|
Foundry United Rev. |
|
|
On the Edge of Promise: The Taste of Resurrection Easter Sunday Sunday, April 8, 2007 |
|
|
Joshua 5: 10-12 Luke 24: 13-35
Rev. |
Two of
Jesus’ disciples are walking the seven miles between They do
not recognize him. They discuss the events of the last week, and they still
do not recognize him. He interprets the Scriptures to them, and they still do
not recognize him. He
calls them “foolish” and “slow” and you’d think they’d recognize him then. How
characteristic of Jesus, to call his disciples “foolish” and “slow!” Surely
they would recognize him in his reproach. But, no, they still did not
recognize him. It was
when they got to Emmaus and sat down at the dining room table to eat dinner,
as Jesus took bread and broke it, that their eyes were opened and they
recognized him. “He had
been made known to them in the breaking of the bread,” Luke tenderly says.
(Luke 24: 35) The
story goes on in Luke. The disciples are together, when Jesus suddenly
appears in their midst. They think they are seeing a ghost. But Jesus asks if
they have anything to eat. The disciples give him a piece of fish and he eats
it in their presence. (Luke 24: 36-43) In the
gospel of John, some of the disciples have decided to go fishing after the
first Easter. They fished through the night. The next morning the resurrected
Jesus appears to them on the shore. He has made a charcoal fire and there are
fish on it and bread, and he says to the disciples, “Come and have
breakfast.” (John 21: 13) No
wonder Craig Satterlee says that the first Easter is “not as much about an
empty tomb as about food.”[i] The
risen Christ wants his disciples to eat, and wants to eat with them. I find
myself moved by this. I find
myself also moved by the description in the book of Joshua of the Israelites’
first Passover in the Promised Land. The Book of Joshua tells it
matter-of-factly. After 40 years of eating manna (which is Hebrew for “What
is this?”), the day after Passover the first day of the feast of unleavened
bread, the Israelites gathered food that had grown in the Promised Land, and
they ate unleavened cakes and parched (or toasted) grain. They ate their
first meal of real food in 40 years. Reaching
the Promised Land means eating real food from the good earth of the Promised Land.
I mean,
you expect Easter to be about the heavenly, the spiritual, the ethereal, the
mystical…and instead it is mostly about eating…mostly about food. You
expect the Promised Land to be about constructs of justice and utopian
principles, about the idealistic and lofty…and instead it is mostly about
parched grain, and grapes, and milk and honey. It is mostly about food. There
is a very practical reason for this, of course. The history of humanity has
always been characterized by hunger and the fear of hunger. Hungry people are
unavoidably obsessed with food. Many of
us here, who have never experienced real hunger, are a very select minority
of the world’s population historically and today. We all know this. NPR says
38 million Americans are “food insecure.”[ii]
They have a hard time finding enough money to keep food on the table. One in
three Africans are malnourished, and 80 percent of the people of Hunger
in our world is a symbol of our failure to claim our Promised Land…it belongs
to Good Friday, not to Easter. On
Easter and in the Promised Land there is food aplenty. In almost every
religion one of the images of heaven is a place where there is food enough
and more for everybody to eat. The promise of the Promised Land and of Easter
is a world without hunger. It is sobering to think that 2000 years after Christ
the majority of the world’s people are still impoverished and hungry. It
disturbs our Easter to remember this, and it should. But
Easter and the Promised Land are about food also, I think, because food is
about community. Food is about love. I won’t
ask for a showing of hands, but I wonder how many of us here fell in love
while eating and drinking with our partners? Eating
together makes a big difference in the lives of families. “Studies show that
the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke,
drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider
suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex,
eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use,” according
to Nancy Gibbs writing in Time Magazine.[iii]
Robin
Fox, an anthropologist who teaches at I may
well be in this pulpit today because growing up Sunday dinners at our house were
spent chewing and digesting the Sunday morning sermon, along with the chicken
and mashed potatoes and gravy. Food is
about community…and love. It is a sign of the quality of relationship in the
Promised Land and in the community of the Resurrected Christ and in heaven. All
during Lent we have been looking at the story of the Israelites final push
over the edge of Promise into the Promised Land, and I have found myself drawn,
as I read the story in the Bible, to the story of the civil rights movement
in After
the But a
number of the efforts that Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
attempted failed and Dr. King became discouraged. By 1960 he had decided to
move to Just as
he was in the process of relocating, four freshmen students at North Carolina
Agricultural and One of
them said that they ought to just go sit at the counter and ask to be served.
The student said, “We might as well go now.” Another student said, “You
really mean it?” The first student said, “Sure, I mean it.” The
four freshmen slipped into seats at the “sacrosanct whites-only lunch
counter.”[iv]
By the next day the number of students sitting at the lunch counter had grown
to 19; the day after that it grew to 85, and by a few days later it was over
400, and sit-ins had begun at lunch counters in Durham and Raleigh, and the
civil rights movement was reborn. Why, of
all things, was it a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter that caused the
civil rights movement to be reborn? Because food is about community and it is
about love, and denying human beings access to even the salty chicken noodle
soup and soggy cheese sandwiches they served at Woolworth’s was a devastating
sign and symbol of the brokenness of the human family. Perhaps no other symbol
could have had as much power at that time, not even the right to vote. Easter
and the Promised Land are about food because food is about community and
love. When we break bread together and share it, the Risen Christ is there. You
made your way to church this Easter morning hoping perhaps to hear sublime
truths about eternity and the realm of glory, and here I am talking about barbequed
fish and rye bread and chicken noodle soup. But there
is another thing I want to say about food and Easter and the Promised Land.
We are never more human than when we are eating. We are never more earthy. We
are never more visceral. The
Risen Christ wants to have some barbequed fish with us. He wants to eat with
us. He barbeques the fish for us and says, “Come, have some breakfast.” He
breaks off a fistful of dark coarse grainy bread and hands it to us. Whatever
it is that is resurrected, it is not some pale ghostly antiseptic versions of
ourselves. Whatever it is of us that is resurrected, it eats. The
Jungian therapist Marion Woodman was anorexic as a young woman. She has often
written about food disorders. Food disorders are very complicated and I don’t
mean to simplify them, they require medical attention. But Marion Woodman
believes that one of the things that food disorders, and their prevalence in
our society, symbolizes is a desire not to be bound to the earth, not to be
dirty, not to make dirt, not to be human. The prevalence of food disorders
symbolizes a desire to be more than human, to be angels, to be gods. She
calls it an “addiction to perfection.”[v] But,
she says, the goal of life is not perfection. The goal of life is completeness
or wholeness. To become perfect we need to cut out a part of ourselves –
whatever part we see as unacceptable or unworthy – but to become complete we
must learn to love and to include our whole selves – the noble and the
ignoble, the wise and the foolish, the competent parts and the bumbling parts,
the honorable and the less honorable.[vi] Here’s
the point – whatever it is of us that is resurrected eats, and I assume scratches…snores…slouches…makes
corny jokes…cusses… procrastinates...and all of the rest. For
some reason God doesn’t want to spend eternity with angels or plaster saints.
God wants to spend eternity with you and with me with all our quirks and
peculiarities and weaknesses and strengths and preferences and personality
types and skin shades and orientations. Here’s
something I’ve never told you before. The week before every holiday I get
emails, two or three, from Foundry folk telling me that a relative – a brother
or sister or mother or father or grandparent – will be attending worship with
them here and asking me if I can say something in my sermon that would help
the brother, sister, parent, grandparent to accept them. I pray about it
every holiday. Whatever can I say? All I can say is that God loves your
brother, sister, son, daughter, grandchild, for who they are…for exactly who
they are. How can’t we love one another for who we are? God
wants to spend eternity with the you who eats. Every time we eat, it is a
reminder of resurrection – a foretaste of eternity with God. So enjoy your
ham or turkey or tofurky. Savor every bite. Each mouthful is a promise of
resurrection. www.foundryumc.org |
|
|
|
|
|
|
