Waiting dinners

About two weeks ago I had a Thursday night to myself and so I decided to read some scripture and try and ready myself for Christmas. I read Luke 14 a couple of times because of the upcoming Lazarus dinner with the homeless. I also read Isaiah 25 a couple of times ... I am fascinated with that text and Kenneth Bailey connects it to Luke 14. So here is my results ... my new art form is poetic sketches. Or maybe they are just first drafts ideas to be taken up by someone more sure with the pen and paint than I am.

"Distance is the soul of beauty." (Simone Weil)

I came across this quote a while ago, but thought about it again this advent. It seems to make a lot of sense and be hard to grasp at the same time. It has something to do with desire and the place of desire in life and hope and love. The 12th century monks used to spend a lot of time in the Old Testament and would say that desire was one of the key themes there. It taught them to wait and long for the messiah, for peace, for the promised land. When they finally opened the gospels, the desert bloomed.

But what if waiting creates anxiety of abandonment? What if waiting never feels secure, only painful. Bonhoeffer said that only the uneasy can wait. He said that celebrating advent was only possible to those who are "troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come." It is important to have a troubled soul. It shows you that your eyes work and your heart hasn't been cauterized or dulled or frozen. And so we wait.

In this waiting, I can't help but put together the picture of the future banquet where the Lord will swallow death and wipe away tears as one filled with the kind of people Jesus wanted to invite to his table. This is really the inspiration for my poetic sketch. It speaks of uneasy waiting and returns us to the longing of the early church which cried Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus.

The Banquet

There will be weeping and chattering of teeth
when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
and all the prophets in the kingdom of God,
and you yourselves thrown out.

And they will come from the East and West
and from the North and South
and sit at table in the kingdom of God.

And then there is Isaiah 25 where God sets down a fat banquet, a wine banquet. The people swallow the banquet and God swallows up death.

I just think this is incredible and intense. But I really wanted to write about Luke 14

Jesus said:
"Whenever you give a lunch or dinner,
do not invite your friends
or brothers or relatives or wealthy neighbors.
They might invite you in return and thus repay you.
No, when you have a banquet,
invite beggars
and the crippled,
the lame
and the blind.

and you will be blessed,
because they cannot repay you.
For you will be repaid
at the resurrection of the just."

These are the words of Jesus and I am thankful to be able to have the slightest participation in their fulfillment this Saturday.

Marcello

It was very challenging to hear the stories again that I heard long ago ... almost at the beginning of my own Christian walk. The picture above is from a postcard Marcello gave me the first time I met him. It was to remind me to pray for the country of his heart and the people he loved. He still loves those people and still has a heart for that country more than thirteen years later.

I had many thoughts listening to Marcello tell his story. That he was a man who spoke with his life. I know these stories to be true and have known about his brave quests for a long time (and been challenged by them). God has watched over him all this time and it is ultimately because God does care about the forgotten church in the middle east. I saw this again last year when I was reading the scholar Kenneth Bailey. He says "there are more Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East than Jews in the entire world. This demographic fact is generally unknown in the West, where all Arabs are often assumed to be Muslims. The result is that even though there were Arab Christians in the Upper Room on Pentecost (Acts 2:11), millions of Arab Christians today are almost invisible to the Western world."

The one thing I don't want to, especially after hearing Marcello speak, is forget our brothers and sisters in this part of the world. That really is a huge way for us to grow is by becoming more aware of the rest of the earth.