Meggan Manlove

Fall Convocation – Oct. 16 (Grace Lutheran, Lewiston, ID)

Isaiah 25:1-9

Did you all figure out a life-giving way to preach on the gospel text yesterday? I might go back and listen to a few of your sermons for inspiration. I looked up Sunday’s lectionary text in June and just groaned. I looked at a few old sermons. I read Father Capon and Dr. Richard Swanson. Where is the good news? I asked when I called a friend who was with me in text study for six years in rural Iowa. We laughed. 

This afternoon we are obviously turning to the other banquet or feast passage from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah had plenty of harsh words of judgment up until this point, but not in the portion we read today. God is a refuge and shade; in other words, God absorbs violence and brings peace. Our minds might wander to other passages of promise in Isaiah: the prince of peace or the wolf and the lamb lying down together. 

Oh, how we long for peace on days like today, in the Holy Land most especially. But I also in so many other parts of the world that are not front and center but where violence rages. We long for peace in our own communities, maybe in our own families. And we know that we are called to be peace makers, in our calls as pastors and deacons to be sure, but we can reach further back to the waters of the font. The outcome of all the promises made is so that the baptized will, “proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.”

There is more to Isaiah’s feast. The prophet also makes it plain that God will invite all to the rich feast God prepares on this mountain. The text layers adjectives to evoke a lavish banquet filled with food and drink. You hear an echo of Jesus’ invitation to come and feast with him at the marriage supper of the Lamb (Matthew 22:1-14; Revelation 19:6-8). The Eucharist is but a foretaste of this final feast for the nations. God invites all to come and dine. 

This scripture passage always reminds me of the table grace we sang at big family dinners, a table grace which brought together so many of the biblical feasts: Come and dine the master calleth come and dine. There is plenty at God’s table all the time. He who fed the multitude, turned the water into wine, to the hungry calleth now. Come and dine. Amen.

Like so many major biblical scenes, the feast Isaiah describes takes place on a mountain. Usually, it’s only on Transfiguration Sunday when I talk about mountain top experiences, but Isaiah 25 lends itself to a similar exploration. Moments of spiritual high are rightly critiqued when they are paired with manipulation or never lead to actual discipleship. But when someone or a group of people truly experiences the love of God in Christ Jesus in an authentic way, that is something to celebrate. 

As a lifelong proponent of outdoor ministry, I’m used to the critique that a week at camp is too unrealistic. Nothing can replicate it down the mountain. It sets the bar too high for what beloved Christian community looks like. My response is something like, How else are we supposed to help bring in the reign of God if we’ve never had a glimpse of it. 

We get into trouble when we think our feast experience, our glimpse of the reign of God is the only one. In my twenties I learned that Lutherans don’t one-up each other through born-again stories, we one-up each other through feast stories—camp, college, mission trip, whatever. We could have just said, isn’t it great we all have some idea of what the Holy Spirit is trying to usher in!

An amazing gift of being on the synod staff is hearing and seeing the variety of mountain top feasts in our synod. Sometimes a glimpse of the reign of God is being welcomed into one of the recovery groups so many of our churches host. Sometimes it’s reconciliation with a family member. Sometimes it is a meaningful worship service. And a glimpse of the reign of God may come by reading scripture passages like this one from Isaiah where God, through a prophet, paints the actual picture.

I will fully admit that when I consider the ELCA’s Truth and Healing Movement, which we are participating in this week, I hear a real call to discipleship, to speak the truth in love to one another and maybe to our communities. I also see another glimpse of the reign of God, another feast.

Part of why Vance Blackfox is with us is because so many of us are in proximity to Indigenous populations. Our whole synod can enter into this movement. But another reason he is here is because you elected a bishop from Western South Dakota and when I began digging into my own anti-racism work, so much of my childhood bubbled up.

As I have written, there is a strange dissonance that comes with growing up in a town called Custer down the hill from Crazy Horse Mountain. Pine Ridge was the poorest county in the nation, the very worst piece of land we could give to anyone, as if it was ours to give. Wounded Knee (both of them) occurred only hours from my home, but I never visited until I was in my twenties. 

There were other stories too, good stories mostly around high school basketball. Because our high school boys basketball coach was commited to reconciliation with the Indiginous people, Custer High School was the one white school invited to the Lakota Nation Basketball Tournament in Rapid City. The tournament was amazing to behold. More importantly to me was SuAnne Big Crow, a member of the Oglala Sioux, and a member of the 1989 state champion Pine Ridge Team. She was more than a great ball player; she was an amazing human and so proud of her heritage. Then she died tragically in a car accident in 1992.

As a teenager, the adults in my life generally did not talk about the roots of all the obvious inequity and certainly no one had a plan for truth and healing. The one exception perhaps being New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and his bill to return 1.3 million acres of federal land, most of it in the Black Hills, to the Sioux Nation. For me, the ELCA’s Truth and Healing movement, it was another feast, another glimpse of the reign of God. It continues the long feast, the long story we already know. 

I always loved that Barbara Brown Taylor called the long commentary series she edited Feasting on the Word. The Word, the story we find in holy scripture, may be the biggest feast of all. We will perhaps be reminded this week that the story has been used in terrible ways to harm people, but I still think it’s redeemable because it is so full of stories of God’s faithfulness and promises and visions for the world. 

What’s more, it is the story you and I are part of. At some point each of you was brought into this story, maybe at the very beginning of creation or maybe in the waters of baptism (metaphysics were never my strong suit). What I do know for sure is that you are part of the feast already here and now because you each bear the name Child of God. 

Each of you in your fullest, authentic, beautiful, and broken self – are loved. Embraced and forgiven, you are set free from all the self-talk and other-talk that binds you with names that are not your true name. You are God’s beloved child.