Have You Eaten Yet?: Hospitality, Solidarity, and the Great Banquet of Justice / David de Leon & Matt Croasmun

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

"Kumain ka na ba?”—Have you eaten yet? (Tagalog) This beautiful phrase of welcome and care and intimacy evokes and offers more than just the pleasure and nourishment of a meal. It calls out to the hunger, the thirst, and the need for love that we can greet in one another. David de Leon joins Matt Croasmun for a discussion of hospitality and solidarity and justice, applying the parable of the Great Banquet to cultures of inhospitality, and especially to the context of the increased targeting, discrimination, marginalization, and violence against the Asian American community over the past year.

Show Notes

• “I think it can be really easy to believe that joy and justice, or even our grief--that expressing that comes at the expense of other people, that there isn't enough space for all of our joy to be together”
• “Life together in the family of God, at the banquet of God is…a radical conviction that God has enough for us all”
• Luke 14, the parable of the great banquet
• "Kumain ka na ba?”—a greeting and an invitation - have you eaten yet?
• “‘Kumain ka na ba?’ Is the lavish invitation of Christ to a banquet that sustains our weary, divided, broken and lonely selves”
• “I miss hosting people”
• Jesus says, "Don't invite people to your parties who can pay you back. Invite the people who never get invitations. Then you'll have it good"
• “The racial justice uprisings of this past year remind us that this country still remains inhospitable to black and brown lives”
• The increase in violence towards Asian American and Asian American elders since the beginning of the Pandemic
• The legacy of inhospitality towards Asian people in America
• “It rears its head in our internalized hatred and the loss of memory and story, the separation of our families, and then the incomprehension of our heart languages”
• “The pressure to present yourself in ways that display your competence, your control, the need to check their whole self at the waiting room of your zoom calls, leaving pieces of yourself off the pages of the papers you write”
• Justice is not scarce
• There’s room for all of our joy at this banquet
• “Perhaps Jesus is inviting us to partake in the feast of rest, the feast of vulnerability and community, to entrust our imperfections and limitations to one another”
• “The food that tastes like home” – how expansive home can be
• “I think there's something about the deep vulnerability of inviting somebody into something that feels very ordinary for you, but it's very comfortable, and then having people enjoy that thing with you”
• Sharing the most unglamorous parts of ourselves
• Unphotogenic food
• How gendered racial violence can be
• “It just seemed like yet another moment where we're not woken up until there's loss of life”
• “Our shared life together should be our orienting hope and dream, as opposed to just the quite proper anger that we might experience in response to death?”
• “It can be really easy to believe that joy and justice, or even our grief – that expressing that comes at the expense of other people”
• A radical conviction that God has enough life for us all
• Are you going to come to the banquet? Are you going to turn away?

About David de Leon

David de Leon is a graduating Master of divinity candidate at Yale Divinity School, and is an incoming PhD student studying Systematic Theology at Fordham University. He’s a child of Pilipino immigrants and was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the last 12 years has worked in college campus ministry, leading Pilipino American focused ministries, and working to mobilize Asian Americans to pursue racial justice.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured David de Leon and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa & Matt Croasmun
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give