November 4, 2012
All Saints Day/Dia de
los Muertos/Day of the Dead
Isaiah 25:6-9
What is
your comfort food? Every culture has comfort food, soul food. It’s the food
that reminds us of good times and good people, food that smells like love.
Maybe your trigger is the smell of chicken fat sizzling in a pan, or the lovely
mouth-feel of banana pudding. Mac and cheese. Peanut butter on toast. Popcorn.
Certain meals evoke memories of people and places and times gone by. Certain
food has the power to remind us who we are, where we came from, and where we
should be going.
We are a
faith founded on a meal of bread and wine, which is the ultimate comfort food. Of
course we do not worship food itself, but the bread and wine reminds us who we
are, where we came from, and where we should be going. This meal holds the
meaning, it is so much more than bread and wine. It holds sacred memory. The
container looks small, but it’s bigger on the inside. It goes deep down, far
back into our sacred memory of bread from heaven, bread in the wilderness. It
goes back to feast days and fast days, memories of scarcity and abundance.
If we pray the prayer that Jesus
taught us, every day, then we are reminded every day that our daily bread is
given by God. God feeds us.
The image of the God who feeds us
is one of my favorite images of God, and another is the image of the God who
tenderly wipes away every tear from our eyes (Revelation 21:3-4). Death shall
be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more. John of Patmos who
received the Revelation was remembering the prophet Isaiah's promise to the
people in exile. Isaiah was imagining God calling the people home to Jerusalem,
to Mount Zion, where a feast was prepared for them-- "a feast of rich
food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged
wines strained clear." On the holy mountain of the Lord, God will swallow
up death forever. "Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all
faces."
One day in Jerusalem, Jesus shared
the feast of Passover with his disciples. The feast was already a reminder of
God’s power to save. What is the meaning of Passover? This feast is to make us
feel as if we personally had come out of Egypt, as if we personally had been
rescued from death and redeemed from slavery. The unleavened bread, the bread
of people in a hurry. The cup of salvation, the cup that anticipates God’s
return, to restore God’s reign of justice and righteousness. The meal already
had meaning. Jesus added another layer of meaning when he said, this is my
body, broken for you. This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood.
After Jesus died, the disciples
scattered. They forgot the promises of God. They forgot that Jesus had told them
that he was going to suffer and die, and rise again. They forgot, until they
sat down at table with a stranger, who took bread and blessed it and broke it,
and then they remembered. Their eyes were opened and they realized-- this feast
means that death is swallowed up forever.
This feast is the Passover, this
feast is the return from exile. This is the joyful feast of the people of God.
This Holy Communion is the Feast of
Paradise. We share this feast with the dead as well as the living. The great
cloud of witnesses gathers around the table, and the shroud is lifted-- that
which separates the living from the dead is lifted. Death is swallowed up
forever. We all feast in paradise together. Come and join the feast!
