Sunday 11 • 25 • 18

The reading comes from Leviticus 23, parts between 4 and 44. These are the appointed feasts of the Lord, the holy convocations which you shall proclaim at the time appointed for them. And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the people of Israel saying, on the fifteenth day of this seventh month and for seven days is the feast of booths to the Lord. On the first day shall be a holy convocation. You shall not do any ordinary work. For seven days, you shall present food offerings to the Lord. On the eighth day, you shall hold a holy convocation and present a food offering to the Lord. It is a solemn assembly. You shall not do any ordinary work. These are the appointed feasts of the Lord which you shall proclaim as times of holy convocation. For presenting to the Lord food offerings, burnt offerings, and grain offerings. Sacrifices and drink offerings each on its proper day. Besides the Lord's Sabbaths and besides your gifts and besides all your vow offerings and besides all your freewill offerings which you give to the Lord. On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you've gathered in the produce of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of the Lord seven days. On the first day shall be a solemn rest. On the eighth day shall be a solemn rest. You shall take on the first day the fruit of splendid trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and shall rejoice before the Lord, your God seven days. You shall celebrate it as a feast of the Lord for seven days in the year. It is a statute forever throughout your generations. You shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All native Israelites shall dwell in booths. That your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Thus, Moses declared to the people of Israel the appointed feast of the Lord. — Leviticus 23:4-44

Father, we pray as we open Your word that You would open our hearts, that You would work in us by the power of Your Spirit, Lord, that You would come. And, Lord, as we leave this place today, we would be able to say, Surely we have been in the presence of the Lord and heard from Your voice. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

One of my favorite contemporary columnists for The New York Times is a man named David Brooks, who's written this brief article about a feast that he attended, a real celebration in New Orleans. And I'm just going to warn you, this may make you hungry. I hope you had breakfast this morning.

He says, I was in New Orleans last Saturday night dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food served in prodigious nineteenth century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters and foie gras, various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty: fish, then crab, then steak. Then dessert floated onto the table—a meringue pie about the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called Devil's Brew. A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some rolling mixture of brandish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in, and then the whole concoction set aflame. The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted a long dripping stream of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, slowly descending cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating Java. And then when he had swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question, "Is that decaf?"

I love that story because Brooks is sort of telling on himself, and he's contrasting this lavish feast with his own ability to sort of enter into it well. And I think that's just like us.

Now, as we're picking up this series of passages, we read just part of a larger section from chapter 23, which outlines all the feast days of Israel. It may seem ridiculous for us to spend any time on this for two reasons. One is that we don't observe these anymore. We don't, as a community, observe any of the Feast of Booths or Weeks or Harvest Festivals or New Moon. But the second reason is that we just celebrated Thanksgiving. And what do American bellies that are quite full need any instruction? Do we need any instruction on feasting?

And yet, I would tell you that I think while we know a lot about eating too much, I'm not sure we honestly know that much about feasting. Feasting is about way more than food—way more than food.

One of our challenges, and this is not just as a culture but as a denomination, is that we are very thinky people.

No one has ever said, "Presbyterians, you guys are just too joyful and too celebratory. You get out of hand." So like Brooks and his decaf comment, where he clearly had a disconnect between that celebration and his ability to enter into it. I think that there's something about us that actually really needs instruction from God's Word about feasting.

So today, here's what we're going to look at: four points. But listen, you've got nowhere to go. You're back from Thanksgiving. So four points—I'm going to keep it brief. Don't worry. So here they are: a God who likes to party, a party that's all about God, fasting and feasting, and sharing the feast.

A God Who Likes to Party

Let's sort of set the scene. Remember, we've been going through Leviticus since August, and this book didn't come primarily to us. It first came to a group of Israelite ex-slaves. They had been in bondage in Egypt for four hundred years. Would you just pause and think about that for a second? That's longer than our nation has existed by a long shot. Four hundred years is so many generations that their families could not remember a time that they celebrated. They can't remember a time generationally back, even in the folklore of the family, like we had this birthday party, we had a day off, we had a celebration. Four hundred years of slavery.

Now, as we talked about last week in talking about the Sabbath, another mandated break that God gave, the Israelite people were not given permission to celebrate. Nobody got a day off for their birthday. Nobody got holidays in Egypt. You worked. That's what you did every day. And there were taskmasters that Pharaoh put over the Hebrew people to make sure that they never stopped working, that they worked every day, all day, without break, without celebration, without opportunity for anything special.

So why does that matter? Because Pharaoh celebrations are for Pharaoh. Feasting is for Pharaoh. And Pharaoh can feast with his court. He can celebrate because you work. He is able to celebrate, but you are never allowed to. And this is what's fascinating and shocking as we read this: God mandates celebration for His people.

The first people who heard this—we talked about last week—God commands them every week, "I want you to take a day off and rest." Shocking news for people after four hundred years of slavery. And then you add this mandated celebration. Mandated celebration.

Let me just give you a couple of bullet points on this. First, it's for everyone. This is not just for the rich or the entitled or the privileged. This is for every person. The richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor were commanded to celebrate.

Second, it's commanded. It's not optional. God says, "You will party." Right? If you look at this passage, the part that I had Peter read—verses 33 and 41—three times. What is the verb that's in that passage? What are you to do? Verses 39 and 41, what is the verb there?

Celebrate. Rejoice. — Leviticus 23:39, 41

God commands them to do that.

And finally, it's disruptive. Work is not permitted on many of these holidays. In fact, if you total them up on a conservative estimate, thirteen days of work off are required to celebrate all of these festivals. Thirteen days off. That's a conservative estimate. There are a lot of people in this country who don't get thirteen days off a year. And they're required, in addition to Sabbaths, to take time off for a party, for a celebration.

Now the priests—I just want you to think about the role of the priest in all these celebrations because there are seven of these national celebrations that we read about in these passages. We're going to walk through those in just a moment. But the priests, what is part of their role? They are event coordinators. And this isn't just like, "Hey, turn on the gas grill, have a few friends over." This is a national party. Seven times a year, the priests—and particularly three of them that require a pilgrimage—the priests are called to facilitate a national celebration. This was a big deal.

You know what does this tell you? It tells you that many of our culture's common narratives about who God is are wrong. While a lot of people think of God as a dour policeman whose job is to make sure that no one is having a good time too much out there somewhere, this is a God who loves celebration, who commands rejoicing, and commands people to take off time to do so. I mean, this is a very different picture of God: a God who loves to crank up the grill and crank up the music and have the whole nation over. This is what God loves to do.

And if you don't believe me, I want you to think about what we see later in the New Testament in the ministry of Jesus.

Jesus starts His public ministry in John chapter two with a wedding at Cana, where He performs the first of His Messianic signs, His first miracle, and it has nothing to do with healing the sick or making anybody better. There's a wedding festival that's running out of wine. Jesus turns water into wine so the party can continue. This is his coming out event.

How many of his teachings are filled with stories about feasting, about great banquets, about when you have a party, you invite this kind of person over, about God who when he goes out and parties, he invites these people to his party, about being ready for the party. So many of His parables, Jesus' parables are about celebration.

When Jesus regularly ate and drank with sinners, this passage from Mark just jumped out at me:

As Jesus was walking along, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at his tax collector's booth. "Follow Me and be My disciple," Jesus said to him. So Matthew got up and followed Him. Later, Matthew invited Jesus and His disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with the many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners.

And Jesus said, I have come not to call those who think they are righteous, but those who know that they are sinners.

Jesus had a reputation of partying too much. He was called a glutton, somebody who liked wine too much, somebody who liked parties too much. No disciple would have invented a charge like that, that Jesus was a glutton and a drunkard. That says something. God is happier than people think He should be.

Jesus would be at the party handing out beers with a plate of wings, walking around handing out wings and Budweiser. That's the kind of crowd that Jesus was with. He was anointed for his burial at a dinner party with his closest friends. Jesus at the Last Supper takes the cup and he says, I'm not going to party again until we party together in the new heavens and the new earth. That's when we're really going to party.

Jesus says that there is a great party coming. Heaven, the new heavens and new earth, the end of all things is pictured for us as a great banquet that never ends, a celebration.

The Kingdom of God as Celebration

The kingdom of God, you could say, is a party and most people don't see the kingdom of God that way. A lot of people think of heaven as like ongoing waiting, like when you're a little kid and you're forced to wear uncomfortable clothes and sit in a room and fill out pictures that you don't want to color in. That's what many people's picture of heaven is. But we see anything but that. God says, and Jesus comes and says, My kingdom is everything that your heart longs for. The best celebrations with those that you love, all gathered together. This is what we long for.

But it's not just a God who likes to party. What we see here outlined in this passage is a party or a series of parties that are all about God. There's nothing particularly Christian about indulging in too much food or gluttony, right? There's nothing particularly Christian about overcelebrating. Look what we see here: each of these seven festivals focused on a particular part of God's saving work, God's character and His provision for us.

I want to invite you to open up your bulletin. We printed all these out for you, even though we read only one of them, because I want you to get the overlay of the land. These series of seven festivals, seven feasts are congregated in really two months of the year, the first and the seventh month. Look at these with me.

First, verses four and five: Passover. Passover commemorated the time when God delivered His people from death in Egypt. The Egyptian pharaoh was not favorably disposed to just releasing hundreds of thousands of Hebrew slaves, and God sent a whole shop of horrors—this series of plagues on Egypt. The last one culminates with the Passover, the death of the firstborn. God instructs His people: this night, kill a lamb and take its blood—yes, this is gross—take its blood and paint the doorframe of your house in blood. Then the angel of death, when it passes over Egypt, it will kill the firstborn of every family and livestock, from the pharaoh to the lowest slave, except for those who have the blood over the doorway. And so the people on the fourteenth day would come together and celebrate.

God delivers from death. Look at how God delivers us from death. The second of these, which is actually Passover, is really a part of the second one, and that's why it's not broken out here. Verses six through eight is the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. You can see that in verse six. The Feast of the Unleavened Bread began with Passover. Feast of Unleavened Bread started the next day, and it was a time where they celebrated God who not only freed them from death, but then freed them from slavery because God sends them out. God sends them out from Egypt, and God delivers them from slavery.

And so that night, as they prepared to leave Egypt, God said, "You better get ready. Have a staff in hand, tie your cloak around you, eat dinner standing up because you're going to be leaving this night." And so they made bread without leaven, without yeast for it to rise. And so the people would gather yearly and celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, where they would eat those crackers, unrisen bread. And remember, God is the one who delivers us from slavery.

The Five Remaining Festivals

Third festival, verses nine through 14, the festival of firstfruits. This was at the beginning of the harvest, and the people would celebrate where they would actually bring food to God and say, "God, You're the provider of all things for us, the beginning of the feast." And instead of waiting for the end of the harvest that comes later, at the very beginning of the harvest, the family would come together, and they would give to God a half gallon of wine, a lamb, and then they would bring 33 cups of flour. And there would be this offering made to God saying, "God, You are the one who takes care of us. You are the one who provides for us."

Fourth one, verse 15, the Festival of Weeks, also called Pentecost, forty-nine or fifty days after the Festival of First Fruits, depending on how you count it. This one's right here in verses 15 through 23. And the people would come together, and they would say, "God, You have provided the harvest." And this was a celebration—it's actually one of the pilgrimage celebrations where they go into Jerusalem and celebrate at the Tabernacle or the temple and say, "God, you have provided." This is akin to their Thanksgiving Day. Trusting God that He will continue to provide every year.

Number five, Feast of Trumpets. We talked about this a couple weeks ago. Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the New Year. The people would come together. They would sound these gigantic trumpets that would signal the brand new year, and they would begin the year not by what we do, where we create New Year's resolutions where we say, "How am I going to improve myself for this year?" They would begin like, "How can I get on God's page?" And it would be ten days of reflection and introspection and repentance, a great practice for us, honestly. You know, to begin the year and say, "I want this year to be about what God wants in my life."

Feast of Trumpets ended with Yom Kippur, which we also talked about a few weeks ago. Yom Kippur, the last day of the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement was a day when the high priest would take one goat—we talked about this—and put his hands on it, symbolically placing all the guilt of all the people on the goat, and they would send that goat out into the wilderness, drive the goat away from the people, and take all the sins of all the people outside the camp. Remember we talked about this? This is one loaded goat. You want this goat to go far away. You don't want the goat appearing in your yard the next morning, so they sent a Gentile with that goat to go out. Later traditions, they would push the goat off a cliff to make sure the goat never came back. No one wants the loaded goat back, right? And the other goat, they would take and they would slit its throat, and it would bleed, again, symbolizing God who covers over the shame of our sin, God who deals with our sin.

And finally, the last one, the Festival of Booths, verses 33 through 43, which we read, to celebrate God's provision in the wilderness. And this is where all of Israel, this is later generations, would come together. Remember, we lived in tents for a long time after God delivered us from Egypt. We were on one gigantic national camping trip for a long time. And so every year, can you imagine if we did this? All everybody would have a week-long camping trip out in your backyard, and you would live in a propped-up kind of lean-to booth that you created out of branches, and you would take work off the first and the last days of that. And remember, God is the one who meets us in hard places. God is the one who sustains us on pilgrimage. God is the one who provides for us even in the wandering, even in the wilderness.

Now, look, I know some of you are like, "This is all well and good, but why should we care about this?" That's a great question. When we don't celebrate these things today, it would be fun for all of us—maybe some of you would think this—to take a week-long citywide camping trip. You know, you would enjoy that, but like, this is not something we practice. Why should we know this? Because each of these festivals, each of these feasts show us something about the character of Jesus and call us to celebrate.

In the Passover, we see Jesus, who is the Lamb whose blood was shed to deliver you from death. When Jesus comes to be baptized in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, what does John the Baptist say about Jesus?

Look, there is the... you know it. Some of you know it. The Lamb of God. The Lamb of God who comes to take away the sin of the world.

In the Feast of Unleavened Bread, we see how Jesus delivers us from slavery to sin. In John chapter six, Jesus says:

Whoever sins is a slave to sin. But if the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.

In the Day of Atonement, we see Jesus take away the guilt and the shame of our sin. Like that goat was driven, Hebrews 13 tells us, driven outside the city, where He was crucified on a Roman cross, led there by a Gentile. In the Feast of Firstfruits, we see Jesus as the firstfruits of our resurrection. First Corinthians 15 tells us this—like the beginning of the harvest, the first ear of corn that comes ripe. Jesus' resurrection is the first of the resurrections for every one of us who believe in the Lord Jesus. When we die, we will be raised up. Jesus is the first of all those resurrections.

In the Feast of Weeks, the same day of Pentecost, in the book of Acts, we see Jesus drawing all people to Himself by the power of the Holy Spirit. His Gospel is proclaimed. And on that day, as the Spirit is sent, 3,000 people come to the Lord from all kinds of nations and people. And we see, again, Jesus is bringing in the harvest.

The Feast of Trumpets reminds us that at the last trumpet, the dead in Christ will rise and that Jesus will return to start not a new year, but a whole new epic. He'll come and bring final judgment and the new heavens and the new earth, and it will be a time when there is no more crying, no more sighing, no more sadness, no more sickness, no more death.

And finally, the Feast of Booths—we see Jesus who provides for us in the midst of our hardship, in the pain, in the pilgrimage of not being in the Promised Land yet. Do you see? In these feast days, we see, we read these things, we're like, "Yes, this is what my Savior does. This is what my Jesus does for me. He does all these things."

We sometimes summarize too briefly the work of Christ on our behalf. Like, "Oh, He died for sins." Yeah. And way more. You know, we could write books upon this stuff—the feast days. This is where they call to us: Are we not supposed to be people of celebration? Do we not have something to celebrate?

The True Meaning of Feasting

You know, feasting—therefore, we know a lot about overeating, but feasting is about enjoying the Lord together and enjoying Him and His gifts. That's what feasting really is. And you could see in all these feasts, it's about the food but it's not about the food. There's a celebration. There's a taking off work, but it's something much deeper than that. It's in the hearts of the worshipers who are like, "That's my God. That's what He's done for me."

I want you to think about two types of meals that I think you've probably had. You know, think about what may have been one of the best meals of your life in a restaurant, around a table, where everything is great, and yet there's just something within the group that's kind of off. Right? Some of you, this was Thanksgiving for you. You're like, "My family comes together, we have the best food, and yet the relationships are broken. There's this sense of like what could be but it's not." Do I relate to that? Have you had those kind of meals where you're like, "Everything's great, but..."

And then there are the other kind. The other kind where you're eating together with other people, and maybe it's even just mediocre food. You're having a very normal, even thrown together meal, and yet it's with some people that you dearly love and who dearly love you, and you're like, "That was a taste of heaven." And it's not because the food is amazing. It's because you experienced something in that meal that's like, "Yeah, this is what it's supposed to be like," even if it's Taco Bell.

Have you all had those both of those, or some form of those where you're like, "This, but not this, but that"? Right? This is what's pictured for us. This is what feasting is. Enjoying Jesus together, celebrating, enjoying His gifts.

Now, one thing that's fascinating about studying this is that there is rightfully a time for feasting, and yet also a time for fasting. And I want to highlight this because if you notice, yes, there are these seven feasts that are laid out for the people to practice, and yet not all the year was feasting, right? There were days when you didn't feast. And that particularly needs to be said in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2018. Because we live in one of the most overfed and entitled places in the world, where right now you can have a feast every day.

I remember my grandparents' generation, the greatest generation, born in the Depression era, fought World War II, hearing how their family never went out to eat. Not once. Not like, "Oh, where are we going this week?" But like, not ever. But not us. We're in a celebratory feasting culture where it's like, "Oh, it's 5 o'clock somewhere, right?" Our children, a lot of them are growing up with desserts for every night. Treats are not treats because they're all the time. That's the culture we're in, where feasting seems to be all the time, and you could pick every night of the week one place you want to go feast at. And when every meal is indulgence, there's something about true feasting that's actually lost.

The Pattern of Fasting and Feasting

See, in the Old Testament, God structured the seasons. These feasts are focused around the first and the seventh month primarily. And that meant that there were times for feasting, but there were also times for fasting. There were times for giving yourself to longing for the feast. If there's a longing, it creates something special about the feast. And God tells us, even in the New Testament, there are right places for us for fasting, for discerning God's will, for growing in yourself a hunger for God in your life. I'm going to go without, so I learn to hunger more for Him.

Do you know that traditionally, you didn't have Christmas parties during most of December? Traditionally, the church throughout the years that celebrated the church calendar, Advent was a time for fasting, not feasting. Christmas and those weeks afterward, that's why we sing the twelve days of Christmas. Those are the days when you feast. After Christmas, Advent was a time of looking forward and longing and saying, "You know what? Just like the Israelite people were longing for Jesus to come, I'm longing for Jesus to come back." It was a time of building an appetite, not overindulging in it.

Yeah, Lent, the same thing. It was a time up before Easter. Easter was the big feast time, but Lent was a time for reflection and repentance. For saying, "I'm going to take some time to focus on the Lord and get my heart right with Him, so that when Easter comes, it is a celebration." Lots of ham, right? That's what's pictured. But when we are people who are overfed, when feasting is every day, the meaning of feasting is actually gone.

Fast days reminded the people, there is a not yet. There's a not yet to the Kingdom of God. Like, this isn't all there is. Jesus promises to come back. He promises to fulfill all the promises with regard to making everything right. And so fasting prepares you for that. Fasting makes us hungry for the ultimate feast. Not all the time should be feasting in celebration.

I know that some of you are inwardly—this is where you are this morning. You're like, "Yeah. I look around, and the world is so broken. How can you talk about feasting? The world I look around, and there's poverty, there's lots of people who don't know Jesus, and there are unreached people groups, and there's injustice, and the list goes on. The burdens. How can you be talking about feasting in the time of this burden?"

And I think there's something right about that. Let me just affirm that. There is a right place for us for lamenting and fasting and saying, "Lord, what would you do?" But that doesn't eclipse this: that the church of Jesus Christ, we are empty tomb people, aren't we? Aren't we the gates of hell will not stand against the church of the Lord Jesus Christ people? Aren't we a Jesus is coming back people?

See, when there's a right place of fasting and feasting in this, there's a sense of longing. There's a sense of saying, "Hey, without there being justice, there can't be a party. Without there being the spread of the Gospel, there can't be an ultimate party. Without meeting the needs of the poor, there can't be a party for everybody." And yet we know that there is a party that's coming. And so, look, we hold both of those things together. Fasting and feasting, both are right. They proclaim different things.

If there's anything that Christianity is about, it is clear-eyed confidence that Jesus is going to return and set all things right. So we are a fasting people, and we're a feasting people.

There's a picture that captures this best from C. S. Lewis's Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It's a children's fantasy book about a kingdom of talking animals where a witch shows up and makes it always wintertime and never Christmas. She's got all of the realm of Narnia under her spell. Everything is frozen, and there's no joy. There's no celebration.

As the book progresses, you hear whispers that the true king is coming back to make everything right. And as he begins to make his way back, the power of the white witch over the creation, over the land of Narnia begins to fade. The wintertime begins to thaw, and it becomes Christmastime.

The white witch is driving her sleigh with her reindeer through the woods, and she comes upon this little party of animals, and they're celebrating. And this is an Englishman, so he says there are decorations of holly and something like plum pudding, and they're having this little celebration. The witch is incensed at this because it's a sign that her power is weakening. She asks them to deny the good news, which they refused. And then, of course, it's a kid's book—she turns them into stone. Why? Because the merry feast to the evil witch was a declaration of war.

And that is so for us. The feast is a declaration of war against the status quo. When we come together and celebrate as God's people, we are saying, "This is not the way it's going to be."

I was at a party this fall, and one of my friends pulls out this document. He's like, "We're going to read this liturgy. It's from this website called Every Moment Holy, and it's a liturgy about feasting." And this is what it said. We said these words:

To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for feasting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war. In celebrating this feast, we declare that evil and death and suffering and loss and sorrow and tears will not have the final word.

Isn't that true? When God's people gather, we come together around Jesus and we enjoy his gifts—whether that's your grandmother pulling out the casserole, or we gather around the smoker with the big pork butt, we're all about to dig in. What we're doing is we're saying there is a God. This is not all there is. We celebrate that his kingdom is real. We have something worth celebrating, and we wait and we look and we taste and we remember.

Three Applications

A couple of applications for you this morning, and I hope you wear your steel-toed boots because I'm going to step on your toes.

First: Celebratory Worship

Can we just say this? This is hard for us as a church. The main job that I gave Danny Yancey when I asked him to come and be our director of music was this: Danny, I want you to find the joy button on the dashboard and push it real hard. And that's because, to be honest, we struggle to find expression for joy and celebration sometimes in our worship. We're sort of holding back as a community a lot of times. Like, am I supposed to sing real loud? Am I supposed to clap? If you clap, you clap like a golf clap. Can we raise our hand? No. We're so held back.

You could say this church has a lot of white people. You could say it's Presbyterian. But don't believe any of that because we live at ground zero of the ACC. We are ground zero for the ACC, and I've seen you people. On my first spring in Raleigh, I'm like, "ACC tournament weekend—what happened? Did everyone go away?" No. There's no. They're always partying because it's the ACC tournament. So I know you know how to do this. I know you know how to do crazy, and I know you know how to celebrate. I know you know how to rejoice.

Can we learn? Can our affect in worship begin to express the glory and the greatness of our God? Can our emotional response to Jesus maybe just maybe be a bit more on par with the greatness of our salvation and the surety of what He's going to do? Can we try this? That's not Danny's job. That's our job. Can we take a step?

Second: Celebrations with Friends

In his book Bowling Alone, which is over twenty years old now, Robert Putnam chronicles how celebration and relationship are circling the drain in our culture. This is some of his stats.

The title of the book Bowling Alone comes from Putnam's observation that bowling leagues—people getting together to do something like bowling—are going down. Here are his stats:

The number of people playing cards together is down 25%. The number of bars, nightclubs, and taverns where people used to congregate is down 40%. Full service restaurants where people walk in and sit down together is down 25%, while fast food restaurants are up 100% so people can eat alone in their cars. Having a social evening with neighbors is down 33%. Having friends over to your home is down 45%.

Inviting people over to your house is countercultural. It is super revolutionary to do that.

Here's one thing I know: Raleigh is not going to be changed by my sermons. It's not. Raleigh won't be changed because I preach well or because our children's classes are awesome. What's going to change Raleigh is your hospitality, your parties, your including people, your inviting people in. For most of us, the Gospel came to us in a relational fashion—through someone saying, "Hey, I want you to know. Come on, come over. Be part of my family life." That's how the Gospel came to most of us: open doors and open arms and open refrigerators and open wallets.

One thing we need to learn is that hospitality is expensive. Having parties and welcoming people costs you time and money. And yet it is so, so worth it. Some of you are here because of it.

Let's not be like Judas Iscariot, who saw money being wasted on Jesus and thought it could be given to the poor. What if our church was known for being a little too joyful? What if there were just a little too many parties for no reason, a little too much celebrating, because Jesus is that great? We love being together and celebrating Him. What could happen?

The Lord's Supper

Finally, the Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper is the new covenant fulfillment of these feasts, particularly Passover. It's a time where we gather every week around this table. Some of you didn't grow up with that and think, "We do this so much. I'm afraid it's going to get old." You know what? It doesn't get old if you do it right.

If you think of what we're doing here as observing the Lord's Supper like it's an event, then you missed it. If you think of it as just a little bit, that doesn't cut it. We celebrate the Lord's Supper. We savor it. It's hors d'oeuvres for the great banquet to come.

Jesus didn't give us bread and water for the Lord's Supper. It's not like, "Hey, let's get by on this." No. He gave us bread and wine—not bread and grape juice. In the Bible, wine is given to gladden the hearts of men. There is a celebratory aspect, not a just-get-by aspect. There is a hors d'oeuvres for the Kingdom of God aspect of what we celebrate every week.

People of God, why so somber? Why so restrained? Why hold back your praise and temper your thanks? Why don't you let loose? Why don't we celebrate what is worthy of all celebration more than we could articulate or imagine?

Because there is an empty tomb. There is a risen King. And there is a sure and certain future.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.