Luke 24:36b-4
I heard a story this week about a pastor who, half-way through her sermon, had a strange sense of deja-vu. But nevertheless ploughed ahead. After the service as she was leaving the church, a 92-year old congregant told the pastor that she had enjoyed the sermon this week even more than she had the previous week.
At first, the pastor thought she meant she liked this week’s sermon more than the previous week’s. But no. The pastor had printed out the previous week’s sermon and delivered it again.
“Oh, no,” groaned the pastor in horror. “Pastor, dear,” the woman said, “it’s nothing. When you think you’re gaining weight because your pants don’t fit and then realize it’s because you’re trying to put them on over another pair of pants, call me. I have some tips.”
So if today’s post-resurrection, mealtime story from Luke is giving you deja-vu from last week’s post-resurrection, mealtime story from Luke, then give yourself a gold star, because you’re paying attention.
Jesus likes to eat.
In fact, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal in nearly every chapter.
Each gospel-writer finishes the sentence “The Son of Man came to…” differently:
Matthew says that the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost…
And Mark, that the Son of Man came, not to be served, but to serve…
But Luke says that the Son of Man has come eating and drinking…
Matthew and Mark’s responses are statements of purpose. Why did Jesus come? He came to seek and to save, to serve rather than be served. But Luke’s response is a statement of method. How did Jesus come? He came eating and drinking…and does so still.
Not too long ago I read a story about a young man who interned with a small rural church the summer between undergrad and seminary. He wouldn’t have admitted to being lonely, but was he most certainly out of his element.
In one week, he had gone from being an undergraduate with a social life to a country preacher living alone in a borrowed farmhouse. After a self-pitying walk through the tobacco fields, he heard a light tap on the screen door.
It was Mrs. Mills. She had shuffled across the street in her housecoat to welcome him. In her hands she held a fried pie, the kind that comes individually wrapped at the convenience store. At 94, she explained, she had retired from baking. But still she wanted to share dessert. He invited her in and somehow, by the grace of God, was able to find two clean forks in the kitchen.
And so began an almost nightly ritual during that summer: Mrs. Mills at the screen door bearing gifts. A Little Debbie snack cake. A handful of vanilla wafers. Powdered-sugar donuts. Each night the offering was different but the offer the same—dessert and conversation until it started to get dark.
At first he admitted their conversations were stilted, hesitant. But after a while he forgot the 74 years between them. He stopped seeing Mrs. Mills as some porcelain antiquity. She became flesh and blood, a friend.
And to his surprise, he learned that in this final stage of her life, she felt as displaced as he did. And so one evening in mid-August, just before the summer program ended and seminary began, the young man recalled how Mrs. Mills took a long sip of milk as if to steady her resolve, then asked tentatively, “How would it be if from now on you called me Granny?”
I don’t think it’s any surprise that all of Jesus’ resurrection appearances involve him eating. Three days in a tomb would leave us all famished, but Jesus hungers for more than food—like the young man and his 94-year old neighbor—Jesus is hungry for companionship, connection, grace.
Our story this morning begins in fear. The disciples are huddled together behind locked doors afraid the authorities-who-crucified-Jesus will come after them too. They’ve heard reports both of Jesus-sightings and Jesus-snatchings and don’t know which ones to believe. Is it good news or fake news? Who knows?
What they do know is that they’re caught up in a whirlwind of emotions—fear, frustration, guilt, grief, doubt, anxiety, suspicion, restlessness, despondency, and terror. Their leader is dead. His body is missing. And in the midst of their escalating alarm, Jesus himself appears, and they can hardly believe it.
“Peace be with you,” he says, “and have you got anything to eat?”
And so it’s true: the Son of Man does come to us eating and drinking: appearing “out of nowhere,” bursting through the locked doors of our fears, feeding us with peace, then leaving our minds blown open.
This Tuesday I’m reuniting with my CREDO group at Wooded Glen Conference Center just outside Louisville. Part of the ethos of a CREDO conference is meeting with the same group of clergy and faculty two years in a row so as to cultivate accountability and strong bonds between we participants.
Last year our group met at Ferncliff, a retreat center just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas. But instead of meeting a full two weeks after Easter, we met just two days after Easter Sunday.
One of our faculty members had never been to Arkansas before. Not because circumstance had never brought the two together, but because he had vowed never to set foot there.
You see, he’s Japanese-American, and during WWII his mother, before she was mother to him, was sent to an internment camp there.
And he admitted this to us, this fear of traveling to Arkansas, not that something would happen to him or that he’d be in danger because of his race. But because the thought of being there filled him, too, with a whirlwind of emotion—fear, distrust, guilt, grief, anxiety, suspicion, terror. Would he fall apart? Come undone? Unhinged?
He didn’t know. All he knew was that he couldn’t do his job or be fully present with us unless he faced his fear head on.
And so, he arrived the Saturday before Easter, rented a car and drove through the hills and hollers of Arkansas to the place where the internment camp had once stood. All that remained now was a dilapidated smoke stack; everything else was destroyed.
There was, however, a tiny Baptist church nearby with sign in the yard advertising their Easter service. And so, with nothing left to do or see he drove back to his hotel.
After a sleepless night, he got back in his car and once again drove through the hills and hollers until he reached that Baptist church. He was so afraid, not because he was a Presbyterian professor and they backwoods Baptists, but because his mother had suffered here.
Not long after walking into the church a woman approached him, and noticing he was alone, invited him to sit with her and her family. At first their conversation was stilted, hesitant. But as soon as the service was underway he forgot that he was a Presbyterian and she a Baptist; he forgot that he was a Japanese man and she a white woman from Arkansas.
When the service was over she invited him to her house to enjoy Easter lunch with her family. During a quiet moment alone after dinner, as he helped wash and dry her dishes, he confessed the true purpose of his visit.
And to his surprise, he learned that the women’s own mother had worked in the camp’s kitchen before she was born. Then the woman got up, and reaching deep into the recesses of a cabinet, pulled out the most utilitarian metal serving bowl you’d ever seen. And as she placed it into his hands, she said, “This bowl fed your mother.”
How does the risen savior come to us?
He comes eating and drinking.
He comes to feed us with his bread and wine, with his living, loving presence. And then he feeds us with his own hunger, until we are hungry for the same things: companionship, connection, grace; meals shared in community, a gathering of strangers and friends where everyone fed is so overjoyed they can hardly believe it, but so overjoyed they can hardly not.
Thanks be to God who finds us, feeds us, and sets us free.
Amen.