The Transforming Feast

Team member Pastor Nathan Swenson-Reinhold recently wrote the following didactic letter to his congregation as part of his leadership in their transition to celebrating the eucharist weekly. It represents an example of leading the church by training people with a sanctified vision, which is the subject of the previous post. "Pastor Big Nate-Nate" (as those of us in the Ministry Driven in Vision Network affectionately call him) provides us with an exposition on that post's first bullet point on worship in a manner more theologically astute and practically lucid than I could ever produce myself. Therefore, I humbly share this letter with you:

A mentor friend of mine ends every table prayer with these words: "...and thank you Lord for this food. It would be a banquet anywhere." It doesn't matter how small or large the meal is...here in the states we don't see much hunger even if there is a great deal of it around us. When it is around us, it tends to be hidden from our eyes. But Rick's eyes were forever changed by a trip to Haiti where he encountered a kind of poverty and destitution he'd never encountered before. As it happens, Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. As Rick says, "There's poor...and then there's Haiti poor."

When we are surrounded by such an abundance of food, it is difficult for us to see the importance of the meal and feast imagery so prevalent in Scripture. In times and places of incredible lack and scarcity, feasts were associated with salvation; with well-being, wholeness, and divine abundance. In our scriptures, where there's a meal and God's involved, you can be sure that God is bringing about his salvation.

We see this in God's deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery at the hands of the Egyptians to freedom in God's Promised Land; in the Passover Meal where the first born children of the Hebrew people are spared in God's spirit plague (Exodus 12), to the Manna that God showered upon the Israelites during their long wilderness journey (Exodus 16).

We see this work of a saving feast all through the ministry of Jesus...and most of the time his feasting is scandalous. Why? Because his "table fellowship" involves tax collectors and sinners, those who have committed treason against their own people, and the spiritual losers of Jesus' day. When Jesus eats with them, what he's in essence saying is that it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs. This is one of the reasons that the spiritual leaders of Jesus' day are so furious with his choice of company. They think that he's got it all wrong. His eating with them is a statement of their well being and acceptance in the eyes of God'and God's intention to reconcile the lost and the least (Mark 2).

Then there are the powerful stories of the feeding of the five thousand, and the feeding of the four thousand...images of God's abundance poured out on the hungry and weary.

And then there's the last Passover Meal that Jesus will ever celebrate. the Last Supper. It is celebrated with the twelve central disciples, not as an exclusive meal, but as a symbolic act of God's promise to Abraham to bless all nations through his offspring. In Jesus' death and resurrection, and this Passover Meal that precedes it, this blessing and this promise is fulfilled.

All of these meal stories and feasts have at their core one thing; it is God who does the feeding, God who does the reconciling, God who does the forgiving and God who does the work of salvation. Period. What do we do? We show up and participate and trust and thank God that he's sufficient. That's it. God's in the business of bringing some beauty and harmony to this mess that so often characterizes our lives. Given all of this, the words from the prophet Isaiah about God's promises are profound and deeply meaningful:

"On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever." (Isaiah 25)

I know that the word has gotten out that the new pastor is passionate about Communion. This is true; I am. But not because it's my hobby horse. I'm passionate about it because it is how we experience God's good news; how we participate in God's promised reconciliation and forgiveness right now. What did we do to deserve it? Nothing. What do we need to do to participate in it? Simply come. We don't learn faith by taking tests and reading books. We learn faith, faith in God's good news, by participating in it. Jesus says, "Come, follow me!" Jesus says, "Take and eat...take and drink." We learn faith by participating in God's work.

In Christian community, this participation is most profoundly experienced at the Communion table where we participate in the future feast that will be prepared for ALL people, right now. We participate in it, and it transforms us. We participate in it, and it reconciles us: us to God and to one another. It makes of us a people who gather at God's mountain, eating his abundance and grace.

In my ordination, I have been called to be an unleasher of the Good News in the midst of God's people. We are experts as human beings at constructing barriers between ourselves and God and his incredible work. But in Christian community, we are required to remove them...to be a transformed people and in our transformation, witnesses to a world that desperately needs to see and experience God's promise of reconciliation and healing.

So I thank you, ahead of time, for enduring the changes in our midst. In the end, I guarantee you that you will see that you weren't humoring your new pastor, you were living the Kingdom of God unaware.