Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] I want to talk about five meals.
[00:00:08] Just five. But I'll make it quick. Alright, I know five sounds like a lot. Meal number one.
[00:00:15] The meals in your house.
[00:00:17] What makes a good meal in your house?
[00:00:21] I'm a like participatory kind of preacher. So you know.
[00:00:25] Meatloaf. Meatloaf. Okay, meatloaf.
[00:00:28] What makes a good dinner party at your house?
[00:00:31] People. People. Good people. You need the right people.
[00:00:34] What else?
[00:00:37] Just people and meatloaf, that's all.
[00:00:41] A table to share at. A table to share. You need a beautiful table. Yeah, Table, meatloaf. Good people. What else? A host. A host? Yeah, a host.
[00:00:50] Someone that has the skills of hosting.
[00:00:54] Music. Music? Yeah, music. Good music sets the vibe covers over a multitude of awkward pauses. Right.
[00:01:03] Okay. Is that good enough? Everybody? At least you have a sense of what makes a good dinner party in your world.
[00:01:09] All right, that's meal number one. Meal number two. The meal in Genesis chapter 18 that we just read about.
[00:01:15] How would we rate this meal in terms of it being a good or bad dinner party? No meatloafs. That's not a good start.
[00:01:26] Do we have good food though?
[00:01:28] We have good food. We have cake. My 5 year old would be happy about cake.
[00:01:33] It also says that Abraham rushed out to the herd and found a calf that was tender and good.
[00:01:41] He got one of the good ones. We got good food, so we got that.
[00:01:45] What about good people?
[00:01:48] Three strange men show up to your house.
[00:01:52] Little bit weird, right?
[00:01:55] It turns out that maybe they're not so bad, but it has the beginnings of kind of a weird dinner party. Three strange men approach the door.
[00:02:03] You get a little bit nervous.
[00:02:07] Let's see, what else.
[00:02:10] Abraham stands while they eat. Abraham stands while they eat. What an interesting detail.
[00:02:15] Maybe he's the host. He's the good host.
[00:02:19] We have good food. We have kind of. We have good conversation.
[00:02:24] Kind of weird conversation, right?
[00:02:28] Which one of you. Sarah, you're gonna have a baby.
[00:02:33] I met you two seconds ago. Strange man.
[00:02:39] But then we do get some laughter.
[00:02:43] You know what is laughter? But indication that we're having a good dinner party.
[00:02:48] Alright, that's meal number two.
[00:02:51] Meal number three.
[00:02:53] This one takes a little bit longer to explain. Fifteenth century guy named Andrey Rublev. Anybody know who this guy is?
[00:03:01] Sweet Andrey Rublev. He is a Russian iconographer. The guy who writes the little eastern icons like that one on the wall back there.
[00:03:12] He was commissioned to write an icon of the Holy Trinity for the monastery of the Holy Trinity somewhere in Russia.
[00:03:21] And that's quite as you might imagine. An Intimidating task.
[00:03:26] Depict the undepictable, you know, depict the central mystery of the Christian religion. And Rublev makes this very interesting decision in order to depict the Holy Trinity. What he paints is this dinner scene from Genesis, chapter 18.
[00:03:49] Somebody who's like, millennial or younger, look up this icon on your phone and then just hold it up to people so they can see it.
[00:03:58] Here's what the icon looks like. I'll just describe it to you. So all it is, all you can see is mostly yellow.
[00:04:04] And it has three angels. And there's one. There's a square table here. You're allowed to get out your phone. I'm not going to judge you. I know it's church angel sitting at the head of the table. Three angels that look very similar. Square table in the middle. One angel here. And this angel is looking at this angel sitting at this side of the table. This angel is looking across the table at that angel, this angel looking back to the angel at the head of the table.
[00:04:32] And that's it. Other than that, that's kind of the whole icon in the very background. You can see one of the oaks of Mamre growing in the background.
[00:04:41] But Rublev thought this was a story that might help us understand the Trinity.
[00:04:50] And why he thought that is because there's always been some mystery about the Hebrew in this passage.
[00:05:00] And that's because some of the pronouns slip back and forth between the singular and the plural. And you notice it in our English translation, if you're really paying attention. We just say some of the time, the three men which are usually depicted as angels, they speak in this. One of them speaks in the singular. And then two other times, they speak in the plural. And they said, which one of you is Sarah? You're like as if three men are all speaking in unison. And which one of you is Sarah? You know, and so there's that kind of play between the singular and the plural. And Rublev was like, I know something else that plays on the singular and the plural.
[00:05:36] And the other kind of magical piece of it is that swirl of eye contact between the three angels.
[00:05:44] The eye contact makes a complete and perfect circle, as the persons of the Trinity do in relationship with one another. The persons of the Trinity are something that are three distinct persons that are in some mysterious way, so united that they behave as one. And so in this icon, you get this picture of three distinct persons that between the swirl of their eye contact, between this flow of their good dining room conversation, almost behave as if they were one.
[00:06:19] And in that. In that swirl of that eye contact, you get a picture of the triune God that is complete in and of itself. It makes a complete circle in and of itself.
[00:06:32] But this is the last trick of the icon because it's kind of formatted like this triangle, like this.
[00:06:38] Anyways, since this is the head of the triangle and it goes that way, it invites whoever is looking at the icon to be somebody who is sitting at the table with the other three.
[00:06:53] Icons are written. You know why icons always look weird like that?
[00:06:56] They're written in what we call inverse perspective. So like in most Western art, you're taught to paint with a vanishing line, with a horizon line. So things in the back are small. Things that are farther away are smaller than the things that are closer to you. In Eastern Orthodox iconography, you do the opposite. The vanishing line is actually out in front of the icon.
[00:07:18] It is with the viewer. And so icons are written so that they are actually looking at you. Does that make sense? That's why the proportions always look funny. It's not because they're bad at art.
[00:07:29] It's on purpose.
[00:07:31] And so there's this wonderful tension in this. In this dining scene between there is, on the one hand, God is perfectly sufficient in God's self amongst those three persons of the Trinity. That circle of eye contact is not interrupted. And at the same time, in some mysterious way, that eye contact is broken open to include you. You get to be. You get to sit at the table with the three persons of the dead Trinity.
[00:08:02] Rublev saw that there were mysterious things that this picture that the Trinity had in common with this story from Genesis 18, had a good flow of conversation, had good food, bread, and wine on the table.
[00:08:17] It was open to the stranger.
[00:08:20] That's something that was different about Genesis 18 than our typical dinner parties. They welcomed the stranger, they washed their feet, they sacrificed the good and tender calf. This element of sacrifice open to the stranger.
[00:08:41] And so that's then the fourth meal, which is this meal that we're sharing together right now, this meal that we call the Eucharist.
[00:08:50] This meal has the same kind of tension, that same kind of double pressure that that icon has.
[00:08:58] On the one hand, God, as we know, is completely sufficient within God's self. God doesn't need anything other than God, just like those mountains don't need anything other than those mountains. You know, if we were looking at those mountains outside of this room, you look up at them and you're like, those are incredible and also a little bit terrifying.
[00:09:23] And we feel really small and insignificant in the face of them.
[00:09:29] But then when you and I look at those mountains inside of this room, framed by that window, we, in some mysterious way, like looking at that icon, feel invited to participate. You see what I'm saying?
[00:09:45] That's the miracle of the architecture of this space, which is it's saying to you, by sitting in this room, looking at those mountains framed in that way, that the same God that made those magnificent and slightly terrifying things is the same God that meets us in this meal at this altar right here.
[00:10:06] God doesn't need us. Those mountains don't need us.
[00:10:10] But God chose to open a seat at God's table for us, the strangers.
[00:10:19] We are strangers to God, and yet God washes our feet. God makes sacrifice to make this meal possible.
[00:10:28] God opens his dining room to weirdos like you and me.
[00:10:37] That's the fourth meal.
[00:10:39] The last meal is the first meal. Again, those meals back in your own home.
[00:10:44] Which is just to say, given this journey that we've been on, there is an invitation for us to think about what our ideal dinner parties might look like in a slightly different way.
[00:10:55] What would it look like for us to shape the meals in our own home to be a little bit more like the meals that Abraham shared with the three strange angels?
[00:11:05] What would it look like for us to make the meals that we share at our home look a little bit more like Rublev's hospitable trinity?
[00:11:15] What would it look like for the meals that we share at our table to look a little bit more like this meal that we share together?
[00:11:28] Five meals. Got it?
[00:11:30] All right. Amen.
