It’s interesting to realize that the Bible is a big, fat book about eating. It’s one long story about God and people punctuated by food – luscious food, forbidden food, food for angels, unknown food, metaphorical food, food served by animals, unclean food, real-life banquets with unsavory characters, multiplied food, a dead guy eating food, idol food, and even God being food. In fact, if you think about it, try and name one book of the Bible in which food does not play some significant role. In the early church in Acts (2:43-47), eating was even a miraculous sign, a salvific thing in which men and women, slave and free, sinner and saint, Jew and gentile, would break bread together daily “with glad and generous hearts.”
And when we follow the way of Jesus, food is for more than survival. Food is a gift of creation, a sign of God’s love, an opportunity and responsibility for ministry. To share food is to share God’s goodness. Meals are a way to welcome and serve others, just as Jesus welcomes and serves us. In fact, when we share our food and drink with those who are hungry and thirsty, we are giving compassion to others but also to Jesus (Matt. 25:35). For Christians, eating and drinking aren’t ultimately about good nutrition or table manners. How we eat and drink shapes a way to live – receiving and sharing God’s gifts with grateful, joyful and generous hearts.
How we understand our bodies - as friend or as enemy, as gift or as problem, as sacred or as repulsive, as temple of God’s Spirit or as a shell in which we are trapped – will influence how and what we eat and drink.
We all need to eat. Thanks!
Eating is “the first and most urgent activity of all animal and human life. We are only because we eat.” This need to eat can be both a delightful and a sometimes frightening thing, filled with experiences that can bring us great joy or great pain. Dinner tables can represent fond memories of being with loved ones or places marked by conflict or verbal abuse, sites of culinary delights or times when we loathe our body and its incessant need. It is not surprising that how we feel about food will often be how we think about our bodies. For what daily activity is more integral to the practice of honoring the body than eating and drinking? Our passage reminds us that the need to eat and drink is not unimportant, unspiritual, or shameful, but something that Jesus cares deeply about. It’s not just your momma who wants you to eat. Jesus does too. It’s the first place of compassion in our text, vs. 31. It’s also interesting that the very word for “compassion” [splagchnizomai] is a belly word which literally means a movement of the gut, probably a lot like hunger pains. A Christian way of eating will understand hunger and want not as something wrong with us but as an important spiritual gateway for thanks and care, for everyone – friends, enemies, strangers, family.
Honoring the body through eating and drinking begins with acknowledging the body’s hungers. It’s the recognition that hunger and longing aren’t bad but a necessary component of being human. So many of our disorders, however, come from a shame about need, a fear of our hungers.
Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, talks of needing to learn to eat as a thirty-three-year old woman. Caught in a cycle of bingeing and purging, frightened at the damage she was doing to her body, she sought help. Thankfully, she found a counselor who told her she would overcome her illness if she would cherish her body and fully embrace her need, her humanity. “It is, finally, so wonderful,” she writes, “to have learned how to eat, to taste and love what slips down my throat, padding me, filling me up, that I’m not uncomfortable calling it a small miracle.”
Anne Lamott is right. Eating is a delightful sign of vulnerability that teaches us that we are not self-sufficient but dependent upon God, the earth, and the labor others. Recognizing that need, therefore, can lead us to gladness! The sustenance we are given in our eating and drinking, if received with wonder, can teach us to attend to the ways God loves us, sustains our lives and draw us into God’s work of honoring our bodies. Not for nothing does a shared meal stand at the heart of Christian worship. Not for nothing is the image of the banquet where all are welcomed one of the most persistent images of Jesus’ ministry and a vision of the world to come. Our need to eat, in other words, is a wonderful need. It’s significant that eating isn’t simply something we do in this life, the Bible says, but also in the world to come.
And so we give “thanks” for food. By learning to give thanks before meals, we engage in a rich, spiritual practice that honors bodies and God. Before Jesus fed the hungry multitude on the hillside he gave thanks (Mark 6:41), when he gathered for supper with his disciples, and on that first Easter when we ate with friends on the road to Emmaus, Jesus said thank you to God for the gifts of food and drink. Every time we pray at the table, we join Jesus, and many others, in seeing God’s grace in our food and giving thanks. There’s freedom here – of course. I’ve seen friends and family pray the same prayer at every meal, others sing the doxology, one couple, who are both clergy, prefer to offer thanks silently – tired from the many words of the day. But remember, however, you do it. You aren’t simply thanking God for food but also for the body that needs it and enjoys it.
But if the need for food is a universal fact of human life and an enjoyment that we all should share, it is also our responsibility.
Food is our responsibility.
It is also true that there is enormous variety around the world and within the United States as to how hunger is felt and met (story of my cousin’s girlfriend eating her food with a knife at the ready). And a world where a minority of us are constantly being sated – while others go constantly hungry – reflects a deep sinfulness and a break from Jesus’ intention for everyone. If part of the practice of honoring the body involves acknowledging the body’s hungers, it also involves working for a world in which the hunger of every human being is met with nourishment. It’s not enough to name the problem – the disciples named the problem in vs. 36. They care but with no responsibility. They recognize the problem but hold little sense of ownership or hope. And Jesus approaches the problem very differently – with curiosity, exploration, and responsibility. The disciples complain but Jesus ask questions [How many loaves do you have?]. The disciples see problems and Jesus invites them to explore [Go and see]. The disciples place the burden on the hungry and Jesus places responsibility to feed others on the disciples [You give them something to eat]. They obviously hadn’t learned James 3:16 yet! I love the fact that the disciples complain and Jesus expresses curiosity.
So let’s not miraculize the story too quickly (yes, I made that word up) as if spirituality, prayer, and food don’t demand something from us. The miracle begins AFTER the command, “You give them something to eat.” There is a recognition, of course, that the problem is huge – perhaps too huge for the disciples to solve on their own. He doesn’t ask them to solve the problem but he does demand their participation. What would such a story look like in our own day? It would look like disciples who curiously asks questions like, “Where does my food come from?” “How are the laborers who cultivate the food treated?” “How are the animals which God created cared for?” It would demand some exploration – some digging. It would be a people who trust God and who understand that God provides enough food for everyone (Psalm 104:27-28) and that starvation and hunger are not God’s fault. It’s ours. It is human greed, human grasping, human violence that must be overcome. It is human sin, in which we all have a share. It is a recognition of gratitude and solidarity, grace and responsibility.
When thought of in this way – the issue of fasting and feasting come greater into focus. Some of us have wrongly done away with fasting – overspiritualizing the supposed freedom we have to eat anything we want. However, the point of fasting is in large part connected to social justice FOR those who are hungry and poor – Isaiah 58:6-8. By the way, if you want to live out this text – don’t simply bring food to the food bank. Rather, fast and put aside the money that you would’ve spent on the food and donate it to the food bank. Right now, every $1 you give to Marion Polk Food Share will provide 3 meals– enough to feed a family.
Food isn’t enough. We need to feast on good words.
We eat to live, of course. But we also eat to meet the need of other hungers, as well. To eat as a Christian is to realize that we need a table life in which our very lives, and not simply food, are both savored and shared. We eat to remember where we came from, or to form a connection with others, or to find a place within a new culture, or to celebrate one that has been passed down to us for generations, cook by cook. We ask the tables where we eat, to meet many hungers: the hungers of our body and the hungers of our memory, our hunger for community, and our hunger for home.
The words that are shared around the table are vital to the life shared there. More than simply saying, “grace” is an all-together other incredibly important understanding that tables are to be places of grace and filled with words of good news – Jesus’ own teachings of love, forgiveness and welcome. Jesus’ compassion was exhibited for the 5,000 before concern over food even began in our story (Mark 6:34). This isn’t to play one off against the other. If the Gospel stories of Jesus eating with religious leaders have anything to teach us is that there can be plenty of good food without good fellowship, filled bellies but empty hearts. Food and good words must go together! Have you ever eaten when there weren’t good words. I’m mindful that there are many people – many of us – who’ve had had to eat in circumstances when food was plentiful but we were starving for something else – love, compassion, a listening ear. We need to cultivate tables where, even in the midst of profound disagreement, food can still be shared and fellowship can still be given. Such conversation cannot be had without taking some risks – choosing to speak of what is in our hearts and inviting those with whom we eat to speak what is in theirs. Only then do you have a feast. I want to invite you to a practice of Zoom meals in the meantime. If you would like to be connected to someone for a zoom meal or already have someone in mind – either way, let us know and we will help you set that up. You can email Gail Ohta at gail@trinitycovenant.org In the same way that we long for bread we long for meaning, intimacy, fulfillment, community, purpose, and joy. In a real sense, a Christian way of eating that gives equal focus to good food and good words turns the act of “begging” upside down. Like the two on the road to Emmaus, we are the ones who “beg” the stranger to come in, eat, be heard, welcomed, fed, and loved (Luke 24).
Finally, our salvation is food.
At the heart of our Christian tradition stands a meal. I’m mindful that Jesus didn’t give us a theory about his death. He gave us a meal. He called himself food for us. And yet – during Covid so many of us have felt cut off from anything sounding like “communion.” Over the past couple of months, in our in-person contemplative service we have been participating in a form of communion referred to as the communion of empty hands. It refers to a real communion service held by Christian prisoners of war who determine to have communion together though they have no bread or wine. The pastor who helped them celebrate said, . . . (pg. 143, “This meal in which we take part . . .”)
CONFESSION: Giving God, we confess that we have tried to horde things, refusing to share, for we have not trusted you. We have lived for ourselves, and turned from our neighbors. We have refused to bear the troubles of others. We have ignored the pain of the world, and passed by the hungry, the poor, and the oppressed. O God, in your great mercy forgive our sin and free us from selfishness, that we may choose your will and obey your commandments; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
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