Sermon of the Week:
Food for Thought–Invited to Dinner

A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 8, 2021.

Part four of a five-week sermon series about Food and the Christian Faith, called Food for Thought.

Special Music: Here I Am, Lord
Hymn: I Love Thy Kingdom

Keywords: Rainsley, Parable of the Great Banquet, Welcome, Sarah Miles, Food for Thought. #pcusa​​​​​​

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Philippians 4:1-9
and Luke 14:12-24

Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.

Glen Rainsley is a United Church of Christ pastor
Who, among other things, writes liturgy for worship,
Prayers of confession, thanksgiving, that sort of thing.
I have a few books of his, and we use his words from time to time
When we gather here at The Kirk.

I was flipping through one of his books this week
A book with the title
Thanks Be To God, Prayers and Parables for Public Worship.
And I hadn’t noticed that parable section before.

These are stories about the Gospel, about the Good news,
That Rainsley has written,
not on par with Jesus’ parables, of course,
but moving, perhaps, for our day and for our age.

Here’s the one I just happened upon this week,
while pondering this story from Luke:[i]

On a crisp fall day, Cheryl decided to take a walk
through a small city park near her apartment.
There were the usual joggers,
several newspaper readers, a few picnickers.

Around one park bench inhabited by a thin grayish man,
there was an undulating feather carpet—
HUNDREDS of bobbing birds.

The fellow had a large garbage bag beside him,
and from it he withdrew piece after piece of bread.

These he reduced to crumbs and tossed gently to the ground.

Without asking permission to enter this scene,
Cheryl slowly walked around the birds
and sat on the opposite end of the bench from the feeder.

“You must like birds,” he said.
“Yes, I do,” Cheryl replied.
“Me, too”
“Where’d you get all that bread?” she inquired.

“From the dumpster behind the market,
the dumpster near the high rise,
the dumpster behind the Wendy’s. Pretty good stuff.”
He paused.

“It’s the same I eat.
Me and my flock. Same bread.
[Here] Help yourself.”

Cheryl blanched and said,
“Thank you, I just ate.
But I’ll feed these guys.”

Soon she had a pecking mob around her feet.

“You probably noticed,” said the bread man.
“What?”

“They’re all pigeons and sparrows.
Amazing, huh?”

He went on….

“Worthless birds. Nuisance birds. Common birds.
Who cares about pigeons and sparrows?

But I do. We have a lot in common.
So we eat together. I give ‘em everything I can gather.”

He stopped to button his jacket, to pull up its collar.
Cheryl looked at him with [a] great respect.
Here he was, eking out an existence on the fringe of society
and his first thought was to provide for
the least among the creatures of the park.
From subsistence living, he gave of his substance.

Cheryl turned away with tears in her eyes knowing
she had much more to learn about generosity and compassion.
He tossed handful after handful of crumbs.
And Christ was present in the sharing of that bread.”

///
Jesus loved to teach in Parables.

Jesus’ parables are stories that reveal something about God
And something about God’s realm that Jesus has come to proclaim.

Jesus talked about several different topics in his parables
But a few of them overlap with the theme
Of the parable we read this morning,
An event with some great meal or a significant party—
Maybe it’s a wedding banquet,
Or the feast at the return of the wayward son.
Grand meals, then, like now, were major events.
The carry with them meaning and significance.

And many times, the purpose of these Parables
Is to directly confront expectations, social norms…
Because God’s realm is different.
In God’s realm, some of the way we deal with one another
Here, in this realm, isn’t going to work,
Because God does things differently.
God sees us differently.
And Ain’t a that good news?

According to Jesus, once upon a time,
In the realm of God, there might be a party,
plans made for a celebration,
delicious food and drink prepared.
But who can afford to throw a party?
Usually they’re only something people of means get to go to.
So naturally they bring up questions of status, of rank, of means
And usually Jesus uses these stories to talk about… others
people who dwell on the margins, the poor and the hungry.
There’s often this interplay
about who is in and who is out.
The First shall be Last, and the Last shall be First….
Or My son was lost but now is found

There are other parables that reinforce this,
non-party parables
Maybe it is when we hear about a shepherd
who goes searching for that one lost sheep
Or the manager, who pays the day laborers their wages,

All these stories are so intriguing,
To us, and to the people of Jesus’ day
Because they challenge our expectations about God,
and in doing that, they challenge us to think differently
to believe differently
to do… differently,
and, therefore, to proclaim God’s realm too, just like Jesus did.

And the same is true with the Parable of the Great Banquet.

///
Here, in Luke’s narrative, we find this parable
in the middle of a larger section
Where there are questions about status,
about access, about privilege.

And, maybe more telling, you’ll find this parable
just a couple of verses before the parable of the Prodigal Son.
You might remember that parable,
Where the younger son gets his inheritance early, insults his father
Moves away, squanders it all, becomes destitute
And, in desperation, returns, hat in hand, ready to be a servant
If it means he might survive.
And the father runs to hug him! After all of that! Runs.
And his brother, bruised at the attention given to this…this…loser
The one who hurt his father and broke every expectation,
He sulks, and the father tells him that his love is stronger than all of that
That having his son back, safely, home….is everything.

If you’re reading your way through Luke
Or listening to someone tell the story,
The way Luke tells the story,
You’ll hear these two parables echo against each other,
And it is unmistakable: the point being about God’s heart,
About who is welcome, about who will be excluded,
Who will gather around the table when the meal is served.

So many of these deeply moving parables
Talk frankly about poverty and about excess
means and scarcity, food in abundance
and the gathering that takes place around it.

In God’s realm. A big party. Food overflowing.
There’s always more than enough to share.

///
So Jesus tells a story about a great banquet,
And the question posed by that story is:
Who, pray tell, will be at that fabulous party,
when the doors are open wide
the music begins, and everything is in place? [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
Food for Thought–Bread of Life

A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 1, 2021.

Part three of a five-week sermon series about Food and the Christian Faith, called Food for Thought.

Special Music: In the Garden
Hymn: Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken

Keywords: Sacrament, Communion, Bread of Life, Jeremiah Wright, Faust and the Devil. #pcusa​​​​​​

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
and John 6:24-35

Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.

So last week we looked at the story of
Jesus feeding the Multitude
And how ritual,
repeated practice,
helps shape our faith and our perspective,
how it can open us up to seeing something important,
how it can nurture within us a way of life
that shares the love of God.

In that story, Jesus commends hospitality.
When he fed the 5000, or more,
people who had gathered to hear him,
hospitality, and particularly a genuine concern
for the material well-being of others,
was the point.

You give them something to eat, Jesus said,
And they did.
They gave what they had,
A few barley loaves and some fish
And everyone ate,
And there was more than enough.

I was reading this week about today’s scripture reading
The one from the Gospel According to John that I just read
Which is immediately after his version of the feeding of the 5000,
And I found Christopher Morse ask an interesting question.[i]

Morse wants to know if the people’s hunger was filled, or fulfilled.

You might think that’s a distinction without a difference,
But Morse doesn’t think so.
Hunger, in the gospels, often comes in various forms,
Not just the physical needs of the stomach
But also the spiritual and emotional needs of the whole person,
those deeper longings and more existential needs that we all have:
To belong, to be loved, to have meaning and purpose in our lives.

The feeding of the multitude operates at both levels, right,
Even if, by outward appearances,
it appears to be about just people’s basic hunger, and hospitality
Something that bread and fish can satisfy.

But we remember why all of those people are there…
Because they saw something in this Jesus
And experienced something, in Jesus…
Something that had them chasing him
all over the Galilean countryside
Trying to grab a little grassy spot to cozy up on and sit
While Jesus was preaching.

In each version of that story,
in all four of the gospels,
The text says that the people’s hunger is SATISFIED,
A word that, Morse suggests,
Means something more than just having that hunger filled.

The ordinary sense of ‘being full’ takes on a depth of significance here.

It is certainly about actually helping hungry people no longer be hungry
But it is also more than that.

It is about doing something loving for someone else,
Particularly someone, in need, right in front of you.

It is about connection, the relationship that is formed
when people break bread together, share a meal together.

It is about realizing that we’re all in this collectively,
Rather than a ‘have everyone go fend for themselves’ mentality.

This is what St. Augustine meant, Morse says,
When he calls this a magno sacramento,
A grand symbolism.

///
That Latin phrase Magno Sacramento
Rings more loudly on a day like today,
As we prepare to share the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
a bit later in our service.

You can already tell from that phrase
Where we get our English word Sacrament.
It traces back through Latin to mean
A solemn symbolic thing,
And ultimately has roots
In words that mean “to hallow,” and “to be sacred.”
It also was the word that Latin used to translate
the Greek word mysterium,
The word for mystery.

We Presbyterians talk about the sacraments
as a Sign and Seal of the grace of God—
Something that God does,
Has already done, and continues to do—
It is a God thing, something through which
we experience God’s welcome and God’s nurture.
Baptism is about belonging,
Celebrating our welcome in God’s big family, the church.
Communion is about how Jesus is the Bread of Life
How, through Jesus, God nourishes our spirit
In a deep and profound way,
and gives us a purpose and a mission.

So sacraments work like ritual, but
they are more than your ordinary ritual, really,
Or maybe it is better to call them
“super-special rituals,”
Things we do as a church regularly,
something that forms us,
Thanks to the Grace of God,
To help sustain our faith,
rooted in God’s amazing love.

We Presbyterians have these two sacraments—.
Other branches of the Christian family may have more,
and what works for them works for them. Terrific.
For us, we celebrate these two, baptism and communion,
Because they were given to us by Jesus, are rooted in holy scripture
And have been sustained through the history of the whole church.

Pat read for us the earliest biblical words we have about communion,
These three verses from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth.
It predates the gospels by maybe twenty or thirty years.

Those words are often called the Words of Institution,
And we recite a version of them every time we share the Lord’s Supper.
They help us remember Jesus’ life and ministry,
His selfless love,
His salvific ministry.

We didn’t ask Pat to read the context of that reading,
In part because that context is a bit of a downer
And I didn’t want to get off track to have to go into all of it.
The short version is that
this whole letter, First Corinthians,
you might remember,
Is Paul’s appeal for concord, for kindness,
To a community that is in disarray.

Paul founded the church there,
Got it going swimmingly,
And then left to go set up another church somewhere else.
And after he left, other people came by
People who challenged Paul’s work
And who started dividing the people into factions.
And once divided, the people started fighting
and the whole thing threatened to fall apart.

This whole letter is about not letting those divisions win.
That’s why we have that whole section, again, you might remember,
About how, among the faithful,
there are many gifts, but the same spirit,
How there many different things we can do,
but we all do it for the same Lord
The hand and the nose and the arm all need each other
And all are needed to make up the body of Christ.
That’s Paul, here in First Corinthians.
The very next chapter, actually, after what Pat read.

But the context in which Paul quotes
the earliest version of the words of institution
Shows Paul critiquing the Corinthians.

They’re not doing it right.
Instead, apparently, some people were going to the meal,
which was more of an actual meal back then, you know,
and they were eating all the food before others even got there.
They didn’t wait.
They didn’t care about the needs of the other people.

Paul told them that this Lord’s Supper was more than a church pot luck.
This was a sacrament.
It wasn’t merely about our bodily hunger, about being filled
But about our spiritual needs, too, about being fulfilled.
Eat at home before-hand if you’re so hungry
That you can’t come to this sacrament and share with others.

And with that, Paul senses something really important about this meal.
It is about what John calls The Bread of Heaven.
Where God feeds us, and gives us something more:
Belonging
Welcome
Purpose
Hope
And Love.

This is why we insist on communion being a public thing.
There are no private sacraments.
It is something for all of us to share,
During worship
Where everyone is invited
All who turn to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

///
The Bread of Heaven meets a deep need within us
Feeds us in a way that is both real, and spiritual. [Read more…]