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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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The Feast of Heaven |
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Luke
14:16-24 Second
Sunday after Trinity June
13, 2010 Imagine
a mansion filled with mansions; every mansion filled with countless rooms;
and every room filled with row upon row of massive tables piled high with
every kind of meat, vegetable, fruit, cheese, salad, wine, and dessert,
all of the very best quality, cooked to perfection, served at the very
peak of flavour, and all put there for one purpose; that you may enjoy
them to the fullest. According
to the Bible, coming to God is like coming to this kind of feast. "How
excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God! therefore the children of men put
their trust under the shadow of thy wings.
They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house;
and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures."
(Ps. 36:7-8). "And
in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of
fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of
wines on the lees well refined." (Is. 25:6). "I
am the bread of life, he that cometh unto me shall never hunger, and he
that believeth on me shall never thirst." My flesh is meat indeed,
and my blood is drink indeed." "He that eateth my flesh and
drinketh my blood, hath eternal life." (Jn. 6:35-55, 56). "Blessed
are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb" (Rev.
19:9). Our
Gospel Reading for this morning continues this same image.
Our Lord is eating at the home of one of the chief Pharisees. The
man's name in not given, but his position reveals him to be a man of
wealth and power in Israel. The
meal is the evening meal which celebrates the closing of the Sabbath.
It is a sumptuous feast designed to impress Christ with the wealth
and status of the Pharisee. During the meal a man says to Christ,
"Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God."
Why does the man say that? Is
he trying to impress Jesus with his piety?
Is he trying to draw Jesus into a debate?
Is he simply pronouncing a blessing as the food is passed to Jesus?
Whatever the reason for the statement, Christ turns it into one of
those teachable moments, saying, "A certain man made a great
supper" (Lk. 14:16). The
"man" is God, and the feast to which He invites us is Himself.
God is infinite and abiding fullness for the soul. There
are two great points to this parable: first, the great Feast to which we
are invited; second, many will not come to the Feast. The
Great Feast to which we are invited is nothing less than God Himself.
There is a pervading ache of the human heart that is often
described as emptiness." It
also goes by other names, like "hunger" and "thirst."
The common "wisdom" of our age says this condition is incurable.
The core of our being will always be empty because there is nothing
to fill us; always be hungry because there is nothing to eat; always be
thirsty because there is nothing to drink, because there is no God.
Beloved, the Bible presents a different message.
The Bible tells us of a great Being who is Himself Fullness and
Abundance. He is Strong Meat
and Rivers of Living Water. He
is like a great Feast of Heavenly proportions.
He is Himself everything we need and want.
He is the food of our souls. He
is the life of our flesh. He
is the light of our minds. Our
being depends on Him. Our
needs can only be met by Him, and He meets them in overwhelming and
unimaginable abundance. Imagine
a beggar so poor he is slowly starving to death. He looks like one of the soldiers rescued from Bataan, or a
holocaust survivor. He has
not gone days without proper nourishment, he has gone months, even years. Now imagine this same man rescued from his poverty and
brought to a Mansion of Mansions in which every room contains a feast of
majestic proportions. Hear him being told, "This is all yours, fresh
every day, forever. Eat as
much as you want. Spend
eternity filling yourself. You
will never get fat, never become unhealthy, never become intoxicated, and
never grow tired of it. It
will be strength and health and happiness to you, and it will supply all
of your desires forever." The symbolism is clear; God is that Feast,
and we are that beggar. We
are in that part of our cycle of prayer we call Trinity Season.
It is a time when we ponder what living in the knowledge of the
"glory of the eternal Trinity" (Collect for Trinity Sunday)
means in every day life. What does it mean? It means our souls dwell in plenty because we feast now and
forever on the spiritual Feast of God. I think the grace we close our
service with explains this Feast. It
comes right out of the Bible, from 2 Corinthians 13:14, and, in my own
opinion, no better benediction exists, nor a better description of the
Feast to which we are invited in God. "The
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen." Let's
talk about the love of God first. "God"
means, here, the entire Trinity, but especially the Father.
The Father loved us before He laid the foundations of the earth.
Before He ever began to form the worlds He laid the plan of salvation by
the cross of Christ. In love
He created you. In love He
called you to feast on His love and glory, to delight in Him as in the
greatest of all riches. All
real love is a desire to share yourself with your beloved. In our own cases, what we have to offer is flawed and broken,
but we give it gladly. In
God's case He offers absolute perfection.
He is infinite in power, wisdom, goodness, knowledge, and love.
And He gives Himself to us, to you, to whosoever will receive and
enjoy Him. He made a great
Feast of Himself, and He invites you to come and dine. Let's
talk about the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It is He who gave Himself to pay for your sins.
It is He who heals your soul, He who gives you life, and redeems
you from the hell of the next world, and the hellishness of this world.
He accomplished this on the cross.
He suffered there for your sins.
He died in your place. He
took all your sins upon Himself and suffered for them so you could be
forgiven. That is love.
That is grace. He gave
Himself to you and for you. His
flesh is rich meat and His blood is sweet wine. Let
us talk of "the fellowship of the Holy Ghost." God, by the Holy
Spirit lives in you. If you
are Christ's through Biblical faith two things have happened.
First your sins have been fully and forever pardoned.
Second, you have been reconciled to God so completely that He has
come to fill your being with His presence and love in a way that is so
absolute it can only be described as God dwelling in you and you dwelling
in God. The Spirit is God in
you. He is God comforting and
enabling you. He is God
connecting you to Himself for as long as you live in this world. He makes all the joy and glory of God present to you now, by
faith. He is Rivers of Living
Water flowing into and welling up inside your being. This
is the feast to which God invites you.
Oh how I wish we would get beyond our selves and just enjoy the
Feast. Oh how I wish we would
focus our attention on the Feast God offers instead of the scraps and
crumbs we think we want. In
the Church we want thrills and chills and smells and bells, and God wants
to give us God.
In the world we want baubles and trinkets, and God wants to give us
God.
Oh, let us come to the Feast.
Lets us desire what C.S. Lewis called "the unblushing
promises" and "staggering... rewards promised in the
Gospels." "Infinite
joy is offered us. Let us not be like an ignorant child who wants to go on
making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the
offer of a holiday at the sea." The
second point of this parable, I will not belabour it, for its truth is
self evident; people refuse to come to the Feast.
Our Lord said they, "began to make excuse."
Do you know what an excuse is?
An excuse is a statement that something else is more important.
One man has bought a piece of ground and wants to see it.
Another wants to work with his oxen.
Another has taken a wife. Now,
the wording may change from person to person and era to era, but the
substance of the excuses remains the same; something else is more
important than God. May it
not be so with us. Let us be
done with excuses. Let us be
done with emptiness and hunger and thirst.
Let us resolve that nothing will keep us from the plenty and
abundance that can only be found in God.
Let us eat of that which is meat indeed.
Let us drink of that which is drink indeed.
Let us eat and drink the food that fills our soul with everlasting
life. Let us come to the Feast. Let
us pray. Holy
God, others have offered excuses, and we have too, in the past.
But now by Thy gracious invitation, bring us to Thy Feast.
In place of our emptiness, give us Thy Fullness.
In place of our hunger, give us the Bread of Everlasting Life.
In place of our thirst, give us Rivers of Living Water.
Oh, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, give us a place at the Table of
Thy Feast. In the Name of Christ. Amen.
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