Lent begins with a feast.  Each week of Lent begins with a feast.  Lent all ends with a feast first on Maundy Thursday before the fasting of Good Friday, and then on Easter Sunday.  On that Easter Sunday, absence gives way to presence.  As our very bodies have felt the absence of food, drink, devices, social media or some other source of comfort and delight, on Sunday, they feel once again presence and with it delight.  

Tonight we are going to feast for “Fat Tuesday.”  For us tonight isn’t a feast of decadence before we try to give it all up for the next 40 days.  It is part of the rhythm of the life of a Jesus follower, meant to form Jesus in us and shape us into Him, or better, a way for us to know and experience our union with Him and all His benefits.  We feast, and we fast, and in both so we might hunger for God.  

Alexander Schmemman writes, “Every bite of food, given by God Himself, is to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God.”  But we have flipped that grace over and made it an end in itself.  Food and drink have become what we love.  We love to feast.  We love to party.  We love good friends.  We eat and our eating is doing something to us.  Making us in to lovers of food and drink.1

Into these wants and desires, Jesus came as “living water” and “the bread of life.”  He ate and drank with us, hosted us, shared meals with us.  In the last meal he ate before His death, He invited His followers into the kingdom now through a meal.  When we eat it, we eat it with Him, and we wait for when this spiritual feast becomes a physical one.2  Here Jesus meets us in our absent minded eating and feasting.  Eating that lost Him as its giver, gift and object.  

In that feast to come, the prophet Zechariah tells us we will have an eight day festival, where we will eat, worship and party in our resurrected bodies with our resurrected Jesus, and every pot will be holy until the Lord.  All that is made in the pots and all who made what is in the pots and all who eat what is in the pots will be as Leslie Fields says, “holy to the God whom it all belongs.”3

Fat Tuesday feasting is feasting with an eye toward that day.  Fat Tuesday feasting is feasting with a hunger for resurrection.  We feast thanking God for good food and good drink, food that nourishes us and sustains us, but food that also draws us into a deeper relationship with our God and neighbor.  In the weeks to come during Lent we will fast, not just fast, as the Lord’s day is a day of fast breaking and resurrection in-breaking.  But the fasting of Lent is a fast to draw us into deeper dependence on God and neighbor.4 

So today, let’s keep the feast, remembering the good gifts of God in food, drink and friends for us the people of God.   

If you are in the Q, we’d love for you to feast with us at 2004 Valencia Dr from 6-9 for some Jambalaya, Red Beans and Rice, Fried Chicken, King Cake and drinks. 

1. Fields, Leslie Leyland. The Spirit of Food: Thirty-Four Writers on Feasting and Fasting toward God. Cascade Books, 2010.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.