No shame for the Pharisees...

I am a few weeks into my "Feasting with God" series and find I am only scratching the surface of all the ideas swirling around my head. Yesterday in worship, we explored why it is essential for us to "taste and see" the goodness of the Lord - an image the feast brings home in spades - and concluded by "praying" with both dates (to mark our unity with Islam) and sweetened apples (to note our unity with Judaism.)

+ At the heart of worship was the awareness that until we "know" God's grace from the inside out, it is very hard to both share peace with others and trust that we are God's beloved. For unless we "taste and see," we are only talking about abstract ideas we are unable to incarnate.

+ I think that is why Jesus not only feasted with many who were on the margins of his society - he gave them an experience of "tasting" so that they might "see" - but invited his opponents to the table, too. It was his hope that his scandalous behavior might awaken those who challenged him - in the fashion of a Zen master - so that they might also experience and celebrate the radical grace of God.

It was not Jesus' goal to shame the scribes and Pharisees. The older I get the more I sense that Jesus loved them as much as he loved those who were regularly locked out of religion. But he challenged each group in unique ways so that each group might be embraced by God. For those who had been marginalized, he created experiences of community and companionship; and for those who were the traditional insiders, sometimes he let them feel what it was like to be shut-out of God's grace, but more often than not he gave them stories and experiences designed to awaken sleepy hearts with a new sense of the Lord's radical grace. As Eugene Peterson has said, the parables of Jesus are more about "detonation" than explanation - he blew their minds!

This week the gospel text is the Prodigal Son - the essence of Christian theology in my experience - and I look forward to wrestling with it again so that I, too, might taste and see. (Here's a lovely prayer/song we'll be working on soon...)