sustain:if:able kiwi

“All the senses are involved in a good feast. We taste, touch, smell, see, hear. Salvation as health is here vividly physical. Anything that heals and enhances savouring the world through our senses may feed into a salvation that culminates in feasting ….

As millions starve, ought anyone to be feasting? Ought there not to be a long detour of working to feed anyone, postponing the feasting till that has been achieved? Or should we keep alive the hope of food for all by working for justice, and, if we have food, simultaneously celebrating the goodness of God? Can we even sustain work of compassion and justice in the right spirit if we are not also having some celebratory foretaste of the Kingdom of God? …

That combination of sharing and celebrating is, perhaps, the most radical of all the implications of the teaching of practice of Jesus. Feeding the hungry is not a matter of the well-fed offering handouts and getting on with their private feasting: the vision is of everyone around the same table, face to face. Even to imagine sitting like that gently but inexorably exposes injustice, exploitation, sexism, hard-heartedness, and the multiple ways of rejecting the other …

To envisage the ultimate feasting is to imagine an endless overflow of communication between those who love and enjoy each other. It embraces body language, facial expressions, the ways we eat, drink, toast, dance and sing; and accompanying every course, encounter and artistic performance are conversations taken up into celebration.”

“Think of a man playing a harp, plucking strings producing different sounds by striking them with one quill … This is how God works … the Musician who controls that universal-sounding harmony … God is the Craftsman of all creation natural and contrived … Like a musician strumming the strings of the lyre with fluent quill, the Spirit proclaimed the same message in different tongues, instilling into men’s ears the varying sounds.”