The Church’s Culture of Feasting (Isaiah 25:1–12)
Advent in Isaiah (Part 2)
The Church’s Culture of Feasting (Isaiah 25:1–12)
And now our lesson of the day from the prophet Isaiah chapter 25, verses 1 to 12:
“O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure. For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the foreigners’ palace is a city no more; it will never be rebuilt. Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you. For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat; for the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall, like heat in a dry place. You subdue the noise of the foreigners; as heat by the shade of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is put to silence.
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.
It will be said on that day, ‘Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.’ For on this mountain the hand of the Lord will rest, and Moab will be trampled down in his place, as straw is trampled down in a dunghill. And he will spread out his hands in their midst as a swimmer spreads his hands out to swim, and he will bring down their pride together with the craft of their hands. The high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thank you, God.
Let us pray together.
Father, we thank you for this great prophecy you spoke through Isaiah. We thank you for the things here that you promised to do—your wonderful counsels of old that you promised to bring to pass through the Wonderful Counselor, your Son, whose coming we celebrate and even look forward to his final coming. Father, may your word go forth this day with power, with truth, that you may glorify yourself, that you may bring honor to your name in all the nations, and that you may edify and build up and strengthen your people. We ask this in Christ’s name. Amen.
You may be seated.
We started looking at this passage in Isaiah last week. We saw that what Isaiah is doing here is describing the glory of the Messianic Age, the new era in history that would arrive with the coming of the Messiah into the world. Right there in the center of Isaiah’s description of this new world, in verse 6, he presents for us a lavish feast—a feast of fat things and refined wines.
What is this feast? That is what we want to focus on this morning. As we saw last week, it is centrally the Lord’s Supper. The Eucharist is the feast of all feasts—not so much because of the quantity of what we eat, obviously, but because of the quality of what we’re given, the quality of what’s offered in this meal. You see that this has got to be the Eucharist, and the fact that this meal is served up on a mountain recalls the feast of Moses and the seventy elders on Mount Sinai in Exodus chapter 24—only now it’s at a better mountain. Whenever Isaiah speaks of the mountain, it is Mount Zion, the Temple Mountain, which the book of Hebrews tells us is now the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. So this feast that is offered for us on the mountain of God is offered to us in gathered worship. It is the Lord’s Supper, the communion meal.
Isaiah says this is a feast of fat pieces. As we saw last week, the fat pieces of the sacrifice belong to God, according to Leviticus chapter 3. The sacrificial animals represented Christ, and the fat represented the best part of the sacrifice. Now, amazingly and graciously, in Isaiah’s picture of this future age, this Messianic age, God shares his own portion with his people. Our fat piece, we could say, is the body of Christ—the bread that has come down from heaven to be our sacrificial offering, to be our sacrificial feast.
But there is more here. Why does Isaiah describe the Messianic age, the New Covenant age, in terms of a feast? Think about this: other than possibly Judaism (which is obviously related to Christianity in various ways), Christianity is the only religion in the world that puts a meal, a shared table, at the center of its practices. Other religions put ideas at the center, or they may put rules about morality at the center, but in Christianity, a feast is at the center of things.
Think about it: no other religion is centered around someone who was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. It is amazing to think about. I think that is significant. While this picture in Isaiah 25:6 points fundamentally to the Eucharist—that is central to what is being described here—it really demands something much more than that. It demands that the church’s life be shaped in a certain way. It demands that the church manifest what you could call a culture of feasting. The call to feasting and celebrating is central to Christian living. It is central to the good life, to the abundant life that God intends for us to enjoy in Christ Jesus.
Let me talk with you about some of the things the Bible says about feasting. Then I want to tie those things in more specifically to Advent and especially the Christmas season. We need to understand that feasting is part of practical Christian living. We talk about these different skills that you have to develop to be a Christian—things like learning how to pray, Bible study, and evangelism. Well, learning how to feast is among those skills that we’re called to master as well.
Like everything else, our discussion of feasting has to start at the beginning in the Garden of Eden. How did God give communion and life to Adam and Eve in the Garden? He did so through a meal, through the Tree of Life. God said they could eat of every tree in the Garden except for one, which means they were free to eat of the Tree of Life. Adam and Eve had a sacramental meal offered to them in that tree. Think further: how would God have eventually given them glorified kingship? When they had proven themselves, when they had proven their obedience and faithfulness, how would God have rewarded them with yet another meal? He would have promoted them to a higher degree of glory through a meal, through the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Through eating, God would have given them this glory. (They seized that fruit prematurely, but God would have eventually given it to them at the right time had they proven faithful.)
What did Adam and Eve lose when they sinned? They lost access to the fruit, to the Tree of Life. Death was being cut off from the Tree of Life. They were kicked off the mountain-garden of Eden where that food was offered to them. This is the form or shape that God’s punishment took: they no longer had access to the Tree of Life. If this is what judgment consists in—if this is what the curse consists in, having access to the Tree of Life barred—what must redemption consist in? It is being readmitted to God’s fellowship through food. It is being readmitted to God’s table. It is being given God’s food again. We could say the Tree of Life—or now, as Jesus speaks of it, the bread of life.
This is just what we find. Think about the Exodus—God’s great work of redemption on behalf of Israel, bringing them out of Egypt, which the New Testament again and again presents as a type or pattern or picture of our own redemption in Christ. God says to Pharaoh through Moses, “Let my people go,” and then he tells Pharaoh the reason why his people must be set free: “so that they might hold a feast before me.” The purpose of the Exodus is so that God’s people can hold a feast in his presence. Moses goes on to say that if they are going to have this feast, they have to take their young sons and daughters with them (Exodus 10). It is a liturgical, sacramental feast, so it has to include the children as well.
When God finally redeems his people, he gives them a meal. The redemption happens through a meal—the Passover meal. Then as they are brought out of slavery and established as a people, as a new nation, God gives them a calendar through Moses—a calendar with set feasts and celebrations that will train them in their story, that will help them remember all that God has done and has promised to do for them.
When you look at that calendar as it is described in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and elsewhere, and you add it all up, you find that in the Old Covenant God prescribed eighty feast days per year for his people—and one fast day. That is amazing. That tells you something about God’s priorities. Listen to one example of this from Deuteronomy 14:26—God’s rule of feasting, you could say. This is how God wants them to feast when they gather in Jerusalem three times a year:
“You shall spend the money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household.”
God says: spend money, do what your heart desires, eat, drink, splurge, celebrate, rejoice before me. As pragmatic Americans, we think that sounds wasteful, inefficient, unthrifty, extravagant. If you do that, won’t other important things get neglected? Well, yes, probably so. But that is part of the point. God commands this because it is really only by faith that we can feast in this kind of way. God commands an extravagant celebration, and he says, when you do this, don’t forget the poor, the needy, the stranger. This is a constant theme that you see develop throughout Scripture.
In Ecclesiastes 2, Solomon tells us, “There is nothing better than for a man to eat and drink and make his soul enjoy good in his labor. This is from the hand of God.” Solomon, the wisest man of all, says there is nothing better than feasting—than eating and drinking and enjoying the fruit of your labor under God’s blessing. In a sense, this should be our motto as God’s people, our slogan to live by: if God blesses, enjoy it. When God says feast, we have to feast. When God gives you something to celebrate, let it rip. Enjoy the bounty of God’s goodness extended to you.
Jesus manifests this in his ministry as recorded in the Gospel accounts. Wherever Jesus went, he was always throwing a party. He was always the life of the party in more ways than one. If there wasn’t enough to eat, Jesus would simply create more so that nobody went hungry. If the party started to run out of wine, he would take care of the problem. In fact, the first miracle we’re told in the Gospel of John was providing the best of all wines at a wedding celebration where they were starting to run short of wine. Jesus couldn’t let that happen—we can’t run out of wine. This is a feast. This is a party. Jesus provides more.
He was always feasting. In fact, we can ask the question: why did the Jews finally plot to have Jesus crucified? What was it that Jesus did that made them so mad, so angry? Right at the center of his offense is the fact that he ate and drank with sinners. Not only that, but the way he described his meals and the stories that he told about meals. If you look at the parables, almost every single one seems to be about some kind of feast. If he’s not eating, he’s talking about eating. The way he describes his feasts, he says these are the kingdom banquets that the prophets promised. These are the meals of the kingdom. They’re Isaiah 25–type meals. And the offense is that he is sharing them with sinners. The Pharisees were most offended by Jesus’ choice of dining companions. He was known as a friend—or a table fellow—of sinners and tax collectors. That was his offense.
When they accused him, as they do in Luke 7, of being a drunkard and a glutton, they are alluding back to the law in Deuteronomy 21 that says a rebellious son who is, among other things, a drunkard and a glutton is to be stoned. In other words, when they accuse Jesus of being a drunkard and a glutton, they are not just saying that he overeats. They are saying that Jesus is worthy of death. His table practices—the way he ate and drank, who he would eat and drink with—made him mortal enemies. You could say Jesus went to the cross because he ate and drank with the wrong people. But ultimately we can even turn that around: Jesus went to the cross so that he could offer divine table fellowship with sinners.
Jesus has all these meals with sinners leading up to the cross. But then we find that what he is doing at the cross is making that kind of table fellowship possible. The fellowship through food that Adam and Eve lost in Genesis 3, Jesus came to reestablish through his death. What is he doing on the cross? He is punching our ticket to the feast. He is regaining for us admission to God’s table.
We see this right before Jesus goes to the cross. What is the last thing Jesus does before he goes to die on the cross for our sins? He institutes the Last Supper—or it might even be better called the First Supper, because that is really what it is. It is the first New Covenant Passover. He takes the Passover and transforms it into something new. This is so important. Jesus did not say, “Well, disciples, now that the New Covenant is coming, now that the Spirit is about to be poured out, you’re going to have immaterial communion with me. So what I want each one of you to do is go off to your prayer closets, each separately, lock yourselves away, and there mentally meditate on me and my truth, and that’s how you’ll have communion with me.” No, that is not what Jesus did. He gave his disciples a meal. He said, “It is in this meal, as you share this meal together, as you feast together at this table, this is how you will know my presence and my peace and my assurance. This is how you will encounter me in a transforming way—as you eat and drink this meal together.”
We see this after the resurrection. Luke 24 is a great example. After the resurrection, Jesus is walking the road to Emmaus with a couple of disciples. These disciples are distraught over the cross and puzzled by the stories of the empty tomb, but they still don’t get it. Jesus is right there with them, walking down the road with them, and they don’t recognize him. Jesus begins to do a little Bible study with them. He begins with Moses and then works his way through the prophets—the whole Hebrew Bible—and he expounds the Scriptures, the things concerning himself, his suffering and his glory, but they still don’t get it. Until you get to verse 30, where he sits down at the table with them, takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. Then Luke tells us, “Their eyes were opened and they knew him.”
Their eyes were opened—that is Genesis 3 language. When Adam and Eve took of the fruit, their eyes were opened in a bad sort of way. But now that is being reversed. They receive bread from the hand of Jesus, they eat with Jesus, their eyes are opened unto blessing. This is the thing in Luke 24: they didn’t recognize Jesus in the word until he gave himself to them in the bread. That is when the word opened up to them so that they grasped the identity of Jesus. In a sense, unless the preaching of the word is sealed by the supper, it is in one ear and out the other. That is how it was for those disciples. It was the breaking of the bread together with Jesus that made the word stick, that made the word make sense, that connected the word with the presence and identity of Jesus.
We see that Paul also sees the importance of feasting. It is not just Jesus and the Gospels; it is also the Apostle Paul. There are a lot of passages we could look at in Paul, but just one example from Galatians 2. Paul says he has to confront his colleague, his fellow apostle Peter, to his face because he is not walking in line with the Gospel. We might think, “Oh no, what has Peter done to not walk in line with the Gospel? Is he teaching some kind of works-righteousness doctrine? Has he gone into some kind of gross immorality?” What is Peter doing that is not walking in line with the Gospel? What is his great offense? Paul says the problem is that Peter is no longer eating with the Gentiles. He is no longer eating with those Gentile sinners who put their trust in Christ. The Gospel is all about table fellowship. Paul says Peter denied the Gospel because he wasn’t eating with the right people any longer.
What does the Gospel do? The Gospel creates a new community that gathers at the table, that is formed around the table that Christ has given to us.
Feasting not only celebrates the glories of redemption; it also celebrates the goodness of God’s creation. Paul makes mention of this in 1 Timothy 4: “Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving.” If you can give thanks for it, you can enjoy it to the glory of God.
Why is feasting so important? It is important precisely because it keeps us from both doctrinalism and moralism. The Gospel is not just ideas to believe and not just rules to obey. There are ideas to believe and there are rules to obey, but that is not what it is all about fundamentally. Fundamentally, the Gospel is events—real, live, historical events—events that call for celebration. The Gospel is a story, and it is a story that must be celebrated. It is a story that creates a culture of feasting and rejoicing. I think this makes the church a counterculture in our drab and joyless world.
If we understand the Gospel aright, if we celebrate it aright, the church will be something like an alternative society within the society of the world. Because the world doesn’t have this. The world doesn’t have this kind of joy. The world outside the church has nothing to celebrate, and so in the end whatever feasts they might offer are tasteless. Their rejoicing rings hollow.
In the Bible we have feasting with depth. You see this in a lot of different ways. Feasting is always connected with singing and with showing mercy to the poor. It is always a shared feast. In fact, feasts in the Bible always include songs. Martin Luther said that right next to the word of God, music deserves the highest praise. He pointed out that this is because music governs human emotions. He said there are songs for every occasion—songs to comfort the sad, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate, to appease the hateful. We could say there are songs for Advent and songs for Christmas, songs for Lent and songs for Easter. Luther went on to say that he would like to see all the arts, especially music, used in the service of the Gospel because he understood the power of music. If Christianity is based on a story—if the Gospel is about what God has done in history—what God has done in history has to be celebrated. We can’t respond to it properly without celebrating it. And if we celebrate it, that is going to require feasting and singing. That is the form or shape that our joy will take.
Luther was especially concerned that the church train her young, her children, in music so that they could learn the skills needed to celebrate the Gospel in the right way.
The world doesn’t know how to feast. If you look at the world today, the world knows how to eat a Big Mac in the car on the way to an appointment, but the world doesn’t really know how to feast. Along with losing this ability to feast, the world has also lost its ability to sing. People don’t sing together like they used to. We have lost this sense of corporate feasting together. We have also lost the ability to sing corporately together. We in the church have got to get these things back.
The world today is a joyless place. It is up to the church to show the world what real joy—truly human joy, incarnational joy—really looks like.
Let me give you an example. Many of you are familiar with the work of G.K. Chesterton, the great theologian and writer and thinker. You can just tell from reading his books that he never wrote a page without a big grin on his face because everything he wrote is so enjoyable. He was a master at unmasking the bankruptcy of non-Christian thinking and living. In his book Heretics, he gives a number of examples of this. One of my favorites is when he takes on Auguste Comte. Comte may not be a name that is familiar to you, but at the time he was a well-known philosopher, known as the father of secular humanism. What is interesting about Comte is that when he turned humanism into a kind of new religion, he said that as Christianity continues to wane and wither, and as secular humanism more and more takes the place of Christianity as our new religion, secularists are going to need a new calendar to replace the Christian calendar, to replace those old Christian festivals and celebrations with new humanistic festivals and celebrations.
Of course, you can imagine Chesterton has a lot of fun with this. The whole chapter is worth reading, but this is one of the things he says: as a philosophy, Comte’s worship of humanity is unsatisfactory. It is unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism and then turn around and ask men to worship a being who is ninety million persons (or six billion persons in our day, I guess)—to worship a being who is ninety million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. Comte has this rationalistic objection to Christianity: we worship one God who exists in three persons. Well, now you’re asking us to worship one God who exists in ninety million persons. How can that be reasonable? Humanity is one God existing in six billion persons. It just doesn’t work. It doesn’t make any sense.
Chesterton says that while the philosophy is the worst part of Comte’s new religion, the ceremony actually is the most sensible part, for at least Comte sees that men cannot live without ritual or festival. If Comte’s religion is to overtake the world, it would have to be through its calendar, not its philosophy—through its new festivals and saints’ days rather than its ideas.
Chesterton says, with a hint of sarcasm no doubt, that while he cannot imagine the pain of having to actually read through Comte’s philosophical works, he can easily imagine, with the greatest enthusiasm, lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day. He can’t get into the ideas, but he can really get into the rituals. But of course, Chesterton goes on to point out that it doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked, and it never can work. After all, no one ever really feels like celebrating Darwin Day. There can be no rationalist festivals because rationalists have nothing to celebrate. Who wants to hang a stocking in honor of Karl Marx? Who wants to put up lights in honor of Immanuel Kant? Who wants to celebrate Aristotle’s birthday? You just can’t get excited about these things.
Chesterton goes on to say, “Men only get gloriously materialistic over things that are thoroughly spiritualistic.” Take away the Nicene Creed and you do serious wrong to the sellers of sausage. No Nicene Creed, nothing to celebrate. It’s bad business for the sausage seller. Wherever you have faith, there you have hilarity. You have something to celebrate. But if man’s reason is all there is, there is no joy. Men will not be filled with hilarity over abstract principles. Only the creed—the Christian creed, the gospel creed—can produce a life of vigor and feasting.
Nobody reads Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and then decides, “You know what I want to do? I want to go out and buy a bunch of gifts and wrap them up in pretty paper and give them to my friends and family.” There is nothing there worth celebrating. There is nothing there that compels joy. But if you tell people a story—a true story about a promised Savior King born in a cattle manger who emerges from the backwoods of his homeland in Judea, who takes on the corrupt religious and political establishment of his day and who ultimately becomes a hero by slaying the dragon of sin and death through his self-sacrificial love—now that is something that people will stand up and cheer for. That is something people will want to celebrate. And as Chesterton points out, because it is something worth celebrating, it is also something worth dying for. If you won’t even put a wreath on your head for it, you certainly won’t die for it. But if you are willing to celebrate it, it is something you are willing to die for.
The world doesn’t have any stories like that, and so they have to borrow their stories from the church. Why is it that in the last couple of years we have seen such a craze over the Tolkien trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia? (You could possibly even put the Harry Potter series in this category as well, though that would be debatable.) Why are these things so popular all of a sudden? It is because the world craves a good story.
But we need to ask: why are people so caught up in these stories that are basically just Christian allegories? Or maybe they are not so much allegories of the gospel, but we certainly have to say they are shot through with biblical images and archetypes and symbolism, and they cannot be understood apart from the Bible. Because the truth they are intending to communicate is truth straight out of the Scriptures. I read an article this week about how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie isn’t just for Christians—pagans can enjoy it too. Well, that is nonsense. If they stick to the book and the movie, that is nonsense. Obviously you could say anybody can be entertained by this. But if you are really going to understand it, if you are really going to enter into it, you’ve got to believe the gospel story. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—that is our story. It belongs to us. It is a retelling of the gospel story.
Lewis tells us why he wrote it. He wrote it so that by finding the gospel there in Narnia, we might know it better here. That by meeting Aslan in that world, we might meet the true Aslan in our world. That is why he wrote. Apart from that, it doesn’t make any sense. These great stories that Lewis and Tolkien wrote are just the shadows of which the gospel is the reality. Those are the myths, but as they both like to say, the gospel is myth made fact. That is why Christmas and Epiphany and Easter and Ascension Day are all worthy of the greatest celebrations we can give. They comprise the true myth. They are fairy tales made over into facts. That is what the gospel is.
The church calendar tells the story. It is a way for us to take hold of the story—or even better, it is a way for the story to take hold of us, to shape and mold us. Think again about Lewis’s story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. What is the situation in that story? It is always winter, never Christmas. Or you could say it is always Advent, never Christmas—until Aslan comes. As the snow starts to melt, the White Witch is trying to do all these things to stop Aslan from acting, to reverse this. But as Aslan is on the move, things begin happening. One thing that happens is Father Christmas comes around. He comes around bearing gifts. In one place he spreads a feast for some small animals in Narnia. When the White Witch comes upon this small feast, the animals gather, she begins to interrogate them. She asks them a bunch of questions. Then she turns them into stone.
Why did she do that? They weren’t really directly involved in the battle. Why does she care? Why does she interrupt the feast? Why does the enemy care if we celebrate? Why should it matter? The truth is, there is great power in the church’s feasting together. As we celebrate God’s goodness in creation, as we celebrate his graciousness in redemption, there is great power in this. Feasting together bonds us into a community. It strengthens our bonds of fellowship and friendship together. Not only that, but God strengthens us by making us participants in his own joy. We could say the church eats her way to victory. We feast our way to dominion. It may be hard at times to convince the world of Christian doctrine, but at least we can show them who throws a better feast. Who has a story worth celebrating.
We are called to a life of joy—a joy that conquers the world, a joy that overcomes the world. In 1534, Martin Luther received a letter from the young prince Joachim of Anhalt seeking his counsel. It seems that the young prince was suffering with melancholy and what he called “dejection of spirit.” Listen to Luther’s wise—and I would say radical—advice to the prince:
“I should like to encourage your Grace, who are a young man, always to be joyful, to engage in riding and hunting, and to seek the company of others who may be able to rejoice with your Grace in a godly and honorable way. For solitude and inwardness are poisonous and deadly to all people, and especially to a young man. Accordingly, God has commanded us to be joyful in His presence. He does not desire a gloomy sacrifice. No one realizes how much harm it does a young person to avoid pleasure. Can you imagine a pastor telling a young man in his congregation today, ‘Son, your problem is you’re just not having enough fun. You’re not seeking after pleasure’? Luther here says it is harmful to avoid pleasure. No one realizes how much harm it does a young person to avoid pleasure and cultivate solitude and sadness. Your Grace has Master Nicholas Hausmann and many others near at hand. Be merry with them, for gladness and good cheer when decent and proper are the best medicine for a young person, indeed for all people. I myself, who have spent a good part of my life in sorrow and gloom, now seek and find pleasure wherever I can. Praise God, we now have sufficient understanding of the Word of God to be able to rejoice with a good conscience and to use God’s gifts with thanksgiving, for He created them for this purpose and is pleased when we so use them.”
Now, how is that for an answer to depression? I think that is pretty good. I like Luther’s counsel there.
Consider a biblical passage that works the same way. In Nehemiah chapter 8, the Jews have come home after the exile. A number of the Jews have returned to Jerusalem. They are at work rebuilding the city and the wall in Jerusalem. Ezra reads the law to them, and as they hear the law read, it brings to mind their sins and they are crushed under the weight of it. They begin to weep and weep. On top of that, not only do they have this crushing burden of their sin, but they also have enemies who are trying to oppose this work of rebuilding the city and the wall—enemies who desire to crush them. But in the midst of this, listen to what the prophet says to the weeping people. This is Nehemiah 8:10, Ezra speaking:
“Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
And the people went and did so. They rejoiced before the Lord. God told them, “Stop grieving over your sins. Stop worrying about it and start rejoicing.” There is a time to grieve over your sin, but now that time has come to an end. Stop it. Now it is time to feast. Now it is time to celebrate. One of the things the church calendar can do for us is break us out of a kind of depression or a state of melancholy by forcing us to feast. It imposes itself upon us. No matter how bad things are going for you, now you must stop grieving over those things and you must start rejoicing and feasting.
What the prophet says there in Nehemiah 8 is so interesting: he indicates that it is this public and communal feasting and rejoicing in the Lord that will be their strength, that will make them strong, that will enable them to get the job done, to win the victory, to overcome their sin, to overcome the opposition of their enemies. They share a feast together for the Lord’s sake. They include the needy and the poor—those who can’t prepare anything for themselves—in it. They rejoice together, and in this way the Lord makes them strong. The Lord gives them strength that they might get the victory.
As Advent begins to give way to the Christmas season, this is exactly what we should be doing as well. We are preparing ourselves for the celebration. We must be ready to feast, to celebrate these things that God has given to us.
Let me talk for just a minute about Christmas celebrations. (I am going to come back and talk about this more next week.) But at least let me say this this morning: the incarnation—that is, God becoming man—can only be celebrated in an incarnational way. That is, with friends, with family, with feasting and singing, with rejoicing in these kinds of ways. It has got to be an earthy thing because our redemption is an earthy thing. Our redemption comes to us through a flesh-and-blood baby who grew up into a full-grown flesh-and-blood man who hung on a tree made of real wood, who shed real blood, who got put into a real cave, and then on the third day came forth in a renewed but real physical body. It is all real. It is all physical. It is all earthy. Our redemption takes place through the earthly, through the physical, through the created things, through the things that God has made.
An incarnational salvation requires an incarnational celebration. The church’s instincts—how has the church been celebrating Christmas through the years? Think about the customs that we have inherited and so forth. Celebrating Christmas with trees and ornaments and eating and drinking and giving gifts and candles and parties and songs and wreaths and lights—the church’s instincts in this way have been exactly right.
We will talk next week about the commercialization of Christmas. But however you deal with that, don’t try to spiritualize Christmas. We are celebrating the incarnation of the Son of God. It cannot be an ethereal thing. The Greeks thought of the body as a prison house for the soul. In Greek philosophy and Greek mythology, the way you become holy, the way you get salvation, is by shunning the body, by escaping physical reality. Salvation is an escape from the material world. But what do we offer as a counter to that in the Gospel? The Gospel of the Incarnation is just the opposite. How could God want you to escape the physical and the bodily when he came to inhabit it? He came to inhabit the physical and the bodily in order to redeem us. How could God want us to escape it?
Now we will talk more about this next week—the ways in which all this biblical theology of feasting should feed into our Christmas celebrations. We will talk some about the commercialization of Christmas and how we as our families, and especially as a church family, should respond to those things. But understand this: when God says celebrate, when God says spend money, buy wine and strong drink and eat and drink together, do what your heart desires—we dare not disobey that. We dare not disobey that command. There is liberation here.
Let us pray together.
Father, we thank you for this, that you have given us something to celebrate, that you have given us the best story in the world. In fact, it is the world’s story. It is the true story. It is myth made fact. Father, we thank you for this, for the great incarnation of your Son, that he came to redeem us, that he came to slay the dragon, to defeat sin and death and Satan on our behalf. Father, help us to cling to him by faith alone, and in doing so, give us hearts full of joy and gratitude that we might celebrate in an incarnational way that shows forth what this gospel is all about. Father, help us to do these things in Christ’s name. Amen.
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