Epiphany 3 Food
4 BFC 2016
I Corinthians
10:23-31; Luke 9:12-17
January 24, 2016
It was the Thanksgiving after my dad’s
first heart attack and the inevitable conflict was about to take place. My mom, out of her care and love for Al
Mulberry, was trying to change my dad’s diet so that he might continue to live
a long and full life, such that he might get to see not only his kids grow but
also eventually get to know his strong, intelligent, and creative grandchildren
like Jacob, Abraham, and Sophia. My
grandmother, out of her consistent care and love for Albert, had made all of
the comfort food known hither and yon among the Mt. Auburn Mulberrys: turkey, slathered in butter, sweet corn,
slathered in butter, and her incredibly thick, yummy noodles, you guessed it,
slathered in butter. This was a Texas
cage match waiting to happen, neither party considering the agency of Albert
Ervin Pike Mulberry himself, who might say to my mom, “Hon, it is only one day,
and this is the way that my mom cares for me,” or to my grandmother, “Mom, I
really need to watch my diet after this heart attack. I love your food. But I think I’ll take very small portions of
some of this good stuff.” Would that
happen? Could that happen? Nah.
Texas cage match.
Because how we deal with food, how
we discern its meaning in our lives, is very often tied to thoughts of love and
care . . . and how that love and care shall be distributed. Most of you know the issue has created the
most conflict for me on Sunday morning is, “Where are the donut holes? What have you done with them? And what squadron do we need to assemble to
go out and retrieve them?” My mom used
to refer to donuts as golden rings of death.
But I remember one of the first memories I have about our church was a
particular Youth Sunday when the Older Youth shared how they loved this church
because of . . . the donut holes. Food
carries messages of love and care and belonging. And so we necessarily have to discern how we
fill those messages of love and care and belonging with content. I may have disrupted some of that content
last week when I shared the ingredients of a McDonald’s strawberry shake. Some of you have mentioned to me that you
will never, ever be able to view a McDonald’s strawberry milk shake in the same
way.
As I have been putting before us
these last few weeks, I think Scripture can be helpful in discerning a food
ethic, food rules, spiritual practice around food.
Our gospel lesson for today is one
of many food stories found in the New Testament. When you hear stories like the feeding of the
5,000 in the gospels, what do you hear?
Do you hear a story about the miracles Jesus did? And if that’s what it is all about, how nice
for Jesus. Or maybe you hear, like I do,
those two ancient narratives at work:
one of scarcity and the need to hoard and claw and scratch and the other
narrative of abundance where scarcity disappears once we become aware of what
we do have and gather our ability and awareness to share? The disciples are like, “I’m not so sure
we’re going to have enough food, Jesus!”
And Jesus is like, “I think we can figure it out.” Jesus, in a time of food insecurity, acts out
of the narrative of abundance. The story
itself never indicates that a miracle has taken place. It does not have the markers of a miracle
story. So maybe this story, one of the
few stories told in all four of the gospels, is about an orientation, an
attitude to who is the giver of good gifts, how food creates social fabric and
community, and who is welcome to share in that food. Those are the very questions the Jewish
practice of kosher seeks to answer. Like
any good spiritual practice, the spiritual practice of kosher is always
evolving.
Kosher is rooted in basic assumptions
with God as the giver of all good things: God giving with an abundance and love
for diversity. God creates all plants as
food for humankind and all of the rest of creation. In the wilderness, kosher develops as a
practice when we recognize we will necessarily have to bring mindfulness and
intentionality to our food practice so that food insecurity does not lead to a
food desert. The wilderness is a fierce
landscape where we might have to be patient and attentive to learn how God’s
abundance is being made manifest. Finally,
last week, we had before us the story of Daniel, who defines himself as a Jew,
first and foremost, through his kosher practice of eating vegetables and drinking
water as an alternative to the offered meats and wine of Empire. In keeping with Daniel, John the Baptist and
Jesus do not eat of the bread showered on high by the Roman Empire but eat off the
grid from the abundance of God, eat from bread and fish shared not from above
but across the table.
In Paul’s
letters to the communities of Corinth, he addresses three issues which had come
to define the dynamic spiritual practice of the Jewish people—circumcision,
food, and sexuality. The question for the Jewish people was, “How
do we live faithfully, in the day to day, with the traditions, ethics, rules,
and practices we have been given—many of them given out of love for us, many of
them given out of love for our neighbor?”
That is a
deep and holy question, rooted in the spiritual practice of discernment. Too often Christian churches have failed to
see Jewish and Christian communities in the first century struggling to
practice discernment. Instead of doing
the hard work of discernment, many Christian communities have taken one side or
another of two extremes. One extreme
says that the spiritual practices should be brought straight across from the
first century and interpreted literally.
The other extreme says we should just throw the baby out with the bath
water and not take theses spiritual practices seriously at all—scrap them
altogether. Paul, a Jew, engages ethics,
rules, and spiritual practices that identify what it means to be a Jew in his
day to ask how God was acting and moving in his day.
I want to
invite us to the same journey of those first century Jewish and Christian
communities, to take on the holy practice of discernment to decide how the
ethics, rules, and practices should be understood and lived out in our day and
age. I believe if we do this, we will
sometimes end up in the same place as our faith ancestors were on some issues,
nuance the ethic or spiritual practice on other issues, and totally contradict
the ethic, rule, or spiritual practice on others—much like the apostle Paul
did.
Kosher practice identified a faithful
Jew. At its broadest, kosher was about
being clear who gave food for the life and well-being of the whole community
(not some idol or another god or a king claiming to be a god); kosher was about
the health and well-being of the entire community through how food was prepared
and eaten; kosher was about building the social fabric by being intentional
with whom you shared meals. Too often
what Christians have historically seen in kosher rules is an exclusionary
practice that forbids some people from coming to the table. The actual intent was to not allow conquering
nations to use meals as a way of building the social fabric for the worship and
practices of their own gods. Meals were so important to building culture
and faith that it mattered with whom you were dining.
Animal
sacrifice was done in such a way as to give thanks to God or, in other faith
practices, the gods for the food.
Slaughtering animals was to be done with much reverence, care, and
gratitude. Spiritual practice and ritual
was sometimes a worship experience that dictated how food should be prepared in
such a way as to make it safe for consumption.
Jesus engaged
and chafed at some kosher practices that became less and less about the health
of the individual and community and building the social fabric and more about
shaming the poor. Choices about dinner
companions, washing hands, and eating meats on a regular basis were often
luxuries reserved for the very wealthy.
What if you do not have the money to keep the long-held practice? Does that make you an unfaithful Jew?
Jesus also
had to ask himself and his community, “What if you are breaking bread, as a
good Jew, at someone else’s table, and they offer you the delicacy, the luxury,
of meat sacrificed and offered in gratitude to the gods of a different faith?” Do you push yourself from the table? I can imagine it would be like being a guest
at a friend’s home when they bring out the fine wine and you might say, (in
Thurston Howell III voice) “Yes,
Lovie, I drink wine, but I’m not so sure I should drink your
wine.”[1] You come off as ungrateful to the hosts and
snobby to the rest of the guests. And a
primary Jewish value is hospitality which recognizes the need to not only be
gracious to your guests but also to be gracious as a guest. But spiritual practice dictates that food
sacrificed in gratitude to other gods is idol worship. How does a faithful Jew live out of two great
spiritual values that seem to be opposing one another: hospitality and the refusal to do idol
worship? What do you do?
As the
folks from the Jesus Seminar shared with us just two weeks ago, the apostle
Paul never understood himself as anything other than a Jew. What he was trying to do, as faithful people
in each age do, is discern how to engage his tradition for a new age. As a result, he ended up with three different
ethics to determine how circumcision, sexuality, and food practice should be
measured and discerned in a new age.
Originally, I had chosen I Corinthians, Chapter 6, to be read for this
Sunday because it contained one of Paul’s discernment questions for
faithfulness. When I read the recent translation
of Paul’s letters in Art Dewey’s recent book, however, I saw all three
discernment questions for faithfulness. Paul writes that all is permissible, we are
all given freedom, nothing is really forbidden.
He writes it as if someone authoritative has said it to the
community. And then he measures it. He writes, “Yes, all things are permissible,
but not all things are good or beneficial for you and the community. Yes, all things are permissible, but all
things strengthen community—are for the welfare of you and your neighbor. Yes, all things are permissible but not all
things honor God.” I hear my mom and
my grandmother’s voice in those pages, “Yes, you could eat or not eat those
noodles, but if you do or do not, does it show you still love me.” Oh, the guilt!
Paul goes
on to talk about this freedom and its measure to decide how a faithful Jewish
person engages in a kosher ethic, practice, or rule in this day and age.
So this is
what we are called to do, in this day and age.
We need to figure out what to do with those noodles before Thanksgiving
even arrives. Ethics, rules, spiritual
practices that are deep and vital are engaged and critiqued in each age to
remember how and why they charted a path in the first place—how they provided
landmarks for our journey. We ask those
discerning questions asked by Paul: 1)
What food practices or rules are beneficial for you and your community? 2)
What food practices or rules strengthen your community—are for your
welfare and your neighbor? 3) What food practices or rules honor God?
For
example, we might ask in this day and age, engage and critique the kosher
practices and rules to ask, “What food practices or rules are sustainable for
the environment? What food practices or
rules treat farmers and food workers with justice? What food practices or rules direct our
purchases toward increasing economic democracy?”
Next week
I am going to share with you some food practices and rules that other
individuals and faith communities have incorporated into their faith and
life. And then I am going to ask you
what the food practices and rules are that you have. To then also take stock of our church and ask
what our food practices and rules are.
What do we want them to be far out into the future that would show our
commitment to a God of abundance, a God who requires our intentionality and
mindfulness to be healthy?
This week
you have in your bulletins something I am also going to share in the newsletter
and have available during Lent.[2] Our congregation is going to join with
Mayflower Congregational and First English Lutheran Church to enter into a
Daniel Fast together during the Lenten season beginning with Ash Wednesday on
February 10. Lent always begins with the
Scripture verse that tells of Jesus walking out into the wilderness or desert
to begin a fast on the First Sunday of Lent.
Many congregations are using Daniel Fasts as a way of helping their
congregations get right with food, recognize their own power, and root their
lives in the Heart of God. So take a
look to see if you would like to join in this high level of commitment. If not, take a look at the sheets at the back
of the sanctuary that ask for an everyday observance of food and its relation
to our faith.[3] If even that is too high of a commitment, you
can join with all of us by just promising to be more intentional and mindful
with your food practice, a form of fasting, during the Lenten season. My hope and prayer is that we walk out of
this Lent knowing that we have walked in the wilderness or desert with God and
with our community, with two other Christian communities, and, in so doing, we
might be able to say, here are our food ethics, rules, and spiritual practices
for this day and age. Amen.
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