Feasting In The Presence Of My Enemies
Rev. Joshua Smith • Psalm 23
The Wealth of Wenceslas
December 26, 2021 • Rev. Joshua Smith
The Feasthood of All Believers Merry Christmas Eve, friends. For much of my early adulthood, my father and one of my sisters had jobs that prevented us from celebrating Christmas together on December 25. The day after was much easier to request off, and the arrangement left me and my other sister free to garner favor with our own sets of future and present in-laws by handing the traditional holiday over to them. So, the day after Christmas, we Smiths typically reserve the day to cook and consume an elaborate breakfast feast before my siblings, parents, and a few grands watch the rapidly multiplying crop of cousins joyfully destroy wrapping paper and reveal the secrets within. The best gift, of course, has been that for the last couple of years we’ve had five generations present! My eccentricities are established enough in the family that they sometimes become ritualized even when there’s almost no intentionality to them. I think I started calling our holiday Boxing Day simply because that’s what was printed on the calendar in the space where I wrote in the even more obscure “Smithmas.” Now we all refer to the event interchangeably as both. There had been speculation as to the origin of the holiday known as “Boxing Day,” but no one ever bothered looking it up, since in those days the internet was not a thing one kept in one’s pocket. Speculations ranged from it being the traditional Canadian day for a formalized fight with siblings over the rightful ownership of contested gifts, to a postal service holiday after the grueling season. In fact, even looking it up doesn’t offer much more clarity. It does, however, add a theory we hadn’t considered, and which seems to be the more likely origin. All over the world from time out of mind, December 26 is designated as the Feast of St. Stephen: the first martyr for the faith, and first recorded deacon of the church. His task, along with six other faithful men, was to justly administrate the distribution of food to widows in the church. So, for generations, the day after Christmas has offered a perfect opportunity for faithful to box up the excess from the previous day of feasting and deliver it to the poor. Boxing Day is properly a very practical celebration of St. Stephen’s Day. As December 26 falls on a Sunday this year, before I head to my parents’ house for Boxing Day I’ll be in worship considering the life and death of St. Stephen. We’ll also remember Wenceslas, the man who honored Stephen’s feast day so faithfully, we still sing a carol about him a thousand years later. Both were simply following in the footsteps of the greatest table-setting King of them all. So, I hope you can be with us this Sunday as we all continue to stretch our imagination of what a good and godly feast can and ought to look like, regardless of its name or date. - josh
A Primer To Party Planning
December 19, 2021 • Rev. James M. Holland • Luke 14:12–14
A Primer for Party Planning I know what you are thinking as you look at that title. Yeah, that is just Jim. He is always a party waiting to happen. He is a seven on the Enneagram, and then a little rolling of the eyes. And yet……What if Jesus set up throwing parties as an expectation? What if setting tables was at the heart of the hospitality of God and the Counterculture kingdom he was bringing? Because, shockingly, it would seem so. In our text Sunday, the exhortation is—when, not if, you throw a party! Curiously, as we will see next week (and I will not steal Josh’s thunder), the whole call of the ministry of deacons is cast around what? Setting tables. So, Jesus gives us a primer for planning our parties, complete with instructions to the host about the guest list. This is what is shocking. He gives these instructions to a “religious leader.” The problem with Israel when Jesus arrives on the scene is not that Israel didn’t believe in throwing banquets—no, they were shaped by them and knew a grand feast was their future. But their banquets had become anti-culture—only people like us, only our peers and those we respect will be at our tables. Jesus drops a bomb on their narrow views and shows us a guest list that reflects the very gospel that would transform the world. Curious? I hope so. We are in the season of parties, banquets, and special programs, and gathering people is at the heart of what it means to be human. And Jesus shows us a more excellent way with a huge expectation—you will be blessed! That is, happy, knowing deep satisfaction. And in a world where these things increasingly elude us, how great is that?! So, join us Sunday, the fourth week of Advent, as we consider how the most mundane thing we do (eating) can reflect the cross—love, that is, life laid down. Glory, Jim