| Food is Good - Covenant Presbyterian Church, Napa, California | ||
Food is Good from Anitra Kitts on Vimeo. |
February, 2009 | |
Food, family, and the Grace of God Matthew 2:1-15
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If you are paying close attention, you might notice that throughout all four Gospels, Jesus stays pretty close to the food. It is most obvious in Luke where it seems that Jesus is either on his way to a dinner party - at a dinner party - or on his way from a dinner party as Fr. Robert Karris points out1 Not to worry, The Gospel of John doesn’t get too far away from the dinner table either. The two Gospel readings that came from the book of John this morning bracket the larger story that John wants to tell us about Jesus - and John starts and ends with food. Wine. A party. A breakfast. Hunger and thirst that is answered not only metaphorically with Jesus’ saving and reconciling work but literally by Jesus with water that becomes wine and fresh roasted fish for breakfast when the nets were empty all night long. Perhaps because I am also native-born Oregonian, whenever I read this passage I always imagine the aroma of a filet of salmon over a charcoal fire in the weber on an early June twilight evening. Just a touch of olive oil to keep the fish from sticking to the grill. Some rice on the stove inside with fresh sweet butter ready to melt into the hot, white grains, a mozzarella, tomato and basil salad standing ready on the counter and a glass of the local Pinot Gris in my hand. Only for breakfast so there really isn’t any Pinot Gris, just the giddiness of knowing that the impossible has just become possible - that someone who was well and truly dead - not faking it, not asleep, not drugged, not in a coma but bona fide dead was now standing and talking and cooking up a fine mess of fish for breakfast. With fresh squeezed orange juice and hot buttered biscuits. It is not surprising that food and eating together runs through the Gospels as a metaphor of God’s intentional loving kindness toward us. Food is one of our basic creaturely needs. Good food tastes really really good and that alone can make us happy. Actually, food and eating is one of our deepest emotional centers. When we come to a table filled with friends, with family, we know that we are not alone, that we are safe, and that no matter how grim things look at the moment, there is still this community that will sustain us. A sociologist pointed out that eating together may be the first and most reliable definition of family. Say an early hunter manages to grab only a few rabbits one day. Who gets to stick their spoon in the stew pot that evening and who goes hungry is a very clear sign of who is “in the family” and who isn’t. The answer to who shares the food, however much there is, and who doesn’t more clearly marks the boundaries of a family than sexual relations or birth itself. Let’s take another look: Imagine its 6 p.m. on a Thursday night. How many doors can you name where you could walk in and sit down at the table without ringing the doorbell and without the police becoming involved? That list is your family. Sure, there may be any number of doors where if you called ahead you’d be welcomed. There may be a few more where if you showed up and waited politely on the doorstep, an extra plate would be set at the table with perhaps only a little grumbling from the cook. But the doors where you could walk in and start rummaging around in the refrigerator without causing problems are the doors that separate family from friends and friends from strangers. That is why eating with Jesus is so important. That’s one of the themes of our communion table. When we eat together, we are family. When we show up at Jesus’ table, we are family with Jesus. Not friends, not acquaintances but family. Real family. Got-your-back-family. I’ll-let-you-move-in-with-me-when-the-house-forecloses family. I’m-going-to-be-taking-care-of-you-when-you-can’t-take-care-of-yourself family. I’m-going-to-show-up-on-the-beach-at-the-crack-of-dawn-when-you’ve-been-out-fishing-all-night-and-have-nothing-but-net-to-show-for-it-and-I’ll-be-cooking-up-some-breakfast-for-you kind of family. Jesus liked eating. He liked a good dinner with friends but he hated the formal, power-parties designed for ambition. When Jesus shows up at these kinds of meals, he is there to make trouble, but we aren’t worrying about trouble this morning. Here on the eve of Lent, of mardi gras. of Fat Tuesday, shrove Tuesday, we’re much more interested in the Jesus who likes a good party. Jesus liked sharing food. He wanted people to eat, to not go hungry. Jesus wanted people to look out for each other, to be family with each other rather than worrying about hoarding or social climbing via the dinning room table. If you were hungry or what we call “food insecure” and hung out near Jesus - chances are very good you’d be eating sooner or later. Remember the story about when Jesus was trying to get away from the crowd by withdrawing into the wilderness but they followed him anyway? It’s getting toward the end of the day and there isn’t any food for miles around? Jesus takes up some bread and some fish and somehow thousands are fed. In one version of that story - Luke’s version - Jesus asks for everyone to sit down in groups of fifty. Just small enough that everyone could see each other, to be a community together. The meal on the hillside wasn’t a restaurant with two-tops and fourtops and the power table in the corner nor an all-you-can-eat buffet place but a community - a family where everyone saw each other’s face and learned each other’s name. In Jesus’ world, people eat together. In Jesus’ world, people without family become family and in Jesus’ world - hungry people got food. The Gospel witnesses are very clear about Jesus’ real - physical - material - human nature. Christians fought for a number of centuries over the nature of Christ - human and by definition imperfect, limited, and with all the realities of a human body or not-human and just “masquerading” - passing if you will - but always above all the icky parts. The compromise position turned out to be both - both of God and eternal, without boundaries, but also very much human who gets hungry and thirsty. Even so - a major theme within the early church, and one that still runs close to the surface even for us Presbyterians today - is the idea that being human is icky, to be despised and repressed and bourn as a burden till we can shake off this flesh and get on with paradise. Not true. This is how God made us and God has no fear of what God has made. The Gospels are very clear. Jesus liked eating. Jesus liked a good party. Food was not something to be feared or resisted or controlled. Jesus liked eating and Jesus really liked it when other people got something to eat too. I’ve always wondered how Mary, the mother of Jesus, knew that Jesus could fix the wine problem at the wedding. Maybe it was a lucky guess or maybe she and Joseph had already been enjoying the benefit of that particular skill. “Hey Jesus, we’re having fish for dinner tonight, can you whip us up some nice chardonnay? Nothing too oaky please.” One thing was clear - this was a party that was going to come to a rapid and dis-honorable end if something wasn’t done quickly. By the way - I want to take a quick side note on biblical wine. Civilized Romans mixed their wine with water. Water, by itself, wasn’t particularly safe to drink. In a world before sewage treatment plants, humans and their animals can… well...contaminate water with microbes and other nasty things. However, if you added wine to the water it was like treating the water with iodine. The bugs are killed and thirst is quenched without completely trashing the liver by the time one is 18 years old. Now it was still possible to go under the influence with a little dedication but perhaps the best way to understand the problem with lack of wine at the wedding isn’t so much about the lack of a pleasant little intoxicant but a lack of anything to drink at all. No pepsi, no iced tea, no sparkling water, no coffee, no nothing. You can see how this might bring a party to a whimpering halt.
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Jesus steps up, under protest, but steps up anyway and a great beverage is served. This is Jesus’ first act of ministry in the Gospel of John. This event is so important to the author of John, that this story ends with the following words: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” Was it that water became wine that was so compelling to his disciples or was it that simple human needs - in this case, thirst - was now seen and would be addressed? How often did people go thirsty in that Mediterranean countryside, a climate much like our own. We’re looking at a drought this year, I wonder what - and who - might go thirsty here this year?
The Gospel of John ends with food - in this case a nice hot breakfast of fish after a long and heartbreakingly fruitless night of fishing. Simon Peter and the boys don’t know what to do with themselves after the three incredible years of tromping around the countryside, after the death - and then the impossible resurrection of their friend, their leader. They go back to fishing because they can’t think of anything else to do but even that simple piece of work eludes them. It eludes them because they are about to be called into a life that none of them can imagine but first they need to let go of the old ways in order to commit wholeheartedly to the new. So Jesus comes to them at the break of dawn but Jesus doesn’t come empty handed. He knows that everyone is hungry and he tends to their physical needs before he makes the final, life changing, mind blowing claim on their future.
One does not come without the other. Courage and hope for the future comes with eating and drinking together. The early church remembered this lesson.
We know something about how the early church, the first few generations of Christians, worshiped, and lived, together. This is how they survived when otherwise they might of perished. These early Christians lived and ate as family. Found family, united in Christ. This is one of the truths, one of the things going on when bread is broken and wine is poured at our communion table - we are eating and drinking in a family meal with each other here in this room, with Christians every where around this world, with Christians who have come before us over the centuries and are yet to come to this table - and most of all with Jesus Christ. We’re family with Jesus, We’re family with God. Its a great, rolling feast.
Now you may be wondering why I am preaching on the spirituality of eating together on the last Sunday before Lent - the one season of our community life in Christ together where we are traditionally encouraged to be renounce food rather than celebrate with it.
Remember what I said at the beginning of this sermon? Food is a very emotionally complex issue. If it was just about the nutrition then we’d all be eating little vitamin bars or something. Instead we find issues of power, control, love, friendship, loss, comfort, self-loathing, fear, desire and loss. We worry about our social acceptability and eat to lose or keep off weight. Or feel so guilty that we fail to enjoy what we do eat. We eat out of anxiety or anger or sadness and find ourselves starting at the bottom of the ice cream container not knowing how we got there. We eat out of fear of becoming ill avoiding certain foods that might bring on heart attacks and focusing on other food that we hope will prevent cancers. We become anorexic for reasons of control when there are no other places we can have control or for other reasons we don’t yet really understand.
And sometimes we don’t eat because we want to be obedient to God. We want to make room for God. We want to be sure that we don’t become so tangled up in all these material things like where is the next meal coming from that we fail to notice Where God is acting or urging us to do or not do in our life. Sometimes we fast because we are so rich with food that we have to choose to not eat in order to remember that for too many of us - not eating really isn’t a choice but an economic and social failure.
There was a time when Christians were encouraged to engage in a hard fast for the forty days of Lent. To limit themselves - in a time before machines and all work was hard , manual labor, to one simple meal per day. Some soup and bread perhaps. It was meant to be a time of penitence, of trying to suffer now in order to make good with God for one’s sins and so as to be in a proper state to be deserving of Christ’s atoning sacrificial death on the Cross. Christians were told to fast so they would get into heaven, so they would stay on God’s “good side.”
The reformers, John Calvin, Martin Luther, and others, pushed back and told us that down that path lies madness. God’s love is already ours to claim which is a good thing because who can ever be sure that they did everything right and played by all the rules? Trying to be “good enough” for God can get any one of us into some not-very-healthy places filled with anxiety and fear.
Remember the movie Babette’s Feast? Came out in the late ’80’s - and is still available on DVD. The story is simple. A woman collapses at the door of a house in a small Danish town. The residents of the town are deeply religious people who have lived together in this town under self-chosen austerity and piety. They want to make room for God in the worst way and so deny themselves almost all earthly pleasures. They take in the woman who starts to cook within their simple meal limitations for them. At the end, however, she comes into a surprising windfall and uses it to make a meal that is the feast of all feasts. The villagers come to the table determined to not enjoy themselves but discover in spite of their best intentions that the food tastes good. And that there is nothing wrong with that.
In the middle of this meal, The General - an outsider who helps the faithful villagers see God at work at this table speaks up saying, “ We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble .... We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty”
In the meal eaten together at this table,the one that belongs to Jesus, we hear it again and again:
Grace, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular. Grace - community with God, with Christ - Grace takes us all in and sets us down to table and proclaims general amnesty. Grace unites us into Family. Got-your-back family, Come in and sit down family because the soup is on and the fish is ready family.
Grace, the goodness of God, can be experienced in the sweet savery firm first taste of salmon fresh off the weber and is available to anyone who lifts the fork. Grace can be found in the taste of a fresh made corn tortilla, in the first bite of the crane melon, in the first tomato of summer. Who earns these things? This is our generous God at play. Your refrigerator is holy ground filled with Grace for the taking. Be generous with each other and come to table together. These are uncertain times, danger and mis-fortune seems to be lurking everywhere. Reach out and feed each other. Remember the lessons of the early church that courage and hope comes from a meal shared.
And consider fasting from something during lent if that is where you think God is nudging you in order to address something in your life but don’t fast if you think you need to please God. You already please God. Fast from TV if you think its getting in the way of noticing where God is - or isn’t in your life or Fast from certain foods if you think it may be robbing you of energy to serve God but do none of these to please God. God is already pleased with us. God has already invited us to God’s table, to the wedding feast where there is always good wine and dancing and enough for all. Jesus is calling and the breakfast fish is fresh off the fire. Grab a plate, help yourself and Rejoice!
Glory be to God, alleluia and amen.