Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Sermon: "Gerunds of Faith: Christian Practices Worth Practicing: 6. Eating"

Here is the sermon I praught from this past Sunday.  At some time, I might dive into the things going through my mind while writing, but for now, I will just say it was a wonderful Sunday.  My parents have been in North Carolina visiting, and it has been great playing tourist with them, as well as to just sit at the table and share a meal together.  
Here is the church, there is the steeple...

Open the doors, and see all the people! (Well, ok, one person...)


As we continue our summer series, Gerunds of Faith: Christian Practices worth Practicing, most of the practices we have looked at have hit home in my own personal experience.  In hearing the sermons on thanking, welcoming, working, resting, and singing, I could think of practical ways to better nurture and develop these practices in my Christian life, for the sake of developing a deeper relationship with God.

And then comes eating. 

Thinking about eating as a Christian practice can make one anxious. This isn’t to say we can’t or don’t see, taste, and feel the sacred that comes in gathering around tables;
The sacred is there, whether the feast is an elaborately set table of bread and wine or a worn picnic table at a camp with numerous 2nd graders feasting on animal crackers and watermelon. We recognize there is something holy about coming together, blessings and breaking bread.

But thinking of eating as a Christian practice can fit into the gray of the world; eating isn’t something so special or so unique for just “us” Christians.  As author Sara Miles puts it, “food is what people have in common, and it is precisely common”1.
To break bread and share in communion is one thing, but what does eating as a Christian practice demand we practice?   How does our eating fit into the picture the world sees as Christendom?

 My mind is flooded in rapid fire succession of questions such as:
·        How do we “seriously” look at eating through the lens of a spiritual practice combined with our discipline, or lack there of regarding food.
·       
1 Miles, Sara.  Take this Bread.  New York: The Random House, 2007. p



 How does animal cruelty, eco-sustainability, vegetarianism, and food scarcity fit within the discussion of eating as a spiritual practice or does it even play a part?

·        Does engaging in this practice really mean we should say a grace before every meal?  Even the one consumed in the car in between sport practices and music lessons to the one where are all gathered around the table at home? 

·        How does scripture play a role within this Christian practice? Do we take the Old Testament food laws seriously? I’m not sure if I’m ready to say goodbye to bacon…
While these questions seem a bit silly to some, all are similar thoughts that come to the mind of many when asked to consider eating as a Christian practice.

What is it about eating that makes it seem different than the other practices we have looked at?  Eating is not some mysterious concept; it happens quite often within the Bible.  Is it the fact the eating is often something we do without thinking?  In the most animalistic nature, we feel we are hungry, and if we are so able, we respond: we eat.  In Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, Theologian Norman Wirzba reminds the reader that “eating is no idle or trifling activity…for any creature to live, countless seen and unseen others must die, …..  eating is the daily reminder of our own need and mortality”2  

This reminder of our own need to eat and our own mortality is illustrated in our reading from Deuteronomy this morning.  The chosen people of God are on the cusp of being done with the lifestyle of wandering; they are soon to be home.  The good and promised land flowing with milk and honey is in their near future.    This portion of the text gives them a commandment –to remember as they continue on their journey:
Don’t forget about the God who didn’t forget about you when you felt the real pains of hunger, the God who went above and beyond providing not just bread of the earth, לֶחֶם for you, but provided manna מָן – heavenly sustenance - for all of you, despite your whining and disobedience.  These people didn’t have to meet any criteria in order to receive these provisions.  God provided despite it all. 
2 Wirzba, Norman.  Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011

What God asks of them as they enter their new land, the good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where they may eat bread without scarcity, where they will lack nothing –

All God asks of them is to remember- remember how God provided – how their clothes didn’t fall of their backs, how they avoided swollen feet.   Keep God’s commandments, walk in God’s ways and fear the Lord.  God asks of the people that when they eat their fill, do it in remembrance of me.
Carla Pratt Keyes makes this connection with the Deuteronomy story3:
            “Those forty years were a time in their lives when the people could not secure food for themselves.  They couldn’t find it, couldn’t grow it, were in great need of it.  Then, in a snap, manna appeared all over the ground.  SNAP is the name of a Food Assistance Program in the US – but the Israelites did even less than Americans must do to qualify – less as in nothing. When they woke each day it was there – fields of manna.  God gave it freely; all the people had to do was harvest it…God asks them to remember: this food also will be a gift they do not earn.”

Keyes continues by quoting Wendell Berry from “The Gift of Good Land” saying:
            “The good land…is not given as a reward.  It is made clear that the people chosen for this gift do not deserve it, for they are a ‘stiff-necked people’ who have been wicked and faithless. To such a people such a gift can be given only as a moral predicament: having failed to deserve it beforehand, they must prove worthy of it afterwards; they must use it well, or they will not continue long in it.”

“They must use it well.”

If we, who are actively participating in God’s creation are, as Norman Wirzba says, to “affirm creation as a delectable gift, and as a divinely ordered membership of interdependent need and suffering and help’, aren’t we too called to “use it well”? Is this what shifts eating from the mundane and necessity into a spiritual practice that draws our soul closer to the life Christ would have us lead?
3“Eat” A paper presented to the 2013 gathering of The Moveable Feast. Carla Pratt Keyes 
4 Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land, “ Flourish Magazine, Fall 2009
http://flourishonline.org/2011/04/wendell-berry-gift-of-good-land/



We live in a food-saturated culture: the food industry spends billions of dollars vying for our decision on what we eat to be in their favor.  News reports regarding latest research on what’s good for you or what’s bad for you can be found on the daily; restaurants try to out-do, out-bargain, out-advertise the others in the hopes that our eating routine will include them.  What does it mean to practice eating in the hope that this practice would indeed  “help us to attend to the work of grace in our lives and our times….” (Marjorie Thompson)   – how do we “use it well”?

Does it mean as Christians and as the church we counteract the messages that surround food?  That we refuse to use food as a tool in implementing power over others?  Does it mean we look at food labels and see who and what we are supporting through our simple staple purchases?  Does it mean as Christians and as the church we don’t just remember those who are physically hungry, but those hungering for companionship, peace, healing, and bring them to our table?  That we remember in the words of Scottish poet, Robert Burns, “that some have meat and cannot eat, and some have none that want it”?

How are we to faithfully respond to the abundant gift that has been given to us, much like the Israelites, with no strings attached, found in God’s creation meant to sustain all people and how are we to use it well?

Author Sara Miles provides one example of how we are to use it well. 

A self-described “unlikely convert…raised by atheists…a blue state, secular intellectual; a lesbian; a left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism”(xii), Sara Miles shares her story of “an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion” through taking her first communion in her book, Take This Bread.  She remembers how “eating Jesus…led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.” 4

Before becoming involved as a human rights advocate and journalist in Central America, Miles worked as a cook in New York, where she “learned that the rituals of even the plainest or most cynically prepared dinner could carry unconscious messages of love and comfort… [she learned] how central food is to creating human community…what eating together around a table can do.” 5
4 Miles, xi.
5 Miles, 23.

This is the Christian practice of eating.  This is God providing manna for all God’s people to share together.

This is Jesus cooking breakfast for his disciples around a campfire. I have hundreds of stories and observations of what eating around the table looks like.  Family dinners of crowded tables full of laughter, storytelling, and possibly a touch of chaos. Eating with the other food service workers in the archaic Refectory at Columbia Theological Seminary before our shift begins and we serve our fellow peers and guests.

There are the Montreat lunches where invitations are extended and guests are welcomed to sit, rest, and fill up on good home cooked food, prepared with love.   There are the dinners where those who are without food are remembered by the act of putting pennies in a jar. 

It is not about what food is provided, because we come hungering for something more.
 
Miles’ memoir walks through her journey of what it meant to go from being a stranger at the Christian table to being one who was serving at the table.   Starting from scratch, she began to explore the scriptures and traditions of the church.
She says,
“poking around in the Bible, I found clues about my deepest questions. Salt, grain, wine, and water; figs, pigs, fishermen, and farmers.  There were psalms about hunger and thirst, about harvests and feasting.  There were stories about manna in the wilderness and prophets fed by birds…And then in the New Testament appeared the central, astonishing fact of Jesus, proclaiming that he himself was the bread of heaven.  “Eat my flesh and drink my blood,” he says.  [Miles continues] saying she thought how outrageous Jesus was to the church of his time: He didn’t wash before meals; he said the prayers incorrectly; he hung out with women, foreigners, the despised and unclean.  Over and over, he told people not to be afraid.  [Miles] liked all that, but mostly liked that he said he was the bread and told his friends to eat him.”
Miles “couldn’t stop thinking about another story: Jesus instructing his beloved, fallible disciple Peter exactly how to love him: “Feed My sheep.”

Jesus asked, “Do you love me?”
Peter fussed: “Of course I love you.”
“Feed my sheep.”
Peter fussed some more.
“Do you love me?” Jesus asked again.  “Then feed my sheep.”
Miles says, “It seemed pretty clear. If I wanted to see God, I could feed people.” 6

Just as Jesus commands Peter in our Gospel reading this morning, Miles took to heart the words: Feed my sheep.  Miles opened The Food Pantry out of the very sanctuary where she took her first communion, at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.  Now in its twelfth year, their mission is to increase access to food for hungry people, and empower them to help each other.  Miles comes to recognize through serving, feeding, and eating with the homeless, the junkies, the immigrants, the single mothers and fathers, the kids, the sick that there was the “physicality at the heart of the story of Jesus…listening and sautéing, talking and tasting, feeding friends and eating together: it was a stew of words and acts and food.”

When it comes to Christian practices, I imagine myself at times feeling like Peter; I will willingly say I love Jesus, but it might take me three times of hearing what Jesus asks of me to actually respond in these practices. Feed my sheep, remember me, go, do.  Eating is all these things.

Eating is saying grace before our meal; even if we are eating alone – remembering the hands that planted, picked, prepared, and put it before us.   Eating is not just a practice for the self, but one to be lived out in the community and world around us. Eating as a Christian practice is breaking bread, blessing it, and sharing it.  Eating is remembering the bread of life and cup of salvation at every invitation; not just on Sunday mornings, once a month.
6 Miles, 92-93.

 My friend from seminary is currently interning in Durbanville, outside of Cape Town, in South Africa.  We were catching up through email, and sharing what our internships have included.  In brainstorming and sharing this sermon’s topic, Bethany shared this insight on her internship:

Interestingly, being on my SM, I've learned to say grace before every meal (EVERY meal) and it's a remarkable experience.  The ways we interact with one another are so different when we've just had a communal prayer.  You can't be anything but loving when you have acknowledged the presence of God at your table... Many of us are fortunate to not worry (for the most part) where our next meal is coming from.  Let's take the time to really be grateful for it and to understand the weight of it.

We can incorporate saying grace more on a regular basis, even in public – we can remember with the gifts Gods provides for us, to “use it well” and  be conscious of our wants versus our needs.  We can celebrate our own local resources and think creatively on how to make eating local available in other communities.

 We can invite strangers to our tables. 

So I challenge you, as you leave this morning and go into the week, put your eating into practice. 

Remember the sacred – the holy – that comes not only from blessing and breaking bread but from sharing it.  Whether it happens today as you head to your favorite brunch or lunch spot or happens later in the week, welcome someone at your table.  As you shop for groceries, remember to “use it well”.  And as you sit down to eat, say grace.

Even in public.


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