(Sermon starts at 28:00)
When things fall apart, sometimes we do things that don’t make sense.
When people die, we eat.
It’s sort of like whistling in the dark. Playing in a graveyard. Singing in the ruins.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus spends a lot of time eating. He ate with outcasts and sinners, rich and poor, healthy and sick. Jesus ate with us because it’s aggressively normalizing to eat with those whom we would rather not touch or talk to.
Most of all, Jesus ate with us to remind us that the great kingdom feast had come near – here, into this place, not some perfect or untouched place, but an impoverished, starving, unjust, lonely place.
Every feast he attended, therefore, was funereal as well as joyful. Every feast was a ruin – but when Jesus showed up, a simple ruin became a tavern, a place for foolish, sacred, drunken love.
“This,” Jesus says incessantly in Luke, “this is the kingdom of God.”