This Week

This week at praxis...Feasting with God

Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, 
for the LORD has done great things! 
Do not fear, you animals of the field, 
for the pastures of the wilderness are green; 
the tree bears its fruit, the fig tree 
and vine give their full yield. 
O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in 
the LORD your God; for he has given the 
early rain for your vindication, 
he has poured down for you abundant rain, 
the early and the later rain, as before. 
The threshing floors shall be full of grain, 
the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.  
I will repay you for the years that the swarming 
locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, 
and the cutter, my great army, which I 
sent against you. You shall eat in plenty 
and be satisfied, and praise the name of the 
LORD your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. 
And my people shall never again be put to shame. 
You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, 
and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is no other. 
And my people shall never again be put to shame.    
----Joel 2:21-27

Our spiritual hunger is evidence of the timeless 
human need for a real and abiding relationship with God.  
God is the one who calls us into relationships, 
and God does everything possible to restore us 
when we have wriggled out of the mutual demands 
of the relationship. God's love lies at the root 
of our hunger for God.  Love is god's hunger for 
relationship with us.  Has it ever occurred to us 
that God is starved for our companionship? 
----Marjorie Thompson, SoulFeast

One of my favorite meals was always the one we 
shared after church on Sundays when I was in college.  
A good friend had been ordained as a Presbyterian minister, 
and a dozen of us would tumble into her house after church, 
put on some rock and roll, make sandwiches, 
pile up snacks and drinks, and eat around a big table.  
We ate and talked and laughed and played all day 
long into night.  It was my first real introduction to a joyful Sabbath. 
----Wayne Muller, Sabbath


Those events (social eating engagements) are not just one 
of eating together, of simple table fellowship, 
but are what anthropologists call commensality - from mensa, 
the Latin word for "table".  It means the rules of tabling 
and eating as miniature models for the rules of association 
and socialization. It means table fellowship as a map of 
economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and political 
differentiation...What Jesus' parable advocates, therefore, 
is an open commensality, an eating together without using 
table as a miniature map of society's vertical discriminations 
and lateral separations.  The social challenge of such 
equal or egalitarian commensality is the parable's most 
fundamental danger and most radical threat.  
It is only a story, of course, but it is one that focuses 
its egalitarian challenge on society's miniature mirror, 
the table, as the place where bodies meet to eat.  
Since moreover, Jesus lived out his own parable, 
the almost predictable counteraccusation to such open 
commensality would be immediate: Jesus is a glutton, 
a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners. 
----John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

The assurance that there will be enough to eat clarifies 
the restitution for the lack of harvest yields of bygone years.  
This restitution will, by its richness, lead again to 
the praise of the covenant God.  The sequence 
"eat...be sated...praise" is not to be taken for 
granted and must therefore be impressed upon the 
mind occasionally; but Yahweh's new acts will be 
so startling that the praising of his name as the 
God of his people cannot but follow.  "Wondrously" 
is used as an adverb which underscores the unusual 
greatness of his acts, a greatness which can be 
understood only when one considers God himself.  
----Hans Walter Wolff, A Commentary on the Books of the Prophets Joel and Amos (verse 26)


Questions:

• All the readings have something to do with feasting, hunger, or eating as related to our relationship with God and lives as faithful people. Which reading speaks to you?
• What does it mean to feast with God? What might the feast include? Do feasts have anything to do with God?
• Is hunger a good way to talk about the longing for God?
• Is harvest imagery helpful in our culture anymore? What do we harvest?
• How is food a part of your spiritual experience?
• How is the communion table a feast?