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WWJE?
by the Rev. Rich Smith
October 7, 2007
Isaiah 58:1-9a
Our theme this morning is one that is very close to my
heart: food! Close to all our hearts, I would imagine, especially if
the old adage is true that the way to a man’s heart is through his
stomach – and a woman’s, too, considering that the health of our hearts
is directly related to our eating habits! But today I want us to think
about not only the nutritional aspects of food, but also the social,
and spiritual, and even the political dimensions. On this day, when we
gather around the Lord’s Table with Christians the world over, whether
they are in large cathedrals of Europe or hiding in their homes in
Baghdad or gathered on a beach in Samoa, we affirm that we are one
family, and as in any family, the actions of one affect the health of
all.
All of these dimensions – spiritual, social, nutritional, political –
are present not only in our everyday eating habits, but also at this
table, for there are many ways to understand this meal which is the
central liturgical act of our faith, whether you call it communion, the
Lord’s Supper, the eucharist, or the Feast of Life.
For example, the traditional liturgy recalls the sacrament’s origins,
on “the night he was betrayed,” when Jesus took bread and blessed it
and broke it and gave it to his friends saying, “Take and eat, this is
my body broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Traditionally,
it celebrates what is called the atonement, Christ giving his life for
us, his body broken on the cross as the bread is broken at the table.
And as we remember he is present with us. At our own dinner tables as
well we are reminded that life feeds on life, that something had to die
for us to live. Emerson once wrote, “You have just dined, and however
scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance
of miles, there is complicity.” Or as one former Moderator of the
Presbyterian Church remarked, after a year of traveling the country and
eating countless potlucks, “Wherever Presbyterians gather, a chicken is
sacrificed!” Whenever we sit down to eat, we do well to remember all
that went into making the meal possible, that somehow, the farmer, the
rancher, the truckdriver, the migrant worker, the grocer, even the
chicken – all who gave of themselves are present and somehow gathered
with us, and so is the spirit of God, the giver of all life.
And so another thing to remember on this World Communion Sunday is that
communion is communal. There is no such thing as “private communion.”
And that too is a reminder that meals are meant to be shared. Do you
know that 19 % of American meals are now eaten in cars and not at
dinner tables? At least a couple of times a week, I find myself eating
lunch alone at my desk. Can you image the French or the Italians ever
eating alone? Not a good feature of our culture, which encourages
consumption over communion. I titled this sermon “What Would Jesus
Eat?” – and we’ll come to that – but for him the larger question always
seemed to be, “Who would Jesus eat with?” He never ate alone, and he
didn’t seem to be too picky in his choice of dinner companions. He had
friends in low places, which kept him in trouble with the religious
authorities. His table was open to everybody – sinners, outcasts, tax
collectors, prostitutes, the unclean and undeserving. This is what the
realm of God looks like, he said, full of people you don’t expect to be
there. Which is good, because that means that you and I will be there,
too! While I often think of hell as one endless cocktail party, heaven
may be a dinner party, a banquet, or a Sunday picnic with all kinds of
interesting guests and fascinating conversation with people of all
stripes and colors and classes – “De Colores” lived out! And so we
practice open communion in our church, where you don’t have to be a
member, or even meet any particular standards, or profess any
orthodoxy, because that’s the kind of dinner parties Jesus had, and
it’s a foretaste of the kingdom of God. It is communion, not
consumption!
Now, let me go back to the question of, What would Jesus eat? While
Jews had laws about what they could and could not eat – we call it
keeping kosher – in reality Jesus and those who shared his peasant
class likely had little choice in the matter. Eric Eve, a New Testament
scholar at Oxford University, says: "The staple diet of a Mediterranean
peasant in Jesus' day would have been bread. Round the Sea of Galilee
fish would also have been significant, though for peasants perhaps only
in small quantities to provide a relish for the bread. Grapes and
olives were also grown in Galilee, but more as cash crops for the wine
and oil trade than for peasant consumption." Food was probably scarce.
"Many probably went hungry much of the time, or achieved only bare
subsistence." But he also says, "I can't imagine many modern Americans
taking enthusiastically to all the features of a biblical diet. For
example Leviticus 11:22 says 'Of them you may eat: the locust according
to its kind, the bald locust according to its kind, the cricket
according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind.'"
It turns out that a Florida physician has written a book by this
sermon’s title, suggesting that Jesus’ diet was simple and healthful,
and that if we want to live longer healthier lives, we too will
simplify our diets – limit meats and sugars. He doesn’t suggest locusts
or grasshoppers, although I hear some people do like them. But, as Dr.
Don Colbert says, “I tell people, sure you can continue eating the way
you do -- all the sugar and cake after meals and pies and cookies and
Snickers bars and fried foods -- and you’ll still go to heaven. You’ll
just go there much sooner.”
Paying attention to what we eat is perhaps a luxury when so much of the
world goes hungry, perhaps it is also a religious duty, because we do
have so many choices. And our health does depend on it. When I was 39 I
had a kidney stone and after I got over it I went to the doctor – for
the first time in several years – to see what shape I was in. He gave
me a list of foods to avoid that promoted kidney stones. Then he
discovered my cholesterol was high, so gave me a second list of foods
that promote that, and then we discussed headaches I was having and I
got a third list of foods that tend to trigger headaches – by now there
wasn’t much left to eat. Lettuce and broccoli, I think. But I have
discovered over the years that I can eat nearly anything I want, as
long as it is as basic as possible – and so rather than buy processed
or packaged foods, I attempt to get fruits and vegetables and meats as
close to the source as I can get. That is, if I can’t grow it myself –
using organic methods – then go out and pick it myself, or buy it at a
farmers market, or failing that, at least at a grocery store that
promises the chickens lived a carefree life in the open, hormone and
anti-biotic and chemical free, and has produce to match. One of my
favorite things is to make biscuits from scratch, using whole grain,
organic ingredients – no Crisco or bleached flour for me! – and top
them off with raspberry jelly, also homemade, from wild raspberries I
searched out and picked myself. It would be completely satisfying if
only it were also low carb!
Novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,
is about her family’s quest to eat as locally as possible. During a
one-year cycle, they ate seasonally, consuming foods only as they
became available in their own garden or from neighboring farms. Her
book "tells the story of what we learned, or didn’t; what we ate, or
couldn’t; and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately
eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our
neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.....Our highest
shopping goal," Kingsolver explains, "was to get our food from so close
to home that we’d know the person who grew it." And such food, she
reports, is much tastier and healthier than what you can buy at the
local supermarket.
It is at this point that the act of eating moves from the nutritional
to the political. It becomes such when you realize that the average
food item on your dinner plate has traveled fifteen hundred miles to
get there, using even more fossil fuel than was used to grow it in the
first place. Public health is a political matter, going way beyond the
veto of SCHIP.
Recently the County Council of Montgomery County voted – unanimously –
to ban the use of artificial trans fats in restaurants. Trans fats,
found in things like “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil,” have been
implicated in cardiovascular disease and obesity. And while most public
health and medical experts are saying “bravo,” the outcry in blogs and
letters to the editor has been substantial – mostly complaining about
“the nannies on the council” telling us we can and cannot do, one more
example of intrusive big government invading our private lives and
freedom of choice. Well, I’m all for personal responsibility and
freedom to make our own decisions, but I think these protesters miss
the larger picture. Namely that what we wind up eating is not
controlled at the local level so much as it is in our national policy –
codified in the infamous Farm Bill. The federal government urges us to
eat more fruits and vegetables, but our agricultural programs offer
virtually no assistance to fruit and vegetable farmers. Organic
growers, furthermore, have to pay out of pocket for the costs of
certifying and inspecting their own farms. By contrast, the inspection
and regulation of “conventional” (non-organic) farms, feedlots,
slaughterhouses, packing and processing plants are paid for by our
taxes. Subsidies guarantee the cheap supply of processed corn- and
soybean-based carbohydrates and fats that dominate the menus of our
school lunch programs and fast-food chains. Childhood obesity and
early-onset diabetes have reached unprecedented levels. It’s no
coincidence that this is an American problem – it’s directly related to
our government's farm and nutrition policies, which have further
resulted in such things as the demise of the family farm, an
agricultural monoculture – in place of crop rotation – which depletes
the soil (30% of farmland is no longer arable). You have the state of
Iowa, with the deepest and most fertile topsoil in the country, needing
to import food, because it cannot feed its population on #2 field corn
and soybeans. This national policy has far more affect on what we eat,
and the choices we have, than anything the county council does.
As Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, says, “We need a
farm policy that aligns our public-health goals with our land-use
goals. In other words, we should not have a situation where one hand of
the government is saying, “We have an epidemic of obesity and
diabetes,” while another hand of the government is making high-fructose
corn syrup so cheap that it makes sense to put soda in 32-ounce cups.
All these things are connected, and that’s the lesson of ecology.”
I think that today, the question of “What would Jesus Eat” would
finally have to encompass these issues. Because while the Bible may
have a lot of food and dietary laws, it is even more concerned with
justice for the least of these and for the wholeness of God’s creation.
As our scripture reading from Isaiah points out, God’s real concern is
not the fasts or the festivals, but whether or not food is being shared
with the hungry, and caring for the homeless and the poor. Our national
farm policies, which may have been designed, in the “green revolution”
of the1970's, with the intention of providing abundant food for the
world, have resulted in making healthy food relatively expensive and
unhealthy food cheap and often the only affordable option for the poor.
Well, I hope I haven’t spoiled your lunch – but these are the kind of
things we are asked to consider whenever we sit down at table. Read
Barbara Kingsolver’s book – or at least her piece in last Sunday’s
Washington Post Outlook section. Read Michael Pollan. Read the Bible.
Buy locally when possible (except for your olive oil; there’s an even
larger justice issue here!). Make a place for Jesus at your table. And
this morning, when we share the Lord’s Supper with people the world
over, remember. Remember the life that was sacrificed that we might
have life; remember those the world over with whom we share the table;
remember that while we are what we eat, even more we are how we eat,
and with whom. Gather ‘round the Table, and remember. “Taste and see
how good the Lord is....”
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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