Friday, April 3, 2015

Eating as religious exercise

Scripture: Matthew 26:17-30

There is just about nothing that human beings obsess over more than our food. We love food. We love bad-for-you food; and we love good-for-you food. Some of us obsess over food coated in sugar or packed with grease and fat; others of us obsess over calories and carbs. Many people just eat without much thought. We all eat, and our opinions about food are in many ways more engrained than our opinions about politics or religion, especially if we are people who grow that food. For the person who eats all the time, the person who struggles to eat anything, and everybody in-between, food has a tremendous hold on us.
            The act of taking in that food—eating—is also a deeply religious exercise. That’s something that has been more or less forgotten in a wider, cultural sense, as food has become easy to come by. Up here we might not have McDonald’s down the street, but getting food for most of us is pretty easy. It requires opening up a pantry, remembering to stop at the store, planning a trip to Grand Forks, or, for the more industrious amongst us, it means putting together a hunting or fishing trip or picking from a garden. I say eating is a religious exercise because it is a universal human activity that reminds us of our dependence. None of us make food on our own. We are dependent on the soil and the weather, and animals and plants whose lives we take to sustain our own. Even when we carefully monitor these factors we cannot control them.
Eating is religious because we are part of the food chain, even if we usually don’t think about it that way. And, most importantly of all, all eating is religious because it begs us to show a measure of devotion to a world that we did not create and will far outlast us. We are not set apart from creation; we are part of it; and we enter into it most deeply every time we sit down at the table or grab something from the grocery aisle.
            It’s harder for us to remember this when we eat all sorts of things that don’t actually look like anything you find in the natural world. I’m not sure where a gummy worm or a Lucky Charm grows in the wild, for example. So, it’s easy to imagine that those processed things are somehow different from eating a rabbit or milk from a cow, but that’s our mistake. We are woven into creation, and, on Maundy Thursday, we are called to remember that inter-wovenness. We remember Jesus Christ and we do it in the most human of ways: we eat; we drink; in remembrance.
            The Passover tradition has Jesus standing in the place of the Paschal Lamb. As we imagine Jesus entering the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday we would do well to remember that he would have been accompanied by thousands—tens of thousands—of lambs being shepherded into town for the Passover. We might imagine Jesus on a road accompanied by disciples, but more likely he was on an ancient highway surrounded by lambs and shepherds, making their way to Jerusalem. Every one of those creatures was destined to be slaughtered. The Last Supper that we remember tonight is melancholy because it marks for us an end. All eating does if we think about it. All life that is given for us will not return—at least that’s how the rules of the game are designed east of Eden. A sacrifice once given can never be undone.
             Which is why it behooves us to reflect on our eating at every opportunity, and twice as much tonight. What is this bread? What is this wine? Is it an abstract thing made in a way you don’t understand? What went into it? Who made it? What additives does it have? And then we should make the turn that Jesus Christ compels us to make and move from the agricultural and the gastronomical to the theological: What is this bread, really? Is it just a remembrance of Christ? Or is it Christ’s body and blood, actually and viscerally shed for you? Are we more than remembering? Are we taking in Christ’s physical body and blood? Then, are those two things the same?
            These are critical questions for us to ponder in a world where eating has become a paltry, degraded thing. Wendell Berry writes, “Life is not very interesting, we seem to have decided. ‘Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.’ We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to ‘recreate’ ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation—for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the ‘quality’ of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in the world.”
            This is what today is about. “The life of the body in the world.” Christ’s body, yes, but ours as well. As the poet William Carlos Williams writes,
            There is nothing to eat
                        seek it where you will,
                        but of the body of the Lord
            The blessed plants
                        and the sea, yield it
                        to the imagination
            intact.

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