Epiphany
2 Food 3 BFC 2016
Daniel
1:3-17; Mark 5:35-43
January
17, 2016
Last
week I spoke of breaking my Oxfam fast, to give money to the hungry, by running
over to McDonald’s and getting a strawberry shake and fries. What
ingredients would you use for a strawberry shake? Here is a recipe I saw online that sounded
pretty good: ½ cup cream; ½ cup milk; 1
tbsp. vanilla; 1 tbsp. honey; 1 cup strawberries; crushed ice. That’s six ingredients if you count the
crushed ice. Six ingredients. And I would break my fast by running over to
McDonald’s to get one of their rich, thick strawberry shakes. Start counting the ingredients.
Here
are the ingredients for a McDonald’s Strawberry Triple Thick® Shake: Vanilla
reduced fat ice cream which includes milk, sugar, cream, nonfat milk solids,
corn syrup solids, mono- and diglycerides, guar gum, dextrose, sodium citrate,
artificial vanilla flavor, sodium phosphate, carrageenan, disodium phosphate,
cellulose gum, vitamin A palmitate. Strawberry syrup which includes sugar,
water, corn syrup, strawberries, high fructose corn syrup, natural (botanical
source) and artificial flavors, pectin, citric acid, xanthan gum, potassium
sorbate (preservative), caramel color, calcium chloride, red 40. (The
artificial flavoring contains the following chemicals): amyl acetate, amyl
butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl
isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac
essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate,
ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate,
ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphrenyl-
2-butanone (10% solution in alcohol), ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl
butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl
anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate,
methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential
oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum
ether, yundecalactone, vanilla and solvent.[1] Anybody count? How many ingredients was that?
There
is a sense that I somewhat knew this to be the case of a McDonald’s milk
shake. I thought there was a time when I
did not have to care so much whether I had the occasional strawberry shake, but
my diagnosis as a Type 2 Diabetic, was a wilderness experience for me. No longer could I eat from the pots and pans
of Egypt and be enslaved to things that were harmful to me. I had to become better, intentionally and
mindfully, or else my neuropathy pain would explode, my daily levels would be
out of whack, I would become easily exhausted by not monitoring my proteins, and
my eyes would give me all kinds of problems.
One of the most helpful things
anybody ever said to me was another diabetic stating, “You know, sugar is
basically rat poison for you.” Rat
poison in the rat race, all rats enslaved to a system that has us addicted,
often choosing to eat from the pots and pans of Egypt rather than the manna and
quail of freedom in the wilderness.
Mindful
and intentional eating was the identifying spiritual practice of Daniel as he
encounters the Babylonian Empire. It is
one of the places where we begin to see kosher strongly emerging as a spiritual
practice of the Jewish people. The
Jewish people were conquered, many of the best and the brightest minds carted
off into Exile from the promised land to the capital city of the conquerors,
Babylonia, to be advisors to the king. The
first thing that happens to them is they are renamed.
It
is usually the first act of a conqueror.
Conquerors rename everything in accordance with their culture and
gods: Denali becomes Mt. McKinley, Gichi-Gami
becomes Lake Superior, The Six Grandfathers becomes Mt. Rushmore.[2] When
Daniel and his fellow Jews arrive in the Babylonian court, they are
renamed. Conquerors especially like to
strip the other culture of its shrines, holy places, and divinity to institute
their own. The holy name of Daniel,
becomes Belthazaar, Hannahiah/Shadrach, Mishael/Meschach and
Azariah/Abednego. Every one of them is re-named after a
Babylonian god.
These
faithful Jews they are told by one of the Babylonian king’s servants that they
are to eat the choicest meats and finest wines of the king so that they would
have a good appearance when they appeared before the king. Daniel refuses to “pollute” himself and asks
the servant if he may keep his vegetarian or kosher practice. The servant pleads with Daniel. If the king comes and finds Daniel to be
gaunt, it will be his head that will roll.
Daniel says, “Give me a couple weeks, come back, and if I’m skinny and
slight, then I’ll go with the kings wine and rations.” So they agree. The servant allows the Jews to eat vegetables
and drink water and returns to find them looking positively peachy. Imagine, that you might look healthier
because you eat your vegetables. Kosher
is therefore defined as an unwillingness to eat the meat, the wine, the bread,
supplied by the emperor. It is John the
Baptist eating locusts and wild honey in the wilderness. It is Jesus turning people away from the
bread and circuses showered from above by Rome to share across the table the bread
and fish they have in their community.
Notice
too that in that first creation story from Genesis we read a couple weeks ago
God gives every kind of plant under the sun for humankind and the animals to
eat. Daniel, as a form of spiritual
practice, seems to be a vegetarian. When
Biblical literalists set up requirements for what gets you into heaven, I don’t
believe I have ever heard being a vegetarian as one of them. Sorry, remember those two steaks you had back
in 1979? Yep, you go to hell. It never works out that way.
No,
I am not arguing for entrance rules to get into heaven to test you for whether
you had the vegetarian stir-fry or the chicken cordon bleu. These are emphases, though, to which we
should pay attention. For it is Michael
Pollan who sums up his food rules, his kosher, in seven words by saying, “eat
food, not too much, mostly plants.”
By “food”
Pollan means real food, not creations of the food-industrial complex. Real food doesn’t
have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain
stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that
your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize.[3]
This is Michael Pollan telling
Michael Mulberry, “Step away from the McDonald’s strawberry shake, Mike.”
Now foodies are all over the board
as to whether a healthy diet should include meat. In ancient times, meat was a celebration
food, rarely eaten and often sacrificed in thanksgiving to idols. Giving thanks to idols for the meat made the
eating of meat problematic for the Jewish people. We will talk about that in later
sermons. What people who recognize that
we need a new diet are universally saying, however, is that we need to move
away from our historic processed food and meat consumption, particularly beef,
and eat a more plant-based diet. Our
spiritual practice, intentionality and mindfulness with food, should move us in
a different direction.
The 2011 food justice documentary Forks Over Knives went even further in
claiming “that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us
can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed
foods.” In a country where two out of
every three of us is overweight, diabetes is exploding, particularly among the
young, and about half of us are taking a
prescription drug, with the leading causes of death and degenerative diseases
directly related to our diet, we should be asking what is happening to us with
history’s and the world’s leading medical technology, the movie states that we
are sicker by than ever by nearly every measure.[4]
Dr. Michelle
McMacken, a board-certified internal medicine
physician and an assistant professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine,
wrote in an article this January, “7 Things That Happen When You Stop Eating
Meat.”
1. The first thing that will happen when you stop
eating meat is that you will reduce the inflammation in your body. Plant-based diets are naturally
anti-inflammatory. Eating meats, cheese,
and highly processed foods leads to chronic inflammation that is linked to
atherosclerosis, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases.
2. The
second thing that will happen when you stop eating meat is that your blood
pressure will plummet. Elevated blood
cholesterol is a key risk factor for heart disease and strokes, two of the
leading killers in the United States. Saturated fat—primarily found in meat,
poultry, cheese, and other animal products—is a major driver of our blood
cholesterol level.
3. The
third thing that will happen when you stop eating meat is that you will get a
healthier gut. Plant foods give us a
healthier intestinal system. And that
healthier intestinal system produces critical nutrients, helps our digestive
system, turns genes on and off, keeps our gut tissue healthy, and keeps us free
from cancer.
4. The fourth thing that will happen when you stop eating meat
is that you will change how your genes work.
Antioxidants and other nutrients we eat in whole plant foods can change gene expression to optimize how our cells repair
damaged DNA. Research has also shown that lifestyle changes, including a
plant-based diet, can decrease the expression of cancer genes in men with
low-risk prostate cancer. A plant-based
diet can help keep our DNA more stable.
5. The fifth thing that will happen when you stop eating meat is
that you’ll dramatically reduce your chance of getting Type 2 diabetes. (Now they tell me.) There are things in meat that have actually
been shown to damage pancreatic cells while whole grains (that’s right, carbs)
have even been shown to protect people from diabetes.
6. The sixth thing that will happen when you stop eating meat is
that we will get the right amount of protein.
The average American meat eater gets 1.5 times more than the optimal
protein intake. This does not make us
stronger or leaner but gets turned into waste for weight gain, heart disease,
diabetes, inflammation, and cancer.
7. The seventh thing that will happen when you stop eating meat
is that you’ll make a huge impact on the health of our planet and its
inhabitants. Animal
agriculture is extremely destructive to the planet. It is the single largest
contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and is a leading cause of
land and water use, deforestation, wildlife destruction, and species
extinction. About 2,000 gallons of water are needed to produce just one pound
of beef in the U.S. Our oceans are rapidly becoming depleted of fish; by some
estimates, oceans may be
fishless by 2048. These are some of the reasons, among many others, why
Anna Lappé believes that
food is the greatest protagonist for climate change.[5]
The
current food system, based on meat and dairy production, also contributes to world hunger—the majority of crops grown worldwide go toward
feeding livestock, not feeding people. Equally important, animals raised for food are sentient
beings who suffer, whether raised in industrial factory farms or in farms
labeled “humane.”
Eating a plant-based diet helps us lead a more compassionate life. After all, as
people of faith, being healthy is not just about the food we eat; it’s also
about our mindfulness and intentionality for our neighbor and our awareness of
how our choices affect the earth that God created in love, abundance, and
diversity.[6]
Again, in citing the work of Dr. McMacken, I am not trying to
suggest that we all stop eating meat.
Rather, I am trying to encourage us to return to a time when food was
understood as a gift of God and the spiritual practice of kosher connected us
to the goodness and intention of God.
This is the amazing, incredibly
wonderful thing we do by making food a more intentional and mindful spiritual
practice. We do what, renegade farmer,
agricultural ethicist, poet, and Christian theologian Wendell Berry says we need
to do. We solve for pattern. As we faithfully practice intentionality and mindfulness
with food, not only do we become healthier but we promote
health across the whole food system and help out God’s good earth.
Berry believes that
we too often, in this day and age, solve our problems mechanistically or with
overkill. We solve a problem over here
that creates a whole new set of problems over here. We seek to decrease our country’s dependence
on foreign oil by fracking, and, as a result, we set off earthquakes, destroy
water tables, and create more birth defects and cancer. Using pesticides and fertilizers to remove
pests and return nitrogen to the soil over the long haul creates cancers, pests
develop resistance, and the soil is depleted of microorganisms so that it needs
an even bigger nitrogen hit to be something more than desert. Or, we solve our problems, Berry observes, by
using bigger and more powerful tractors to combat soil compaction and create
even more soil compaction. So we use
even bigger and more powerful tractors to wage war on that soil compaction.
Solving for pattern
solves problems differently. Solving for
pattern understands that all things are a part of the whole. A good solution is good, Wendell Berry believes,
because it is in harmony with larger patterns; a good solution in solving for
pattern values both the health of the individual and the whole, unwilling
to compromise the health of one in favor of the health of the other.[7] It is how God in all goodness and love,
created earth and all that is in it, connected and interdependent. When we solve problems with the assumption
that all is connected and interdependent, small practices ripple out to large
systems and push to transform them.
So our kosher
practice, the way we eat, has relevance for the life and health and resiliency
and regeneration of a whole set of systems in the world. We solve for pattern when our kosher practice
is intentional and mindful of neighbor, those closest to God’s heart, the most
vulnerable and defenseless, and the earth.
Sometimes we think
our actions, our small practices like the eating of our everyday meal as so
small. But there is an old monastic
proverb that says you can tell how a person prays by how they sweep the
cloister.[8] We know something about someone’s spiritual
life by how they complete a routine act in their home or office. What do our food practices say about us? How do the everyday, mundane tasks of
gardening, shopping, and eating reflect upon our spiritual life?
In the book of
Daniel, the prophet reveals his faith through his simple, every day, mundane
food practices. They define him over and
against the empire of his time. Later on
in the book, Daniel’s Jewish colleagues, Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego are thrown
into the fiery furnace because they will not bow down to the Babylonian King
and the idol made of him to worship.
Their loyalty and source of power is found in a different place and not
on the Babylonian throne.
And, finally, Daniel
is thrown into the lion’s den for faithfully praying toward Jerusalem
throughout the day. His source of power
is not oriented toward the Babylonian throne, king, and gods. Rather, Daniel knows who created the universe
and through his small, simple acts, repeated and repeated, he reveals his
character.
As we think about
small, mundane, everyday practices around food, how shall we live them out in a
way that shows our intentionality and mindfulness, our spiritual life, our
faithfulness, our loyalty to a God who creates seed upon seed upon seed in love
for this good earth? May we, as a
community of faith, give strength to one another in solidarity. For we know that small simple acts, repeated
and repeated, and done in the context of community, bring about untold courage.
We are connected, one to another, the
Body of Christ. And simple acts,
repeated and repeated, done in the context of community, bring about untold
courage. Praise God. Amen.
[1] Holly Johnson, Just
Eating? Practicing Our Faith at the Table Middle School Version, p. 13, https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/hunger/pdf/justeating-ms.pdf quoting from
Charles Wilson and Eric Schlosser, Chew
on This: Everything You Don’t Want to
Know about Fast Food ( New York:
Houghton Mifflin,2007), p. 114.
[2] Lauren Barbato, “5 Whitewashed American Landmarks That, Like Mount McKinley,
Sorely Need A Name Change,” Bustle,
August 31, 2015. http://www.bustle.com/articles/107621-5-whitewashed-american-landmarks-that-like-mount-mckinley-sorely-need-a-name-change.
[4] http://www.forksoverknives.com/synopsis/
[5] Anna Lappé,
Diet for a Hot Planet: The
Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
[6] Dr. Michelle McMacken, “7 Things That Happen When
You Stop Eating Meat,” Forks Over Knives,
January 12, 2016. I have provided editorial and theological points in point seven.
[7] Wendell Berry, “Solving for Pattern,” The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (NorthPoint Press, 1981), pp. 2-3. See Berry’s article for many more criteria
for solving for pattern.
[8] Esther de Waal, The
Way of Simplicity: The Cistercian
Tradition (Cistercian Publications:
2010). http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/practices/practices/view-day/98/esther-de-waal-in-the-way-of-simplicity
No comments:
Post a Comment