You
are how your food is prepared. You are
what you eat. You are the way you
prepare to eat your food. You are the
people who eat with you. That, in a
nutshell, is what Jewish kosher practice is all about. To a degree, we all practice some version of what
it means to be kosher today. And the
specifics of what it means to be faithfully kosher changes and evolves as
Jewish people engage that tradition and practice.
Ancient Judaism recognized that how food was
prepared went to one’s health and well-being to develop kosher purity law and
practice. Kosher practice entailed
special preparations for milk around meat, how the blood of the animal was to
be separated from the meat, so that good health would be maintained.`
We recognize a necessary form of this within our day
and age. Over ten years ago, a nationwide
peanut butter salmonella outbreak was caused by a single factory in
Georgia. The FDA had repeatedly cited
the company for dire sanitary conditions and let it continue operating. The company even found salmonella in its own
products at least twelve times in 2007 and 2008 and continued to send out the
peanut butter anyway. The plant was
finally closed in January 2009 after
some people had died and hundreds of people had gotten sick (mainly children).[1]
And maybe you also heard that lethal mercury had
been found in the high-fructose corn syrup that goes into our Coke, our
Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, our Smucker’s jelly, even our Quaker Oatmeal to
Go—created by the way some high-fructose corn syrup is processed with
chemicals.[2]
Kosher practice said, “You are what you eat.” Holy people eat holy foods. Clean people eat clean foods. To eat unclean foods makes one unclean. We see this in the story of the apostle Peter
who objects to eating the unclean foods he was commanded to eat.[3] Although the phrase, “You are what you eat,”
is familiar to most of us, some of you also may have seen the movie that is now
almost 20 years old, “Super Size Me,” by Morgan Spurlock. A perfectly fit
Spurlock decides to eat nothing but a McDonald’s diet for a month. By the end of the month, his wife is telling
him to come back to their vegan diet out of concern. He has put on tremendous weight, he has lost
his vip and his vim, and his doctors are begging him to stop before the end of
the month or risk losing his life. You
are what you eat, and by the end of the month, Morgan Spurlock looked just
about as greasy and as salted as a McDonald french-fry.
You are the way you prepare to eat your food. People who practice unclean eating habits,
such as not washing their hands, are themselves unclean.
Kosher purity law also suggested that we are the
people who eat with us. Like people are
to eat with like. Royalty is to eat with
royalty. Jews are to eat with Jews. The slaves are to eat with slaves. Since meals very often included a
thanksgiving to the deity the household worshipped, you might be caught eating
at a neighbor’s home only to find you are effectively worshipping another god.
Beyond kosher practice, seating arrangements also
conveyed a pecking order. Who sat at the
head and the end of the table conveyed the social status of a person, who had
the most honor. The closer people would
sit to the head, the more respectable those people were.
More than we like to admit, this is still our basic
practice. Though we might cross some
boundaries, we still pretty much eat with the people who are like us. And many of us have a pecking order around
special meals like Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Ever been the sole young adult that sat at the children’s table? I know I was, and I can remember how shameful
it felt. “Bryson, stop throwing your
food at me!” (deep sigh)
In the ancient world, meals carried huge
meaning. They set proper boundaries
around behavior, who you invited, conveyed how clean and unclean you were, distinguished
who was in and who was out, and stated your status in society. And Jesus of Nazareth, with his meal eatin’,
boundary crossin’, invitin’ low life, no hands washin’, sittin’ at the end of
the table lifestyle just called it all into question and messed it all up. For
goodness sake, Jesus, now how are we supposed to live our lives faithfully at
meal time?
With the Scripture read for us today, we hear somewhat
of a summary of Paul’s letters to the faith communities in Corinth. Throughout this letter to the faith communities
in Corinth, Paul is helping the people in this seaport slave city to discern
what it means to be a faithful community by giving them tools, principles,
guidelines which might shape their faith practice around three major
issues—circumcision, sexuality, and food.
All of these discernment tools should be measured against the body of
Paul’s letter, I Corinthians 12, which tells the Corinthian faith community that
they are the Body of Christ with many, diverse gifts and one Spirit.
Paul has tools, principles, and
guidelines to help the Corinthians shape their faith practice around sexuality
in a world that is increasingly diverse.
In an ever-changing, diverse world, Paul is trying to develop general mission
statements to help people to be faithful.
Here are his maxims and his presenting questions for discernment. Though we may be free to do as we will, we
should discern what is beneficial to the entire community. How do we practice our faith so that we have
mastery over sex and sex does not have mastery over us? How do we practice our sexuality in a way
that does not destroy us? We are to
practice our sexuality in a way that honors our bodies and what our body does
as a part of the wider Body of Christ.
No talk about sex being dirty or obscene or wrong. But quite a bit of talk about how we practice
our sexuality within the context of the wider community and, in a way, that shows
our power over our own sexuality.
In the same manner, these faith
communities are also trying to figure out how to eat their meals faithfully in
a pluralistic world. And once again, it
appears that the first step is to realize the tremendous freedom we have been
given. The story is told in the Acts of
the Apostles of Peter, in a dream, saying that he will not eat the unclean
animals spread before him because he is faithful to kosher practice. But then, as a way to include Gentiles,
unclean people, within the faith tent, God commands Peter in that same dream to
get up and eat the unclean food. It is a
way the apostles are engaging their tradition to decide what to bring forward
and what to leave behind. In the same
manner, Paul begins the passage from I Corinthians today suggesting that it may
even be ok to eat food offered to idols!
So, once again, we are free, but what
are the boundaries the apostle Paul would put around that freedom? Paul suggests that there are some folks who
are of “weak conscience”, meaning that these folk see good and evil at every
turn when, in fact, Paul writes, there really is no morality here at all. Paul sees this food issue as one of moral
indifference. God makes all food. Idols have no life in them. No food is going to bring us any closer to or
further away from God. But these people
of “weak conscience” might not get it.
So Paul suggests that we should pay attention to our example, how we
model, when we eat.
“Hey,” Paul writes, “you may know
better, but what good is your knowledge when it ends up harming someone’s
faith. Love is the primary value. Community love is the primary value.” Isn’t that a beautiful passage? I think it suggests that love is not some
esoteric, namby-pamby warming of the heart.
No, love is a deep and abiding will to work through our different
perspectives, our different places on the journey, to build up the community of
faith . . . in the day to day. In this
instance, love is looking out for people who are caught up in seeing clean and
unclean, good and evil, morality and immorality in every situation.
This does not mean kosher practice
itself is immaterial. Food dedicated to
idols may not be a concern like it once was in the ancient world. But kosher practice is something we keep all
the time with our food ethic in the world.
We keep kosher practice in this church through the incredible food
pantry at our church. Pre-pandemic, St.
John’s habitually did one of the most Christian kosher things in the world
every time you all invited the community into its building.
Food is still a primary way we build community
life. Rabbi Morris Allen writes about the
continuing value of kosher, “We need to be in a world where we can say that
keeping kosher is the way in which I demonstrate not only a concern for my
relationship to God and Torah but the Jewish concern for our relationship to
the world in which we live.”[4]
Food is still one of the primary ways
we build up one another in love, weave together community. There is a great discussion about kosher
going on in our communities today which will require our discernment. At the kosher meat packing plant in
Postville, Iowa, Jewish leaders were alleged to have broken over 9,000 child
labor laws. Jewish people then doubled
down on asking whether kosher food
produced unethically remains kosher. A
Jewish man who had been to Postville did not think so. Mr. Yanklowitz remembered his meeting with
Maria, a young woman from Guatemala, who had worked in slave-like conditions
from seven in the morning to ten in the evening so kosher meat could be
produced. “The consumer of goods
produced immorally is morally culpable,” he said.[5] Rabbi Morris Allen goes even further by
writing, “We should not be eating food that has been produced in a way that has
denied the dignity of labor! We should
not be more concerned about the smoothness of a cow’s lung than we are about
the safety of a worker’s hand.”[6]
So kosher is caring about the hands
that prepare the food, where the food comes from, and where it is
processed. Carbon Conscious Consumers has
said that the greatest way we can reduce our carbon footprint in the world is
to buy a Community Supported Agriculture share from a local farmer. Our food travels an average of 1200 to 1500
miles, and it takes quite a bit of energy to freeze, refrigerate, and truck
that food around.[7] By buying locally and from people we know,
our family will not have to worry so much about the mold growing in some peanut
butter plant or the way high fructose corn syrup is processed. Yours truly wrote an article on the ethical
and practical reasons for buying a Community Supported Agriculture share from a
local farmer.[8] Buying locally also means buying at the local
farmer’s markets where we get to know the people and talk to them about the
food they produce. We weave together our
social fabric. People who shop at a
farmers’ market are said to have ten times the conversations that people do in
a supermarket.[9]
In perfect freedom, we do not have to
do any of these things. But if our
kosher practices are about building each other up, weaving together a community
in love, we can begin to see the multitudes of ways our food is prepared, the
food we eat, and with whom we eat our meals as a way that defines us in the
world.
Next week, in celebrating the sacrament of holy
communion, we remember a meal eatin’, boundary crossin’, invitin’ low life, no
hands washin’, sittin’ at the end of the table lifestyle represented in bread
and grape to say we will bring all of our diverse perspectives, our different
gifts to become one in the Body of Christ.
The eating of this meal is part of our kosher practice to say that we
will practice building one another up, weave together community. We will love.
In this season of Epiphany, what is being made
manifest is that the material, and sometimes the most mundane, is made holy as we
share food that crosses boundaries, invites the poor, and goes outside our own
social circles to recognize that we cannot be the Body of Christ alone. In the food pantry, with the community
dinners, and what our congregation did in the sharing of turkey dinners with
the Jackson community around Thanksgiving and Christmas was not only good and
right . . . Jesus proclaimed this spiritual practice as sacred. What St. John’s regularly does is good and
right . . . and sacred. Praise God. Amen.
[1] Tom Philpott, “That’s just
nuts: More on the FDA’s bumbling role in the peanut-butter salmonella
outbreak,” Gristmill: The Environmental News Blog, http://gristmill.grist.org/2009/1/28/155954/042?
[2]“Food Safety: Georgia
[3] Jerome H. Neyrey,
“Reader’s Guide to Meals, Food, and Table Fellowship in the New Testament,” http://www.nd.edu/~jneyrey1/meals.html
[5] Paul Vitello, “Label Says
Kosher: Ethics Suggest Otherwise,” The
New York Times, December 11, 2008.
[8]Rev. Mike Mulberry,
“Community Supported Agriculture & Churches,” UCC Environmental Justice
Blog, https://www.ucc.org/community_supported_agriculture_and_churches/?e=da777e9638de87e29f5bd363d0def054&n=13&utm_source=unitedchurchofchrist&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_pollinator_the_e
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