Everywhere the Feast

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – April 9, 2023, Easter Sunday

Everywhere the Feast – Matthew 28: 1-10

In Christian tradition, a table grace is most commonly understood as a mealtime prayer. It’s the often simple prayers spoken, sung, sighed, or held in silence before a meal that gratefully mark the presence of God. It’s an ordinary practice that has the extraordinary potential to regularly renew our awareness of our unbreakable connection to the God of all creation.

The gospel accounts give us many stories of Jesus eating with followers, friends, and foes. It’s the ordinary setting where numerous extraordinary teachings occur.

Perhaps then we should be unsurprised that in this extraordinarily miraculous moment when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary meet the risen Christ while leaving the tomb where he was buried, that he instructs them to bring the other disciples and meet him back in Galilee, the perfectly ordinary, backwater region where their story together began. “In Galilee,” he says, “there they will see me.”

In different gospel accounts, the women come to the tomb with spices to anoint Jesus’ body and to continue their cultural rituals of mourning. But in Matthew’s account all the narrator tells us is that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. What was it they went to see?

Did they come to see the dead body of the one they had loved and followed? Or were they good listeners to Jesus’s teachings on how he would rise from the tomb? Were they hoping for a miracle? And, what kind of miracles are we promised? What do we hope to see?

Too many here and across the world know the reality of death, suffering, and sorrow. It seems to be an all too ordinary part of life. We may be tempted to consider it extraordinary any time when pain and heartache are not all-consuming. But I think the truth is more like the scenes in many spring gardens right now, where signs of miraculous new life bloom right alongside the signs of last season’s end.

There was a news story some years ago that left a lasting impression on me. It was about two men hunkered down inside an embattled Syrian city. Despite the grim reality of their plight, they refused to give up hope and continued the ordinary practices that gave them strength, like daily prayers, eating together, and in overturned cinder blocks or any possible open soil they grew whatever plants they could. They were growing food, yes, but as they said, what was keeping them alive was more than food. It was the ordinary practice of gardening that allowed them to feel as though they were continuing to live as long as they could even in those conditions, and that one way or another their lives would go on.

In today’s story the signs of miraculous new life are large and undeniably extraordinary. There is an earthquake and lightning and a dazzling angel sitting atop the impossibly moved stone outside of Jesus’ tomb.

These are all signs that the powers of the world that used violence to keep people controlled and cowering, in particular the Roman empire that loved its cosmic imagery, was not equal to the power of God as known in Jesus, for whom even death was not the end of his life-saving message of God’s love and grace.

Death, violence, pain, and sorrow, need not have the last word in our lives either. We can trust that God’s abundant love and grace carry us beyond this life and through the trials that come our way while we yet breathe.

And, though God’s extraordinary love and grace are a powerful part of all creation, there is nothing extraordinary we must do to receive these gifts. They are available to all of us no matter how ordinary we consider ourselves to be. To God each one of us is extraordinarily loved and worthy of abundant grace.

Most of the angels and miracles I’ve seen are perfectly ordinary like:

the person struggling with addiction who asks for help,

the mother who gets herself and her kids free of an abusive situation,

the unsheltered or otherwise suffering person who finds a life-saving community of           support,

the one who refuses to live as other than the beautiful person God created them to be,

the one who learns how to forgive and begins a new life,

the one who opens their home to a stranger and expands their family,

the one who gets through each day one moment at a time until life by and by gets a little    easier and they find they can share their gifts with joy again,

or simply the spring that rises from the ashes of the winter.

Yes, I have seen angels and miracles and so have you. I have seen the unending love of the risen Christ embodied in hundreds of life-saving ways.

My friends Brian and Diane Stanton run a bakery and a coffee shop in downtown Elgin. In the those first months of the pandemic, they didn’t know if their business would survive, but they did know that they had neighbors who were going hungry and they had neighbors who even if they had food needed to see some acts of kindness in the midst of such uncertainty and despair. So, they started making bread just to give away.

They’re very smart business people. They know that giving away food isn’t the way you keep a business open, but they knew it was worth doing anyway. They’re still doing it today, and their business is still thriving despite the hundreds of loaves of bread that went out the door for free.

I pray that God would save me from missing the extraordinary that is shining through the ordinary moments of our lives. I pray that God would save each one of us from forgetting to be moved by the miracle that is every meal that reaches our mouths. I pray that God would send each one of us forth from here to proclaim the good news of the risen Christ by sharing precious morsels of love and grace in any way we can.

Galilee is the otherwise unremarkable home of the earthly Jesus and his disciples. But when the risen Christ meets the disciples there later in Matthew, it also becomes the launching point from which he commissions them to go into all the world and make disciples. 

We are those disciples. We are the inheritors of that story and of all the moments of love, growth, and grace they shared around the table. We can also be the ancestors who–in extraordinary acts we may be tempted to consider ordinary–continue to pass on that love, growth, and grace.

When we do so, like the women at the tomb, we may witness the risen Christ alive and at work around us. When we experience, say, and share God’s unending grace, we may find that, despite the reality of suffering and death, we are part of a miraculous, abundant, eternal flow of life not unlike the image Jan Richardson paints in her well-known prayer-poem about a world full of table grace. In which, she writes,

                    And the table will be wide.

                    And the welcome will be wide.

                    And the arms will open wide to gather us in.

                    And our hearts will open wide to receive.

                    And we will come as children

                    who trust there is enough.

                    And we will come unhindered and free.

                    And our aching will be met with bread.

                    And our sorrow will be met with wine.

                    And we will open our hands to the feast without shame.

                    And we will turn toward each other without fear.

                    And we will give up our appetite for despair.

                    And we will taste and know of delight.

                    And we will become bread for a hungering world.

                    And we will become drink for those who thirst.

                    And the blessed will become the blessing.                 

                    And everywhere will be the feast.[1]

Christ is risen.

Christ is risen indeed.

Amen.

[1] Jan Richardson, https://paintedprayerbook.com/2012/09/30/and-the-table-will-be-wide/