“Son, eat what’s put before you.” That was one of my
mother’s core principles, apparently. I grew up in a family in which children
weren’t consulted about what they wanted to eat, with very rare exceptions. Somebody,
normally Mama or Grandmother, fixed a meal, put it on the table, announced that
it was ready, and assumed their accustomed places. The rest of us gathered,
bowed our heads, thanked the Lord for what we were about to eat, and ate
without complaining. When on rare occasions we went to a restaurant I cannot
remember once anyone complaining about the service. Perhaps it was always
stellar.
 |
| I guess she did, but I don't remember my mother ever cutting up meat for me. |
One night a friend asked me to join him and his father for
dinner at a restaurant in a nearby city. I gratefully jumped at the chance to
get off campus for a really good meal. We went to what was reputed to be a
fairly good restaurant. My friend’s father almost immediately began complaining
about the place. It was far too chilly. The background music was too loud. When
the waiter brought something, back it went with complaints and orders to bring
something fresher, or better cooked, or not so ill-presented. I sat there
almost unable to eat, so uncomfortable I was at this spectacle of complaining,
the like of which I think to this day I have never seen matched. I could hardly
enjoy my steak. My host must have asked me ten times how this or that or the
other was.
I guess these wandering Israelites would be sympathetic. They
are not known in their own scriptures as particularly compliant. They
complained. And complained. And complained. “Why did you bring us all the way
into this wilderness to starve us? Slavery was better than this!” Poor Moses. Poor
Aaron. The complaining never seems to have stopped. First it was having no
food. Then it was having the wrong kind of food. Then it was having no water. It
got old after awhile. Little wonder that one time Moses took his staff and
banged it against a rock, angry with his high-maintenance tribe.
The themes of hunger, eating, and food are perennial in the
Bible. So when we leave the Exodus story and enter John’s gospel we encounter
more questions about food and eating. In that case it was Jesus who had to
contend with the fallout from another feeding in another wilderness, namely the
occasion on which he took and blessed a small amount of bread and fish and with
it fed thousands of people. If he had been looking for a way to become a rock
star or President or king, he held the key in his hand: feed people. Feed them
what they want. Control the supply of bread. Indeed that was one of the
tempting possibilities he faced at the very beginning of his ministry: “turn
these stones into bread.” In other words, manipulate the food supply, a sure
way to bring people to heel.
The issue woven through this matter of food and complaining
is the clash of the very real human problem of hunger on the one hand and the
misunderstanding of true nature of spiritual nourishment on the other. Both
physical hunger and spiritual hunger are real. They may even in some ways be
connected. The chief difference is that by our very nature we are a lot more
aware of our stomachs than our spirits.
What the Gospel of John is driving at in those passages
where Jesus speaks of himself as the Bread of Life is that there is a
sustenance the soul needs that is a far cry from the food that satisfies
physical hunger. Don’t, for God’s sake, see that as a code word for the
Eucharist as we know it—not just yet at any rate. Set that aside for the time
being. Let’s talk about how Jesus himself is Bread. In essence, Jesus
overturned more than just the moneychangers’ tables in the temple. He overturned
the entire way people look at the world. Rather than playing the game in which
most religion ancient and modern specializes, namely how to become superior to
everybody else, Jesus deliberately broke down walls that separate people from
each other and people from God. And how did he do that? By eating! His worst
offense, the one that got him in trouble most often, was having open table
fellowship with any and everyone. He ate with tax collectors, sinners,
Pharisees, men, women, sex workers, the whole gamut of his society. Nothing
drives people in power insane more quickly than to have someone contest their
specialness. Do that and they will tweet their minds away. This was just a part
of Jesus’ message: how to live differently. He dared to identify his way of
forgiveness, acceptance, and freedom with the Life of the Kingdom, which is a
way of talking about God’s life. His implicit testimony is that that way of
living is true Life. And thus he is the Bread of Life, the very substance that
gives life its real purpose and meaning.
Now we can talk
about eucharist. If we want to be like Jesus, then realize that what you are
here doing today is participating in a radical ritual. It is not a way to
become special or holier or purer so that you can, should you wish to,
congratulate yourself on being just a little better than someone else. It is
about following Jesus and making his commitment to radical justice,
inclusiveness, forgiveness, and mercy your own. That is in fact what is meant
in John’s gospel by its emphasis on believing
in Christ. To believe means to give one’s allegiance. And if you keep pushing
on the question of what that means, it turns out to mean yielding your heart. That
might ring a bell. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart…” the beginning
of the first and great commandment. Believing has very little to do with
intellectual assent or assuming factuality about this or that. It has
everything to do with giving your heart to someone. And that one is none other,
for Jesus, than they one who created the heart in the first place.
One day when I lived in Charlotte many years ago I went to a
local cafeteria with my family for their Sunday dinner—a kind of Southern thing
to do. I noticed that this particularly attractive woman standing not far from
us in line seemed to know and be known by everyone. But I didn’t know who she
was. Not, that is, until the next morning when her photo appeared on the front
page of The Charlotte Observer. Her
name was Mary Green and she ran a hot dog stand downtown. The article was about
its impending closing, as Mary was about to retire and shut down the operation
she’d run for years. I told my wife that we really must go have one of those
hot dogs just to see what it was about.
So we went on a rainy weekday. On a side street,
overshadowed by high-rise banks and department stores, was Mary Green’s hot dog
stand. There was a semi-circular counter in the center of the small space at which
it seemed every single kind of person in Charlotte was represented. Blacks and
whites sat down side by side. Construction workers and lawyers, bankers and
cleaning crews, young professionals and grizzled street people were all chowing
down on hot dogs, Mary Green herself serving them up as fast as she could. I
thought for a moment how rare this scene was. And then it dawned on me that I’d
like to put a candle at each end of the bar because that was as close to the
Sacred Meal of the Kingdom that I’d ever come. It was a mass, a Divine Liturgy,
a Holy Eucharist, and Mary herself was the high priestess of the Kingdom,
feeding all and sundry as if they were her family.
Well, Mary Green went out of business, but St. Luke’s is
still in business.[1] Push
the boundaries out farther and farther. Make the circle wider and wider until
you simply cannot believe all the people that it encompasses. Don’t even think
about coming to this table for solace only and not for the strength to testify
on behalf of justice and mercy in the world. It is not about having a nice service
or a pretty celebration of someone who died and rose ere long ago. It is the
act of following him so closely that you become like him, accepting his fate as
your own, trusting that he is as good as his word, for he himself is the Word,
the Bread, the Life.
The only reason we would complain is that we simply missed
the point of it all, imaging that somehow our purpose in life was about collecting
those things that made us temporarily feel good and lovely and powerful and
successful and all that. Give your heart to him whom you follow, and know that
you will indeed eat meat at twilight, and bread in the morning, and you will
know him as your Lord and your God.
 |
| The "altar" at Green's Lunch, the counter where Mary served holy food |
A sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August
5, 2018, Proper 13 Year B on the texts Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15 and John 6:24-35.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018
[1] When I was writing this sermon, it didn’t occur to me
to check to confirm the actual fate of Green’s, actually named Green’s Lunch.
Mary was the daughter-in-law of Robert, the founder in the 1920’s. She indeed did sell the place in 1975, though
continued to work there for some years. Green’s continues to this day under
different management, apparently, according to Yelp as popular as ever. Perhaps there is a lesson here for the
Church?
No comments:
Post a Comment