August 30, 2025 – The Banquet
Sermon by Pastor Russ Norris, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

Forty years ago, in the spring of 1985, a new kind of ecumenical ministry opened its doors in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It squeezed into a nondescript building next to the Holiday Inn parking lot. And in a direct reference to our gospel reading tonight, from Luke 14, it was called, simply, The Banquet.

The group that founded this new ministry was a mixed collection of people from various faith communities – Catholic and Protestant, clergy and lay – who were inspired by what you might call “New Testament hospitality”. The goal was to address food insecurity in the rapidly growing city of Sioux Falls.

To learn more about how to do that, the group visited similar ministries in a number of other cities, including Milwaukee. There they sat down with Father Steve Gleiko, a priest at St. Benedict’s Catholic Church, who asked them, “What’s the target of your ministry?” They all looked at each another. Wasn’t it obvious?

The poor, of course!

Wrong, he told them. Your target is the whole community: the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, the blind and the sighted. In this little glimmer of the Kingdom of Heaven that they were starting, there would be no division between them.

The Banquet would, as much as possible, do what Jesus told the Pharisee in Luke. They would create a space where the advantaged and the disadvantaged could come together around a common table. The idea was not to have church people “serving the poor”, but to br a place where people would be welcomed to both serve and eat, to share with strangers, to crack open cold hearts, if only just a little.

The Banquet would be a place where people’s lives might touch; a place to connect with each other. The Banquet wasn’t a charity at all; it was a celebration! Key to all this was what you might call “intentional extravagance”. Every meal would be overflowing, generous, abundant. This wasn’t going to be a bare bones kind of “soup kitchen”. If they were going to do it right, it would be with meat and potatoes, steaming casseroles, homemade cookies and sheet cakes, and –this being Lutheran country in the 1980’s, plenty of Jello “salad”. There would be fresh flowers and linens on the tables, so that when people walked in the door, they might say, “What? Are you setting up for a wedding?” That was intentional. It was an intentional effort to upend the status quo, to do something radically new.

The hard part was getting folks to sign on to this kind of program. Those with money and resources might be interested in sharing what they had; but it’s another thing altogether to sit down at a table and share a meal with a stranger. At The Banquet this became the practice: Everyone who came to serve also sat at the tables and ate. There was no hiding in the kitchen or behind the coffee pot.

And if this sounds a little far-fetched, you can see it for yourselves right here on Cape Cod. Just a couple of miles down the road. First Lutheran Church has been doing this kind of ministry for years. They call it the “Barnstable Café”. The second Saturday of every month they offer a community meal for anyone and everyone. The folks who prepare the meal sit down and share it with those who come. There’s no cost, no fee. Everyone is welcome.

See, in Luke 14, Jesus isn’t saying to the Pharisee, “You need to do more good deeds”. He’s saying something entirely different: “You who think you are rich; you are really poor. You who think you have; you have not.” And, says Jesus, “that’s really good news. Because the only way you’ll discover the meaning and purpose of life is by sitting down with the poor and breaking bread together. Then you can begin to see your own poverty and discover what life really is.”

But then Jesus says something really mysterious and puzzling. He says the reward for all this will not be found in recognition, but in “the resurrection of the righteous”. What do you think that means? What if the resurrection of the righteous isn’t something that happens in the far-flung future, at the end of the world. What if it’s found in the new life that awakens inside us when we find that our separateness from each other is a delusion, that our power is really powerlessness, that our possessions weren’t ever really ours in the first place?

What if it means that in the mystery of God’s Kingdom, we find our reward buried deep in the mystery of resurrection and new life?

I ran across a recent quote from Pope Leo this week that underscores what The Banquet is doing. Leo says, “I encourage you not to distinguish between those who assist and those who are assisted, between those who seem to give and those who seem to receive, between those who appear poor and those who feel they have something to offer. In the church everyone is poor, everyone is precious and all share the same dignity.”

The Banquet, by the way, just celebrated 40 years of sharing that intentional extravagance. They service 16 meals a week in two locations to more than 200,000 participants a year! Now that’s a banquet!

Amen.