Isaiah 25:1-9
Proper 23 (28) - Year A
The Messianic Banquet will take place on our mountain! Everyone comes our way.
How would the Messianic Banquet look if we imagined it taking place on Mount Halgurd in Iraq, the land of our administration's latest (not last, at this rate) enemy?
What if it were on Mount Everest with very few folks making it up even if they were to come in that direction?
What about some rounded hill without a name in South Africa?
Where can't the Messianic Banquet happen? Why not where you are? Pull out a tablecloth this next warm day in spring/fall (depending on which hemisphere you are in and how far away from the equator you have drifted) and have a picnic. Invite folks (even enemies) to a Messianic Banquet on the sward where you live. You might even make plans to have the next banquet be on their turf.
What, more than one Messianic Banquet? Why not? How loverly!
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/october2002.html
Isaiah 25:1-9 or Exodus 32:1-14
We have all had refuge spots along the way. They, like other adaptive behaviors, have seen us through tough times. These times and places in which we can take a breath and re-clarify a vision of a better tomorrow are precious to us. In some sense they are defining moments.
Our tendency is to continually return to these same refuges when things get tough. That can work for a bit, but, eventually, we need to find ourselves surprised by a new refuge, never before thought about or envisioned. It is this quantum leap that reveals whether we are stuck in some idolatry of the way in which we will prescribe the relief now needed. Golden calves, and other less obvious sources of relief, seemed to have ameliorated our situation in the past and so we keep going back to that well.
We need a new experience that moves the fearful shroud of a commanding mountain into a place of renewed presence of abundance for whatever journey we are on.
A key for this transformation of briar patch into refuge is participation in various liberation movements that remove disgrace from one peoples or another. There are still plenty of disgraced folk around. So pick one and go to work to provide a refuge for them, and, lo and behold, find a new refuge for yourself. [Note: this is not just one-way work of helping ourselves by helping others, but entails a mutuality that puts our own need for refuge in the hands of others who, in turn find a new refuge for themselves.]
It is time to move on to the graceful and challenging work of challenging disgrace. Or, as Fred Craddock put it,
"To be Christian is to cease saying,
'Where the Messiah is there is no misery'
and to begin to say
'Where there is misery there is the Messiah.'
The former statement makes no demands;
the latter is an assignment."
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/october2005.html
Isaiah 25:1-9 or Exodus 32:1-14
Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23 or Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14
Moses is delayed on the mountain: Worry. Take things into your own hands and build an alternative worship experience. Dance around a golden calf, which is what hoarded resources are good for.
Wedding guests have refused their invitations and killed the messengers: Recompense. Take things into your own hands and kill the killers. Invite any left to the wedding. A seemingly generous act finds the violence of recompense still active when someone doesn't live up to a dress code. With a finer and finer sieve are folks caught, until none will be able to stand. Many are called, but few are chosen. Few are chosen, and even these will eventually be speechless.
It is difficult to let our gentleness be shown in a wilderness setting or an example of heavenly blessing. We refuse to take the time to remember goodness and mercy all the days of our life.
- - -
glory is exchanged for grass
every day
that which is before us
is never as delightful
as that which is not
grass is greener elsewhere
grass is exchanged for grass
grass for grace
promises of G*D with us
in Moses' return
in a heavenly banquet
fall on empty ears
we hallucinate grass
until gold becomes an oasis
busy-ness an edge for advancement
getting hungrier and hungrier
settling for empty calories
unsettling the ox within us each
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
This is a looser than usual connection to the lectionary.
Cities are extensions of individuals. There are patterns that occur. The boom-town phenomenon is one sort of city. Sometimes they develop more than their original impetus of economic mono-culture and continue, mostly not.
Cities with a long history have come and gone. How many Jerichos have archeologists found? Why does New Orleans stay functional? What will happen with Fargo when Canada rebounds another inch from its glacial compression and the Red River basin returns to a lake?
We might think about cities and migrations in terms of resurrection. After awhile cities fail and immigrants are incorporated into the genetics and other strata of a culture. There is a fading, a dying. But periodically there is a rebirth, a feast is re-established.
Waiting and salvation seem to be on unaligned sine waves. Even were they synchronized there would still be a waiting and a fulfillment. It is obvious that death has not been swallowed up – see to what lengths the church and individuals will go to deny death and set up protections against death. Somehow we keep thinking that G*D really will defeat death once and for all. This rings false from the beginning. Just try to imagine any vitality in a creation without death or G*D without Death – soon implacable stasis, a state worse than death, sets in.
It is this reality of death that leads us, time and again, to a gift of resurrection, not its surety. We all like a next breath too much to look forward to resurrection being a gift and not a given. For all our preaching about Easter qua Easter, Good Friday still is its straight-man. Without Good Friday, Easter's punch-line wouldn't ring true.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html