Sermon: Cathedral Eucharist - 8 February 2015

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 8th February 2015

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Mark 2: 13-22

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 2.6M)

‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’'
(Psalm 34.8)

With the celebration of Candlemas, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, last week, the focus of the Church’s attention has now shifted. We have moved from the season of the Incarnation of the Word, Jesus Christ, towards the simplicity and depth of Lent.

We move, you could say, from the feasting time of Christmas, Epiphany and Candlemas characterised by sparkling gold and white hangings and vestments, and towards the fasting time of Lent with the simplicity of unbleached linen adorning building and clergy alike.

Feasting and fasting are integral to the Christian life, and as we approach Lent we should rightly be reflecting on the way in which we will fast and pray and also prepare to feast at Easter, and to ponder on how this pervades our lives and God’s call on our lives.

Both feasting and fasting are practices of abundance. You need abundance of food to feast; you need abundance of food to fast. Fasting does not mean there is no food, that’s called famine. In famine both feasting and fasting are impossible.

As we celebrate the Eucharist we must always consider, and pray for, those who go hungry in our world. The Eucharist always has an ethical dimension; hence our contribution, as a community shaped by the Eucharist, to the North Guildford Food Bank as a practical outworking of Christian concern for the hungry.

Famine is also a metaphor. It is a metaphor for the spiritual state that is barren and not feeding us, the state of being propped up by illusions and manipulations, of self-obsession and life shut down and seeking gratification from sources that cannot satisfy for long.

If Levi was anything like a typical first century tax collector he was in a spiritual desert, a place of famine whose landscape is littered with extortion, bribery, racketeering and collaboration with the occupation.

It may have been a place of spiritual famine, but it was a lucrative seat in the tax booth that Levi left. Actual food wasn’t his lack. But Jesus knows Levi’s true hunger, his call is, ‘Follow me’, implicitly saying, ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Psalm 34.8).

The simplicity of that call and its response is beguiling, yet God continues to call men, women and children into his life and love, today, now, here. God calls us by his grace: yet this grace, the grace that Levi received, is not without its demands.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book The Cost of Discipleship, calls it ‘costly grace’. It is free grace but not cheap: ‘Cheap grace’ he says, ‘is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate’. He goes on to say that this free, yet costly, grace is, ‘the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him’.

Walking away from the fishing nets, or the tax booth, or self-obsession is a step of profound trust and vulnerability. It is a walk away from ourselves tangled up in the nets, seduced by the money or power and a walk into ourselves as a new creation in Christ (cf 2 Corinthians 5.17). God’s call asks our repentance; metanoia, as the New Testament calls it.

This metanoia is not about being more respectable, conventional or more middle-class: far from it. Metanoia is healing but goes beyond the therapeutic reassembling of our lives or the idea that all that matters is a self-willed effort on our part. Metanoia is not just a change of mind; it is a change of life, a fundamental reorientation of priorities and outlook. When our lives respond to the call of Jesus Christ we know that we cannot see, feel or taste the world in the same way ever again.

Metanoia takes us to ‘a new place’. Levi followed Jesus out of the land of famine into a land flowing with milk and honey, a Promised Land. And, in our journey to that land, Levi, you and me, like the Israelites, are fed by God: in the words of Psalm 78, ‘Mortals ate of the bread of angels; he sent them food in abundance.’ (Ps 78.24).

And a meal is a sign of Levi’s new place: the meal that Levi shares with Jesus, and fellow tax-collectors and sinners, is the sign of his acceptance. And it’s more than a simple meal, since the Greek original of the text says not that ‘they sat at the table’ but that ‘they reclined’: this was a banquet, an abundant meal (Mark 2.15).

It is in this place of abundant spiritual food that we, like Levi, can begin to feast and fast. Feasting with Christ and fasting for Christ: both feasting and fasting help us to live lives of gratitude, gratitude for the abundance of God’s grace and for the Giver of it. That’s why both feasting and fasting are appropriate for us who await the coming of Christ the Bridegroom, Christ the Point of the Party.

The dinner is laid out for Jesus, but although Jesus is Levi’s guest the tables are turned: he feeds him with the bread of life eternal. The guest feeds the host. He doesn’t feed him on watered down gruel, a pale imitation of the Gospel, but on the meat of the Gospel: ‘Take hold of the life that really is life’ (1 Tim 6.19). And as he receives from Jesus, the Bread of Life, Levi starts to become what he is called to be, someone who tastes of the abundance of God’s love.

God - who calls you in the power of the Spirit in Jesus’ name - is faithful! So take a look at your feasting and fasting, or are you in a place of famine? Pray: ‘Lord, give us this day our daily bread’. Ponder how your life is ordered and orientated from today: for now you are invited to receive Christ as the guest who will feed you abundantly.