Eating and Serving

Psalm 80 • Psalm 77, [79]
Joel 1:1-13 • Rev. 18:15-24 • Luke 14:12-24

During my semi-house arrest, I have been taking long walks each morning and late afternoon. It is fast becoming one of those ultimate rarities, a healthy addiction. Living close to the greenway doesn’t hurt.

While padding along I listen to some of the Great Courses I have bought over the last few years. Besides ones on physical anthropology, the works of Twain, the Darwinian revolution, the Odyssey, and Henry VIII (whatta guy!), I have one on “Food: A Cultural and Culinary History.” It’s fascinating and, like the others, it essentially demands that you rethink your world. We have made how we eat into endlessly elaborate cultural settings that speak to who we are, maybe most of all our individual and collective values.

This is a long way around to what I thought when I read the “great banquet” parable in today’s gospel from Luke. As with Evan’s excellent sermon awhile back on an alternate version, our thoughts are usually on ourselves as guests—whether we truly accept God’s invitation to the table, and accept it fully—but especially at the start of today’s passage we can read Jesus’s words here with an eye to ourselves as banquet-givers. He begins with an odd warning: if you host a meal, for Pete’s sake don’t invite friends, family and the wealthy. Be warned: if you do, they’re liable to repay you with their own invitation. The tone is like lessons we give to our children. “Don’t run red lights” or “Don’t stick your finger in a light socket.”

Eating is one of the few voluntary things—maybe the only one—that we must do to survive as individuals. That would seem to give us an innate impulse to be sure we have something on our plate by, for instance, offering food when we have it to people who will offer it to us later.

But as in so much, Jesus is warning us that if we are to even glimpse God’s kingdom we have to start by transcending such impulses and seeing that God’s dream is one of relationships of unconditional compassion, in this case of feeding those who need feeding, and feeding them simply because they need feeding.

What is interesting to me is that to make his point Jesus chooses the metaphor of eating, the act most elemental to us as humans. He is diving right down to the lowest common denominator of our species, the irreducible core of our self-regard, then telling us there is a better way. And of course it is a metaphor we can choose to make actual. We act it out at community meals and our Sunday meals at our sister Methodist church. That’s a start that calls me to think how I can act it out in other ways.

Written by Elliott West

Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than twenty-five years.