Sermon Notes — September 28, 2025
Isaiah 25:6-9
A Feast for All People
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
September 28, 2025
I love teaching Confirmation. The irony of my love for Confirmation is that I was never confirmed in the United Methodist Church, or any church for that matter, because I didn’t grow up in a denomination that had confirmation. In fact, my first real exposure to Confirmation wasn’t until 2010 – which was the same year that I taught my first Confirmation class.
My favorite part about Confirmation is teaching about the sacraments – about Baptism and Holy Communion, because the sacraments are – by definition – signs of God’s grace. Maybe we can’t understand exactly how baptism initiates us into the church and how it washes away our sin, but water becomes a sign that God’s grace surrounds us.
The same is true of Holy Communion. We can’t fully comprehend how the bread and the juice become for us the body and blood of Christ, but every meal that we share with others becomes a sign of Christ’s love for us. In some sense the sacraments will always remain a mystery, but we have these signs – outward and visible signs – water and bread and wine – signs of God’s grace everywhere if we’re paying attention.
Which has been most of the point of this sermon series. If we are paying attention, every meal – every table – becomes a sign of God’s grace. Over these past seven weeks we have reflected on who gets invited to the table, how Christ reveals himself at the table, and why we need the food that only God can provide. Which brings us to our final scene in this series where we reflect on the what – What does the perfect table look like – and when – when does that invitation come to us?
Will you pray with me and for me?
Both of our scriptures for today ask us to use our imagination in big ways, and so I’m going to tell you how these scriptures engage my imagination. They may conjure up completely different images for you, and that’s totally fine. But in my mind, when I read these scriptures, I imagine a banquet table. It’s a dark cherry red – probably because most of the tables where I’ve shared meals with my family were all cherry – so it’s dark cherry red and it’s oval – and you can’t see one end from the other. That’s because it’s cosmic – it literally fills up the whole cosmos. And everyone is around the table. Everyone. Everyone who ever was and who is and who is to come. And the table is full of everyone’s favorite food.
So this is what I liked to ask my Confirmands. Let’s say that at the heavenly feast – the cosmic banquet – the meal that we’re going to share for the rest of time – let’s say you get to order your very favorite food and you get to keep eating it forever – let’s pretend like you’d never get sick of it. Every bite tastes as good as the first – what would you order?
I would eat barbecue nachos. I would eat barbecue nachos forever and ever until the end of time. Now, I want you to find someone close to you and you tell each other what you would order at the heavenly feast. What would keep showing up on your plate forever and ever?
(pause)
Am I certain that the heavenly feast – the cosmic banquet – is going to look exactly like what I picture in my head? Of course not. It’s going to be even bigger and even more awesome. But I believe that of all the words in scripture about what is going to happen at the end of all things – of all the words – the words describing a heavenly banquet are by far the most compelling.
Let’s put those words in context.
The first picture that we have of this heavenly banquet is in Isaiah. Isaiah was a prophet to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, which was defeated by the Babylonians in 587BC.
But for eighteen months before the Babylonians invaded and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, they laid siege to it. They built a wall around the outside of it – in fact, Jerusalem was already surrounded by a wall, but the Babylonians built another wall around the first wall to ensure that no one could get into the city or leave the city. And that resulted in famine within the city because people who grew food on the land outside of the city couldn’t get into the city to feed the folks who were stuck there. For a year and a half.
So when we get to today’s text we’re not sure whether Jerusalem had already been destroyed or whether it was just clear to Isaiah that it wouldn’t be long before Jerusalem would be destroyed. All we know is that the people of Jerusalem either were experiencing or had recently experienced punishing hunger and paralyzing fear. And the people of Jerusalem need a word of hope from the Lord.
And that’s exactly what Isaiah brings.
Isaiah helps them imagine a future that seems utterly impossible in the moment. A future in which Jerusalem – which has either been destroyed or is about to be destroyed – Jerusalem will one day be the location of a cosmic banquet – a feast for all people. And it won’t just be the people who worship God now who will be invited. Everyone will have a seat at the banquet table. And the food that God will serve at that banquet table will be fatty and rich – just decadent. Juicy meat and fine wine like they have never eaten before.
This feast is a celebration – celebating that God has beaten death. God has defeated death. The image that Isaiah uses is the image of God swallowing death. In the ancient near east the god of death was often depicted as a gruesome creature whose mouth stretched from heaven to earth so that he could swallow his enemies. But Isaiah tells us that the swallower has been swallowed.
he will swallow up death forever. (Isaiah 25:8)
God has defeated death once and for all. And so we celebrate. God wipes the tears of sorrow from every eye and so we celebrate. And God destroys fear and shame and sadness and grief and so we celebrate.
In the book of Revelation the banquet is a wedding feast – the marriage supper of the lamb. John, the author of Revelation, asks us to imagine that at the end of all things – when death has been defeated and all is as it should be – Jesus will join his bride – the church – forever and ever. We tend not to talk much about this imagery from Revelation – the stuff about plagues and horsemen and beasts is much more interesting. But this imagery of the church as the bride of Christ makes much more sense if we read this passage in concert with a text that comes later on in Revelation. In Revelation 21 John says
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them and be their God;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.
It may or may not have been on your radar last week, but apparently a pastor from South Africa made the bold prediction that the “rapture” – the second coming of Christ – was supposed to happen either on September 23 or 24. And here we are…so I don’t know if that says something about him or about us. Anyway, rapture theology is a fairly recent theological development – it only showed up in the mid-19th century – and it claims that when Jesus returns to earth all of Jesus’ disciples who have died and all of the disciples of Jesus who are still living will be raised into the air with Jesus who will transport them all to heaven.
Now, there is some biblical support for this idea, but a far more common depiction of the end of all things is not that disciples of Jesus are whisked away somewhere else, but that Jesus remakes earth and comes to us to be with us. Jesus comes to dwell with the church on earth as a groom dwells with his bride. And we celebrate that second coming with a banquet – in the Communion liturgy we call it the heavenly banquet.
Both of these banquets – in Isaiah and in Revelation – celebrate the defeat of death and sadness and sorrow and mourning. Death is swallowed up forever and we celebrate with a feast around a cosmic banquet table where there is more than enough for everyone and all people are invited.
I grew up in a church and with a theology that focused far more on all the things that could go wrong than all the things that could go right. And most of those things that went wrong were something that I could have prevented had I been a better, more faithful, more studious, more focused disciple of Jesus. And there was nothing more frightening within that theology than the terror of the end times. At the end of all things every person who ever lived would stand in front of God and all of creation, and God would list all the things that we had ever done wrong. All of our sins would be exposed to the whole world. I have no idea why, but I always wondered what Abraham Lincoln would think of all the terrible things I had done in my ten short years of life.
At the same time, we were also supposed to be winning other people to Jesus, which is hard when the most compelling message you have to offer is “come follow Jesus or spend forever in eternal torment.” Also, regardless of whether you follow Jesus or not, God is going to expose your sins to the whole world. None of that says “heavenly banquet” to me. And it certainly doesn’t fit with God’s promise to take away our shame and disgrace and grief and mourning.
I’m not saying that the Christian life is simple and free of heartache – in fact, I believe that judgment is one of the most compassionate things that God offers to disciples of Jesus – but we’ll talk about that another day – And I know that following Jesus costs something, absolutely – but at the end of all things is not more heartache and shame but celebration – a cosmic celebration – a heavenly banquet where all people everywhere proclaim the words of Isaiah:
“See, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
All peoples, Isaiah says. All peoples.
But they can’t come to the banquet if they don’t know they’ve been invited. And they won’t know they’ve been invited unless we ask them to join us at the table. At the table of the Lord. At the tables in our homes. At the table of the heavenly banquet.
And so as we end this sermon series and prepare to feed our hungry neighbors, I invite you to take these questions into your heart, to talk about them at your own tables, and to bring them to your times of prayer.
What message does your table – what does our table at Bethlehem United Methodist Church – communicate about the Kingdom of God?
Who is missing from our table? Who is God calling us to invite? And what message of good news do we have to share?
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.