Junk Food And Holy Tables Or The Cup Of Good Friday
Sermon
The Culture Of Disbelief
Gospel Sermons For Lent/Easter
Bread and wine go with communion the way turkey goes with Thanksgiving. They belong to each other. They are the proper menu for the culture from which they spring. Bread and wine spring from the Christian culture, where a little is a lot, a small man is a great man: Christianity is a place where memory is the foundation of hope.
It is no accident that Jesus initiated the Lord's Supper from within the Passover tradition. The memory of so many Passovers became the foundation for the early Christians of communion. Nor is it any accident that Jesus spoke of cups when his time of suffering came: he saw the cup of blessing as the cup of suffering. They were the same cup to him.
From time to time, youth groups "do" communion with popcorn and soda. Young couples have pasta for Thanksgiving. These methods of exempting ourselves from the rules of the feast are lots of fun for youth. If fifty-year-olds are still exempting themselves from the table manners of their group, they become what Toni Morrison calls a "spectacle." They don't tell the truth of the culture or themselves.
Morrison says a truth is the story ritual tells; spectacle adorns lies. Eucharist says that a central Christian truth is feast at the table of God. Eucharist means God with us in food. Eucharist is bread and wine in Christ or Messianic disguise. The Holy Spirit dresses the table. The cup is both a blessing and a suffering.
Many argue that what keeps Americans from genuine ritual, and so capable of grotesque spectacle, is that we are still trying to act "different." We are still children. American exceptionalism runs deep. We don't think we need the feast that most other peoples enjoy when they celebrate holidays. We think we can get by without holy food. We also think we can get by without suffering.
A wise activist said that she wasn't sure which had done more for justice, Catholics refraining from meat on Fridays or soup kitchens. Ritual is powerful in the way it shapes a people. If a people is not shaped by feast at table with God as really present, then the people remain juvenile, undeveloped, pre-truth as opposed to truthful. Vatican II managed to turn the matter of Real Presence into a theological controversy -- as though people didn't understand metaphor in their own pre-critical ways. We know what real presence means; we don't need to argue about its truth. We experience it at table, not the way theologians tell it, but in our own ways. We feel God at the ritual table. We experience God in the feast, and we experience God in the absence of feast, in our own suffering.
When asked once how to preach the gospel, a wise man said, "Use words, if necessary."
Our culture is in its youth about food, both our holy food and our regular food. We are immature in our table manners. We are immature in our understandings of the very blessing that comes with and through and after suffering.
We eat out of bags, even at church potlucks, which used to be food heaven and now are linked to efficiency the way almost everything else is. We come together for community and "bring our own." Fast food is about as close as we get to holy food. Since fast is what we worship, it should be no surprise that our food's rituals come out of disposable bags.
I think in contrast of a very poor woman I once knew who had three children. Many nights she served them pork and beans on a tattered linen table cloth. She knew the holiness of food.
In the '50s, women's magazines advocated the recipe that could be prepared in sixty minutes. Now quick chicken recipes reign. Ten minutes is the maximum time a dish may take to be prepared. Many deacons in my denomination spend precious hours deciding how to make sure the communion doesn't take "too long." That attitude towards feast and thanksgiving -- "Euchariste" -- tells all. It tells that time is what we worship, not God at table with us. It is the real reason many of our Protestant communions are spectacles, not rituals. They only pretend to worship God.
Major religions have always linked food and faith. Bernard Glassman in Instructions To The Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons In Living A Life That Matters (Bell Tower, 1996) encourages us to eat. Last year he held a Passover Seder for homeless men in New York City's Bowery district. He sees Zen as nothing more, or less, than the art of eating a good meal. In a good meal, we throw nothing away. We use what we have. We recognize our faults as our best ingredients. Eucharist joins Seder in linking our daily intake to our long term output. We are what we eat.
I was helped to understand the Eucharist by an article in the Boston Globe (July 21, 1996) by Mark Rosenthal, titled "Ten Reasons Why it's So Hard to Change our Eating Habits (and three reasons why we might)." There are more obstacles in our way than we normally observe. Habits run very deep, with religious habits and assumptions having an uncanny resemblance to that reach for the potato chip than we might want to understand. That reach is Pauline -- the good that I would do, I don't do, and the evil that I would not do, I do!
Protestants continue being the way we've been even though we lose members, trip over our own secularism, idolatrize culture's own prizes, and become, in the words of one of our chief critics, increasingly "dispensable" and "disposable." We eat junk food.
Gluttony is a national tradition. "All you can eat" is a First World hyphenation. No wonder one third of the population is overweight. Public health messages are off the mark; they are punitive and frightening and fad driven. The politics of agriculture corrupt the way we eat. There is more corporate profit in unhealthy food than in healthful food. The truth of our food is deep within our economic system; our attachment to food as "product" is what we ritualize daily in the way we buy to eat.
Rosenthal's ledger is full on the negative side and lightweight on the positive side. He says the three reasons we might change are that environmental pressures may alter our diet, the medical establishment may enter the fray, and some have already started to improve our eating habits, "sort of." These economic hopes make slim pickings for "hungry, dry bones, can these stones become bread" people! We search for good food. We want to eat food that lasts -- the same way people complain about the sermon with the aching words. "I wanted something to take home with me."
People know that suffering is part of life. What we want from our cups is what Jesus drank: the full cup, the one that contains both sorrow and joy.
Many have found lifelong comfort from the memorization of the Heidelberg catechism... "What is your only comfort in life and death?" "That I belong -- body and soul, in life and in death -- not to myself but to my faithful savior Jesus Christ." We are fed more by knowing to Whom we belong than by anything else we put in our mouth. The bread and wine of the Holy Table represent this knowledge. It tells us that we belong, body and soul, life and death, to Jesus Christ.
Our contemporary experience is hunger. We live in what some people call a time famine (Jerome Segal in Tikkun, Winter, 1996). We are spiritually homeless people; we are spiritually hungry people, without even a soup kitchen. These are our faults in the richest country in the world.
Eucharist means fullness of soul and fullness of belonging. Eucharist is the best diet in the world. It both feeds and slims us -- in the sense that it right sizes us. Eucharist puts us at table with God and with each other, and there in the slimmest wafer and smallest cup, we find abundant accompaniment. The little is plenty. We mature at the table where food is understood in its depth, as opposed to its speed. When food is understood as a gift to which the only reply is deep thanksgiving, rather than a get which we buy at counters where we hope the help is speedy, Eucharist marks our days. We grow up to the height and depth of the rituals all around us. We feast. We become full instead of "eucharistically starving," as Rosemary Radford Reuther puts it.
Aldous Huxley tells us there are "non-verbal humanities." Once a clown led a group of us unofficially to commune together. She held the bread first as though it were a baby, the baby Jesus. The baby grew and became a cross in her mime. Then the cross poured the blood into the cup. She passed the cup around. This same clown asked us one Christmas to hold a piece of purple cloth and to "make believe" it was the baby Jesus. We could do anything we wanted with it. I held it close to my heart. She wiped the tears of her eyes with it. No one ate it. But they could have.
In a world where it is easy to meet a Zen Christian or a Buddhist-leaning Jew, it is incredible that we still reach for proper ways to have communion. Again, we insult the very people who understand the mystery of table feast and accommodate those who think "Real Presence" is a theological controversy. That Protestants and Catholics don't sit with each other at table shows that the theologians have won the battle of the feast and that they bear major responsibility for how hungry we are.
I think of Nhut's Cafe in Faison, North Carolina. Nhut runs a Vietnamese, Southern-style eatery on the main street of town. Out front are parked dozens of pick-ups every noon. Nhut married a local man when he was a soldier in Vietnam. She has been there for twenty years. Because most of the people are Mexican migrant workers in the fields today, there is salsa on the table, collard greens and egg rolls on the menu. The Real Presence shows up some days and orders the special.
Denise Levertov, the poet, wants to know why we live so hungry in the orchard. What happened to American culture that we could be so hungry in the richest country in the world? Where are our linen tablecloths?
The reason is forgetting to Whom we belong. It has to do with forgetting that real blood was shed at the table where we hold the memorial feast. Good Friday is about real blood, not phony blood. Good Friday is not a spectacle.
Not just the blood of Jesus but the blood of Vietnam Vets and Vietnamese children (just to mention a few of the victims of our amnesia). We live and eat as though the bomb had never fallen, the Jews of Europe had not died, as if Rodney King had not been beaten. We fritter away mystery and awe in paper bags of packaged food.
Let's eat and let us suffer. Let us drink the cup we have been offered.
It is no accident that Jesus initiated the Lord's Supper from within the Passover tradition. The memory of so many Passovers became the foundation for the early Christians of communion. Nor is it any accident that Jesus spoke of cups when his time of suffering came: he saw the cup of blessing as the cup of suffering. They were the same cup to him.
From time to time, youth groups "do" communion with popcorn and soda. Young couples have pasta for Thanksgiving. These methods of exempting ourselves from the rules of the feast are lots of fun for youth. If fifty-year-olds are still exempting themselves from the table manners of their group, they become what Toni Morrison calls a "spectacle." They don't tell the truth of the culture or themselves.
Morrison says a truth is the story ritual tells; spectacle adorns lies. Eucharist says that a central Christian truth is feast at the table of God. Eucharist means God with us in food. Eucharist is bread and wine in Christ or Messianic disguise. The Holy Spirit dresses the table. The cup is both a blessing and a suffering.
Many argue that what keeps Americans from genuine ritual, and so capable of grotesque spectacle, is that we are still trying to act "different." We are still children. American exceptionalism runs deep. We don't think we need the feast that most other peoples enjoy when they celebrate holidays. We think we can get by without holy food. We also think we can get by without suffering.
A wise activist said that she wasn't sure which had done more for justice, Catholics refraining from meat on Fridays or soup kitchens. Ritual is powerful in the way it shapes a people. If a people is not shaped by feast at table with God as really present, then the people remain juvenile, undeveloped, pre-truth as opposed to truthful. Vatican II managed to turn the matter of Real Presence into a theological controversy -- as though people didn't understand metaphor in their own pre-critical ways. We know what real presence means; we don't need to argue about its truth. We experience it at table, not the way theologians tell it, but in our own ways. We feel God at the ritual table. We experience God in the feast, and we experience God in the absence of feast, in our own suffering.
When asked once how to preach the gospel, a wise man said, "Use words, if necessary."
Our culture is in its youth about food, both our holy food and our regular food. We are immature in our table manners. We are immature in our understandings of the very blessing that comes with and through and after suffering.
We eat out of bags, even at church potlucks, which used to be food heaven and now are linked to efficiency the way almost everything else is. We come together for community and "bring our own." Fast food is about as close as we get to holy food. Since fast is what we worship, it should be no surprise that our food's rituals come out of disposable bags.
I think in contrast of a very poor woman I once knew who had three children. Many nights she served them pork and beans on a tattered linen table cloth. She knew the holiness of food.
In the '50s, women's magazines advocated the recipe that could be prepared in sixty minutes. Now quick chicken recipes reign. Ten minutes is the maximum time a dish may take to be prepared. Many deacons in my denomination spend precious hours deciding how to make sure the communion doesn't take "too long." That attitude towards feast and thanksgiving -- "Euchariste" -- tells all. It tells that time is what we worship, not God at table with us. It is the real reason many of our Protestant communions are spectacles, not rituals. They only pretend to worship God.
Major religions have always linked food and faith. Bernard Glassman in Instructions To The Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons In Living A Life That Matters (Bell Tower, 1996) encourages us to eat. Last year he held a Passover Seder for homeless men in New York City's Bowery district. He sees Zen as nothing more, or less, than the art of eating a good meal. In a good meal, we throw nothing away. We use what we have. We recognize our faults as our best ingredients. Eucharist joins Seder in linking our daily intake to our long term output. We are what we eat.
I was helped to understand the Eucharist by an article in the Boston Globe (July 21, 1996) by Mark Rosenthal, titled "Ten Reasons Why it's So Hard to Change our Eating Habits (and three reasons why we might)." There are more obstacles in our way than we normally observe. Habits run very deep, with religious habits and assumptions having an uncanny resemblance to that reach for the potato chip than we might want to understand. That reach is Pauline -- the good that I would do, I don't do, and the evil that I would not do, I do!
Protestants continue being the way we've been even though we lose members, trip over our own secularism, idolatrize culture's own prizes, and become, in the words of one of our chief critics, increasingly "dispensable" and "disposable." We eat junk food.
Gluttony is a national tradition. "All you can eat" is a First World hyphenation. No wonder one third of the population is overweight. Public health messages are off the mark; they are punitive and frightening and fad driven. The politics of agriculture corrupt the way we eat. There is more corporate profit in unhealthy food than in healthful food. The truth of our food is deep within our economic system; our attachment to food as "product" is what we ritualize daily in the way we buy to eat.
Rosenthal's ledger is full on the negative side and lightweight on the positive side. He says the three reasons we might change are that environmental pressures may alter our diet, the medical establishment may enter the fray, and some have already started to improve our eating habits, "sort of." These economic hopes make slim pickings for "hungry, dry bones, can these stones become bread" people! We search for good food. We want to eat food that lasts -- the same way people complain about the sermon with the aching words. "I wanted something to take home with me."
People know that suffering is part of life. What we want from our cups is what Jesus drank: the full cup, the one that contains both sorrow and joy.
Many have found lifelong comfort from the memorization of the Heidelberg catechism... "What is your only comfort in life and death?" "That I belong -- body and soul, in life and in death -- not to myself but to my faithful savior Jesus Christ." We are fed more by knowing to Whom we belong than by anything else we put in our mouth. The bread and wine of the Holy Table represent this knowledge. It tells us that we belong, body and soul, life and death, to Jesus Christ.
Our contemporary experience is hunger. We live in what some people call a time famine (Jerome Segal in Tikkun, Winter, 1996). We are spiritually homeless people; we are spiritually hungry people, without even a soup kitchen. These are our faults in the richest country in the world.
Eucharist means fullness of soul and fullness of belonging. Eucharist is the best diet in the world. It both feeds and slims us -- in the sense that it right sizes us. Eucharist puts us at table with God and with each other, and there in the slimmest wafer and smallest cup, we find abundant accompaniment. The little is plenty. We mature at the table where food is understood in its depth, as opposed to its speed. When food is understood as a gift to which the only reply is deep thanksgiving, rather than a get which we buy at counters where we hope the help is speedy, Eucharist marks our days. We grow up to the height and depth of the rituals all around us. We feast. We become full instead of "eucharistically starving," as Rosemary Radford Reuther puts it.
Aldous Huxley tells us there are "non-verbal humanities." Once a clown led a group of us unofficially to commune together. She held the bread first as though it were a baby, the baby Jesus. The baby grew and became a cross in her mime. Then the cross poured the blood into the cup. She passed the cup around. This same clown asked us one Christmas to hold a piece of purple cloth and to "make believe" it was the baby Jesus. We could do anything we wanted with it. I held it close to my heart. She wiped the tears of her eyes with it. No one ate it. But they could have.
In a world where it is easy to meet a Zen Christian or a Buddhist-leaning Jew, it is incredible that we still reach for proper ways to have communion. Again, we insult the very people who understand the mystery of table feast and accommodate those who think "Real Presence" is a theological controversy. That Protestants and Catholics don't sit with each other at table shows that the theologians have won the battle of the feast and that they bear major responsibility for how hungry we are.
I think of Nhut's Cafe in Faison, North Carolina. Nhut runs a Vietnamese, Southern-style eatery on the main street of town. Out front are parked dozens of pick-ups every noon. Nhut married a local man when he was a soldier in Vietnam. She has been there for twenty years. Because most of the people are Mexican migrant workers in the fields today, there is salsa on the table, collard greens and egg rolls on the menu. The Real Presence shows up some days and orders the special.
Denise Levertov, the poet, wants to know why we live so hungry in the orchard. What happened to American culture that we could be so hungry in the richest country in the world? Where are our linen tablecloths?
The reason is forgetting to Whom we belong. It has to do with forgetting that real blood was shed at the table where we hold the memorial feast. Good Friday is about real blood, not phony blood. Good Friday is not a spectacle.
Not just the blood of Jesus but the blood of Vietnam Vets and Vietnamese children (just to mention a few of the victims of our amnesia). We live and eat as though the bomb had never fallen, the Jews of Europe had not died, as if Rodney King had not been beaten. We fritter away mystery and awe in paper bags of packaged food.
Let's eat and let us suffer. Let us drink the cup we have been offered.
