I was really hungry and the only inn in site was the Ramapo Thruway so-called service station. I got gas for the car and went in to see what gas they had left for me. It was early evening. I probably haven't told you all that I grew up before the Thruway went in and listened to nothing but my extended family's extended conversations about how the road would destroy Upstate. (What constitutes either destruction or Upstate is another matter, one not attended to by my family.) Later in my life, as the contracts were let for which agribusiness would manage the food on the thruway, I wrote an article about local food. I didn't know then what the local food movement was, just that local restaurants instead of franchises up and down the automotive spine of the state might be a way to limit the damage. I proposed to the Thruway Commission that local owners put up locally owned restaurants at each exit. That would make driving more interesting and keep fast food from threatening the feast of life. "Sauerkraut and Pork Available at Exit 17", "Arugula Salad at 15." You get my drift. I was confirmed in this early hope last Wednesday night as I sought nourishment in Ramapo.
Searching for my meat in due season, I realized there are only two franchises at Ramapo: one is McDonald's and the other is UNO, a pizza place. I settled on the pizza place only to observe that the warming tray was dead empty. I practically wept as I asked the young woman behind the counter if there was any hope for one such as I to get a pizza. "Sure," she said, "I'll make it fresh for you." "You will?! How long will that take?" My slow food thoughts went utopian as my fast food stomach gurgled. I was both thrilled at the idea of slow food on the thruway and distraught at waiting for a freshly made pizza. She took care of my gurgle and left my utopia alone. "One and a half minutes," she said. So it was that I entered my own country of ambivalence about food. I want it slow and I want it fast. I want it local and I want it cheap. Mostly, when it comes to food, I want it now. When we have it now, it tends to taste like that "fresh" pizza in Ramapo. Its virtue was that it was warm. Its sin was that it was made of something that long ago was grain - the white flour - and something long ago - the tomato - that was fruit. The cheese was no longer cheese and if the pepperoni ever was food I'll be surprised. As I wolfed down my warm glob of chemicals, I thought about the sources of my food. In Florida, the tomato pickers earn very little per bushel picked. Nobody could possibly pay the migrant workers any more than that because otherwise I'd never get that round warm 800-calorie, nutritionally worthless globule for just $6.99. You have to add the truck and its gas, the middleman's middleman's middleman, the lawyers they hire to fight the migrants so they don't get more for picking the tomatoes. Then there are advertising costs to make me want the pizza, and the union-busting lawyers who make sure the woman who made it "fresh" for me doesn't make too much money. Then there is the package, which is at least 11% of the product. They don't charge me for eating this stuff in the car while driving down the thruway; that pleasure is free. Later, in this sermon, when I make practical suggestions, you'll want to remember just how impractical all this is.
Today I want to peel off the skins of the onion of eating. I want to go at food from several perspectives that will take us back to the truth of the matter, which is that fresh pizza is a fabulous food. It can be made without refined flour, with fresh tomatoes, and with cheese that is still cheese. It can be made fairly and locally. It can be made to taste much better by migrant workers who get a decent wage for harvesting tomatoes and women who make it fresh (even) in thruway restaurants. Another world is possible. It is a slow food world in the 21st century. It is called "feast," and feast is the destination of humanity.
Layer one of this onion is scriptural. There is a lot said about food in the bible. 80% of it is rules about eating: what you should not eat, how you should not eat it, with whom you should not eat it. I often think of scripture as an onion: you have to peel away a lot of dietary laws and other kinds of laws before you get to the feast of grace at the middle.
The narrative we have today is about Jesus' breaking the rules about eating. I am going to recommend something very similar to you today: Let's break the rules about eating. Let's peel away the rules and get to the feast. But first, let's look more at this layer. The four synoptic gospels have about 80 snippets about Jesus and food. They fall into four basic categories with the large majority being about how Jesus ate wrong. He picked his food on the Sabbath. He ate with sinners. Or Pharisees. Or drunks. Or prostitutes. He just kept showing up at the wrong tables. Our text today is one of these majoritarian texts. He is being observed from the outside and people are talking about him. He just isn't right at table. His manners are bad. A second layer of texts is the feast layer. Contrary to the law texts, there are the feast texts. These are the wedding feast, the feeding of the 5000, and the feeding of the 4000. They are very few in number but they set the stage for the last supper, the Passover meal, and the Eucharist. The prohibition texts outnumber the feast texts but the feast texts are persistent. They are the positive of the negative; they show where Jesus is going with food: he is moving from laws and purity codes to Feast and Eucharist. Many people rightly justify the purity codes about food as being early public health policies. Jesus ignores these things. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine eating on the edge of town in ancient Palestine with prostitutes and thieves. I know I would be worried about my health. Jesus, unwisely, was not. He was showing a way to something different. The feast table, the Eucharist table, was a universal one. It was public, not private. The loaves and fishes were distributed on the edge of town in a field. In addition to the contrast between the "don't eat it" and "do feast it" texts, both of which in their own way lead to the Eucharistic table, we have a minor theme of the "don't worry, be happy" texts. "Do not worry about what you shall eat or wear… the body is more than food and more than raiment." There is a constant commingling of the spiritual and the biological in Jesus' work with food. Obviously, this little summary of layer one of the onion is too simple - but it is also the funny foundation on which we think about food spiritually. Food is both fraught with rules and laws, fears and subterfuges, the right table and the right people eating food in the right way for the right reasons - and it is feast, leading to the great Eucharistic claim that someday everybody will eat well at one table. Between now and then, we are to not fear, to not be anxious. One way to get real about food is to note just how conflicted our foundational thinking about food is. It is not simple even at its base in ancient narrative, although the bottom of the bottom is in the Magnificat. What does she say of Jesus? He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.
A second layer of the onion is obviously psychological. Every time I read one of those articles about how to lose weight I have to laugh. The first thing the writer will say is that eating is emotional: that we may be doing more than satisfying biological urges when we eat. I watched a very large man eat a very large portion of Manhattan's newest delight, a Macaroni and Cheese lollipop, which is, yes, Macaroni and Cheese molded on a stick. I hoped that he was deeply satisfied. I hoped that he had an answer to the psalmist's question, "Why do we eat food which does not satisfy?" Of course, eating is emotional. When I was a kid, we had two foods, over and over again: scrambled eggs and hot dogs. I never had vegetables, which bothers me and my dentist even to this day. But even today if I have an upset stomach I will make myself scrambled eggs. They satisfy. Are they good for me? Who cares! Eating is an emotional experience which takes your guts, another word for stomach, right back to childhood. When the people who help us lose weight - always a tricky question in a world where most people don't have enough food - get a hold of how we eat culturally and economically, which is to say what kind of food you can get on the thruway, we will not have to say something stupid like, I hope I am not satisfying an emotional need by eating that macaroni and cheese or those scrambled eggs.
A third layer of the onion is cultural. Obviously, different peoples eat in different ways. I remember my church in Miami with more fondness than is probably legitimate. That doesn't mean I like everything about it. Because some New England Yankees founded the congregation in 1925, every year on this Sunday before Thanksgiving, there used to be a pilgrim festival. The whole congregation had pilgrim outfits and pilgrim hats. The women would sit on one side of the congregation and the men on the other, just like in the days of yore. The minister would read long-winded proclamations. Tableaux of live pilgrims would be the backdrop on the altar. Someone carried a big musket he had brought down from Boston. He led the procession with his wife who carried an old bible in with the gun. Then a big turkey supper would be had.
The second year I was there, someone, not me, suggested that we might do a different Thanksgiving celebration. I, foolishly and wisely, agreed. We had people from every nation that had migrated to Miami stand and wear some form of native dress and read some work from their own culture. The first year we had 11 nationalities in tableaux: one Pilgrim, one Peruvian, a Cuban, a Mayan, a Russian, a Parisian, a Haitian, a Nicaraguan, etc. It was incredibly beautiful and moving - and made its point about who we were as a congregation. One of the sweetest older ladies in the congregation came up to me afterwards: "Please, please, please, don't tell me we have to eat their food, too. It just won't be right." What we eat is full of cultural prohibitions and permissions. What we eat is either a Eucharistic feast or a human folly. What we eat is emotional. What we eat is who we are. In the long series of conversations that followed this retabling of the tableaux, the word "right" was used way too often. "Right" is just another way of saying "purity code." Who is to say who eats right? When we say, "I hope we don't have to eat their food, too," what we are saying is that we hope Feast never comes. We hope Eucharist never comes. We hope against justice at the table and for the "right" ways of doing things. We dare not make too much fun of those who criticized Jesus' table manners.
Eucharist - just tabling, just food, just humanity - will come when the Yankees learn to eat on the edge of the village, with the other folk who are standing there, just waiting for a way to come in and sit down. By the way, some Nicaraguans are Yankees in this way; it is not just North Americans who think the rest of the world are sinners. Whoever, from wherever, imagines that the table is just their emotional cultural site engages a purity code. They imagine right eating when the point is feast eating.
So what is feast eating? It is the following out of Genesis 2:15, "the Lord God took the humans into the garden and told them to till it and keep it." One garden, one humanity, one table coming from one garden. Back to the garden is feast eating. A fourth layer of the onion is practical feast editing at Ramapo. We take the spiritual permission to feast and the guarantee of the feast coming, join them to our psychological emotional needs for warmth in our bellies and beyond, link that to our cultural patterns, and then we just eat. We eat just. We eat justly. We eat for the fun of feast. We demonstrate feast. So here comes the practical part of this fruit, which is the center of the onion. Why must we get practical at the heart of the matter? Because that is the meat of the matter. Ha. Something very strange has happened to food in the richest country of the world. We can get a bad tomato just about any time of day, in any season. We eat out of paper bags and drink the magnificent beverage of coffee out of Styrofoam cups. While we are drinking the coffee, we worry about the possibility of nuclear war over oil. We eat alone. We eat while driving. We eat but there is nothing sacred or beautiful or slow about it. Judson people come to meetings and leave half a foreign country's worth of paper and Styrofoam behind. Just kidding. Yes, we recycle some of it. We have our coffee hour with paper cups. Kids eat chicken fingers over and over again - and slow food has to organize as (an increasingly popular and fast growing) international movement. Imagine having to organize politically for the right to eat slowly and well. The fast food economy has created a world in which we have to protect ourselves from it. Fast is the enemy of feast.
Consider these playful suggestions. Consider these just playing:
· Coffee Hour with real cups. I'll wash them.
· A church with a stove.
· Cooking at home with tablecloths, dishes, and a prepared simplicity.
· Growing a little something, somewhere, even in a pot in a window.
· Meetings that have real food at them without packages, like last Monday when Dave Johnson made minestrone for the local clergy, with fresh pesto and cheese on the top.
· Buying ten per cent of our food locally.
· Joining a CSA as Judson and having local food delivered by one farmer here every Sunday - in the same way that we get or can get our coffee now.
I know the feast won't come tomorrow. I also know that there is no need for anxiety about this. No guilt trip here; remember me and that pizza. There is a need instead for small actions. Small, signifying actions. The kind that tell you a fast is coming and that you mean to join the world at that table. We get to the feast by breaking the rules. We do things that seem "silly" and "impossible." We do them for the sake of the feast.
