I stoutly spudder [along]

Last year when I was visiting the Chicago Art Institute, I had lunch at the cafeteria there, and I went straight to the counter where a big hunk of corned beef, which was being served with potatoes and carrots and onions, was displayed. The man behind the counter said to me, as he sliced the meat, "you look like a fellow that likes to eat." And as he delivered to my plate a generous portion I responded with Yes. Yes I am a man who loves to eat.
When I was younger I ate copious amounts of fried chicken, gnawing on the cartilage around the leg bone and on the sternum, crunching into the bone and sucking out the marrow. Chicken, ribs, steaks, pork chops - I gave them all thorough attention. And I loved nothing better than eating outdoors in the summer time with my family. I would have a plate piled high with chicken thighs, deviled eggs, field peas, collards and cracklin' corn bread, with a sliver of Vidalia onion, all in one hand on a precariously weighted paper plate, and in the other hand a big glass of sweet tea, poured out of a gallon jar warm onto crushed ice.
I have a series of black and white photos taken a few years before I was born of such a meal spread out in the back yard of my great-grandfather's farm. A white cat sits under a simple white wooden table loaded with chicken and bowls of vegetables. In other photographs my grandfather and his brothers sit around a semicircle on metal chairs talking. In back of them behind a row of trees are acres of cotton. In another photo my grandmother and other women are circled closely together laughing. In another photograph my uncle Wesley stands in a bowling shirt and pleated trousers sucking on the very end of a chicken leg. In all these photos I'm as good as there. I can pet the cat, chase the chickens, hear the laughter, feel the comfort, and taste the marrow of what it must have been like.
All this no longer exists. The children in the photos are retired now and the elders are long since passed. The farm is under a subdivision and the farmhouse was burned down to make place for a day care center. I once went back and discovered that some of the old oaks were still standing where an old shed once stood near the road. I walked around one of them, placing my feet on the roots, touching the rough bark, closing my eyes and trying to breathe in an air of memory, hoping that somehow I might touch again a time, hear a voice and feel the touch of love that wrapped me like a blanket when I was young.
Is this something of what happens where some fragment of ruined hope remains, where like a wailing wall we approach, hoping that by touching the fragment we can grasp the whole and take into our memory and feel in our being an embrace of something lost. And we hope that that embrace would never leave us.
The text in Isaiah 25 demonstrates this, the image of a banquet, of a restoration of a hope that might have been, of being able to taste again and laugh again, after all their loss and exile. How starved they must have been, how homesick, how grief stricken. God though doesn't give them an image of the past, a promise of restoring a golden age. They are not allowed to turn the past into a shrine; instead they are invited to imagine a future better than any past. Not just a future for them but for everyone. Imagine a future where the shame of being exiled is removed; where the grief of loss is replaced with the happiness of discovery; where the fact of death looming over our lives is taken away.
The fact of death looming over our lives is taken away. That must be the crux of the message that joined the first Christians together. As wonderful as the story of Jesus is, his parables, his compassion on women, beggars, lepers, the nearly dead, the shut-in, and the blind, the incredible nature of his defeat of death is what captivates the imagination. He defeated death, never to die again, but to live a new kind of life. And this is the crux of the gospel that the heart of all our fears and the heart of sin that exists in us and in the world is the fact of death. Death tells us that we're doing all we do for nothing. The struggles we face today, whether we get a promotion or find a job, whether we marry this person or have a child, and many other things that seem so important, so important that we endanger ourselves and others in our cars or break in front of old people waiting in line, are rendered laughably moot by the fact that we're going to die. We might say that to live successfully is to successfully deceive yourself about death. This is why the basic message of Ecclesiastes is "live for the day - don't be obsessed with the past or anxious for the future." All Jesus's words in the sermon on the mount fall into this category as well: "Don't worry about the future, consider the birds, consider the flowers - they don't stress their problems and know that God will clothe and feed them."
Not that for Jesus Death is a light thing. He contemplates his death as something that might be avoided, and though he suffered it in obedience, he felt real agony and was shaken to the base of his soul. As it is written, "for the glory set before him." Paul might have said for the feast set before him - and Jesus used the event of a feast to describe the kingdom of God so prominently that, based on this Isaiah passage, we might suppose that for "this gluttonous man and wine bibber" that would be the best kind of outcome.
But this is our hope, that Jesus defeated death, swallowed it up, and his life is the renewal of creation. In his life, by the power of the Holy Spirit we experience this renewal, we are reborn.
As people who have been removed from the threat of death, what manner of life should we expect. Certainly we can still expect to die, but what death means has been changed for us. Death no longer means the end. Death no longer hovers above us, threatening us if we get out of line. This is where our freedom occurs. We are freed in Christ for getting out of line. We are freed in Christ to be indifferent to our death, and we are freed in Christ to become engaged with life. We can now live life as life. Where before we lived a life as an escape from death or thinking about death - becoming immersed in consumerism, in workaholism, slaves to fear, to anxiety, to sin.
This is the meaning of Christ being sacrificed for us - that we can attend the feast. That no longer fearing what Death can do to us, we can feast, we can celebrate with one another (and it is with one another, because no one feasts alone). We are freed from ourselves and for each other. We feast together in the freedom of Christ. We feast freed from the need to sin - we no longer survive by sin, by envy, pride, lust, greed, avarice. We now survive, we thrive, by Grace. What wondrous freedom this is; and it is ours in Christ.
So just as the resurrection is not merely the resuscitation of a dead body, so this feast is not merely a meal, a satiation of hunger. In the Church we are about something more than gathering people together. In the Church we prefigure this eschatological reality. In the midst of our bureaucracy, our meetings, our differences and difficulties - the hilarious audacity of our some of our political strivings and social activities - the Holy Spirit causes our spirits to thrive together and grow together: we participate in God's generosity with our offerings; we participate in God's creativity with our acts of praise and art; we participate in the life of the heavens in our worship. And we taste something of this when we share communion together.
This is not just the eating of a piece of bread or the consumption of some grape. In this supper, around this table, we're lifted up by the Holy Spirit into the presence of the Trinity where we feed on the benefits of Christ by faith. In this feast we remember that Death has been swallowed up and we've been freed for serving each other and the world. So let us practice this feast, accepting our shortcomings and bearing with one another, as God bears with us and accepts us, knowing that Christ's love is working in us in a new creation.