrace all people. If you’ve ever experienced that, anywhere or any-when in your life, you throw away Mrs Beeton’s! You know that the Queen and archbishops and all the Lords and Ladies don’t have any special place at the table because we’ve moved beyond the human frameworks of rank and dignity into the presence of God and his justice, his healing, in which all people have a place at the table and every tear is wiped away and death is banished forever.