Luke 22:7-23
Faith United
April 9, 2009
We’re all hungry
And I think more often than not, a lot of what we do
comes out of that hunger
Whether we’re mean to each other,
selfish, and insulting,
or overly generous and kind,
compassionate and loving
We’re all hungry
but too often we don’t even know it
because we numb ourselves on junk food
I think it’s safe to say that most of us
have never truly been physically hungry
We’ve always had enough to eat
there’s always been food available
We eat without thinking
we eat in front of the television
we eat while reading the newspaper
we eat while talking on the phone
we don’t even taste what we’re eating
because we’re usually doing something else
and eating becomes just a necessity
even an inconvenience
but in Jesus’ day and tradition
eating together was an act of fellowship
and it was significant WHO you were eating with
Basically, you are who you eat with
And Jesus ate a lot!
Especially in Luke’s version of the story…
Jesus seems to do a lot of his teaching
in the context of a meal ….
And that’s no accident
the meals that Jesus eats with different people
are part of his message
part of the unfolding story that Luke is telling
Jesus did some of the feeding,
but he also gave others the privilege of feeding HIM
because Jesus knew that feeding promotes relationship
Think about it
we do it without even thinking about what we’re doing
Somebody dies or suffers a tragedy
we make lasagna and take it to their door
Whenever I visit with someone about a funeral
inevitably their kitchen is full of food brought by others
Nobody seems to come to the door empty-handed
When I gave birth and moved to Tilden
for two weeks people who I’d never met before
provided supper for us every night
When there’s a funeral dinner
we are never short of people eager to bake a cake
or make a salad or come and make coffee
When someone’s house burns down
or they have insurmountable hospital bills
we have a dinner to raise money for them
So that not only do we raise money to help them
but in the process people are gathered together
for a common cause
for a common love for that person
They gather in honor of the one they want to feed
and they, in the process, feed each other
People laugh and say it’s because we just love to eat,
and that’s part of it, of course,
but it also shows that when someone is hungry
in any way, we want to feed them
and by feeding someone we show them we love them
In the Middle East,
giving and receiving bread is a symbol and sign of hospitality
it is no small gesture
it is a form of being connected in God
In the Orient, bread is considered sacred
when a traveler sees a scrap of bread on the ground,
he will pick it up and throw it to a dog
or put it in the crevice of a wall
or toss it to the birds
it must not be trodden underfoot
because it is seen as a sacred gift
coming from the Giver of all good…
I wonder how we’ve lost that sense of sacredness
that precious sense of bread as holy
as a symbol of our sustenance in God?
Is it because we just have much more food than we can ever eat?
Is it because we take for granted that we will eat
when we are hungry?
that the bread will be there?
My father has always been somewhat eccentric
He was truly embarrassing to be around
when I was a teenager
When there was a lull in the dinner conversation
he would spontaneously start quoting poetry
that he’d memorized as a kid
or he’d ask an impossible, philosophical question
usually of an unsuspecting dinner guest
which only served to stop the conversation further
He’d leave the house in the morning
and wearing his characteristic hat on his head
and his black trench coat,
he’d pause at the door, with his hand on the doorknob
and say out loud,
“I go to prove my soul….”
He was quite the dramatist
and so when he was hungry
he’d tell my mother,
“I need something to keep body and soul together….”
Back in Pennsylvania,
I participated with our youth group
in the 30 hour Famine,
which was sponsored by World Vision
The kids would fast for 30 hours
to raise money for the hungry
We spent the night at the church,
so we could be accountable to each other
We played games, watched movies,
had some lessons together
and tried to keep busy to keep our minds off being hungry
By the time we got to the 30th hour
needless to say, we were very, very hungry
probably hungrier than we’d ever allowed ourselves to get
and we broke the fast
with a service of communion
And of course, I gave the kids really, really big chunks of bread
while I said, “The Body of Christ, the bread of Heaven….”
and they’d never been so appreciative of communion before!!
After the service,
we all continued to pass the bread
until it was all gone
and bread never tasted so good!
I can’t help but think that we Christians 2,000 years after the fact
miss out on a lot of Jesus’ teachings
because we weren’t THERE
we just read the words
we try to fill in the blanks with our imagination
but the first disciples not only heard the words
they SAW the Word,
they tasted, smelled, felt and touched the Word
of course, they missed the point a lot too
but Jesus was like the ultimate Children’s sermon giver
Everything he did was tied to what he was doing
He didn’t just speak, he lived it out in front of them
He knew his people were hungry
he knew that some of them were much much hungrier than others
and he knew that some were greedy
some took for granted what they had
and some also took their status as Chosen Ones
way too literally
Jesus loved meals
and his meals always said a lot about who he was
and what he wanted to say with his life
He had many meals at the house of Mary, Martha and Lazarus
his best friends, you might say
he taught while he was there,
but he also enjoyed their company
he enjoyed the pleasure of allowing someone else to feed HIM
He went to their house for his own sustenance
He went there to keep body and soul together, I think
Jesus fed the five thousand and the four thousand
well, actually, no, he didn’t
he provided the food,
but he made his disciples do the feeding
“YOU give them something to eat,” he told them
when they were sure they had nothing to give
and he gave them the privilege of feeding the hungry
of serving, of giving
of looking upon someone in need as a brother, a sister
and of loving them as such
He tended to spend most of his meals
with questionable people
prostitutes, crooked politicians, addicts,
street people, the homeless, the incurably sick
the smelly, the poor, the rough characters
and the Church People hated that
What would people think? they said
because, indeed, you are who you eat with!
But Jesus knew that those people, more than anyone
were more aware of their hunger, their need
because they weren’t the privileged
They didn’t have everything handed to them
They were starving to be noticed, loved, valued….
And so most of the meals we read about
Jesus is eating with people we turn away from
and found fellowship with them
He ate with the Pharisees, too,
The Church People,
but I bet he enjoyed those meals much less
because those people usually invited him over
to make themselves look better
to show that they were indeed open-minded
they wanted to question him, test him,
make him prove his worth to them
and they always wanted to talk theology
and I bet even Jesus needed a break from Church Talk!
With his other friends,
he got to simply be himself, to laugh, tell jokes
relax and let his hair down
he was at the house of a Pharisee
when that woman burst in uninvited
and bathed his feet in expensive ointment,
washed his feet with her tears
and dried his feet with her own hair
It was a holy moment,
a beautiful, tender, sensitive moment
but the Church People missed it
they were too busy being horrified at the lack of dignity
in the woman’s behavior
and of course, they said, she had to be a whore
to behave that way
But whomever he was eating with,
Jesus always tried to show
that his mission from God
was to gather all people together
ALL people
All over the world
and his meals were a symbol of that
He tried to convey the vision of the Heavenly Banquet
of God’s Kingdom as that of a Great Feast
where all people will sit together in peace
Oh, how he longed to share this Passover meal with them,
he told his disciples at that last meal together
and I wonder, if he was also speaking of a deeper longing
a longing for that meal
where all people would gather
all people of the world
from every corner
every station in life
a vision that is still a long way off, of course
but a longing of his nonetheless
A longing that he wishes all his people had
a longing that he lived out
A deep hunger for peace
a deep hunger for love
a deep hunger for the fulfillment of God’s creation
“This is my Body,” he said,
as he broke the bread and gave it to his dearest friends
This is my Body
It was an embarrassingly intimate gesture
Take my Body, he was saying
make me a part of you
allow me to nourish you from the inside out
Eat my bread, do my will
feed my people
Sara Miles is a longtime writer and editor
that has written for the New York times,
traveled all over the world and been a journalist
in the midst of some of the ugliest wars
around the world
Sara was an atheist for the first 40-some years of her life
she was raised by a mother
who had been badly burned by the Church
harshly treated by Christians
and was finally fed up with the meanness
so she raised her daughter to be suspicious of all organized religion
Sara had had a full life
and seen many human atrocities across the world
and found herself in dangerous places
as an American in countries
where America had done some questionable things
but she had an innate sense of justice
and concern for the poor
she just didn’t know what was underneath it all
One day, when she was in her mid-forties,
she walked into an Episcopal Church in San Francisco
To this day, she doesn’t know why she wandered in
she had never read the Gospels
didn’t know the basics about Jesus
she’d never said the Lord’s Prayer
the last thing she wanted to do was become a Christian
But in previous walks
she’d passed the old Episcopal church
and admired the beautiful wooden building
with its soaring architecture
so out of curiosity, one morning she wandered inside
She didn’t even know what Episcopal meant
in the whole scheme of Churches
She just walked in, took a chair
and tried not to be noticed
She looked out the windows that opened out onto a hillside
covered with geraniums
and bathed in the morning sunlight that shone in
through the rotunda
Water trickled out back from a slab of rock in the hillside
There was singing
She stood up and sat down
when everyone else did
suddenly, she said, someone was putting a piece of fresh,
crumbly bread in her hands and saying,
“the body of Christ,”
and then handing her a goblet of sweet wine saying,
“the blood of Christ,”
and then, she said, something outrageous and terrifying happened
“JESUS happened to me,” she wrote
After that everything changed
She struggled in the following days to understand why
she felt so weird, so blown over, so uprooted
A friend later told her she’d wandered around
like “a deer in the headlights”
She began going to Church regularly, taking communion every Sunday
as Episcopalians do
taking the bread and bursting into tears
drinking the wine and crying some more
She didn’t understand what was happening to her
and it was a few years
before she was able to tell her mother
that she’d metamorphasized into a Christian
but as she regularly attended church,
ate the bread, drank the wine
sang and read and worshipped with people,
her life was changed
Eventually, she felt pulled and stretched and challenged
to truly live out what Jesus wants
and she ended up organizing a food pantry
that was based in the church, in the sanctuary
around the altar
Every Friday, people from all walks of life would come into the sanctuary
and receive groceries
fresh produce
that various stores and restaurants
would have thrown out because they always had too much
After awhile, over 300 people came every Friday
to receive food
more and more people participated
and the Pantry ended up receiving more donations
than they knew what to do with
so the money was used to start other food pantries
throughout the city
And as Sara often encountered the often disappointing dynamics
of church life
as she tried to do ministry and met with resistance
she found her bread in her work with the food pantry
people from the streets flooded the sanctuary
prostitutes, addicts, street people, transvestites,
you name it, all of them came
because all of them were hungry
and Sara experienced the presence of Christ in the giving of bread
It became a sacrament for her
the giving and sharing of bread
She told many stories of people off the street coming to her
after receiving their bag of groceries
and asking her to bless them, to pray for them
She found herself performing many priestly duties
“Communion,” she writes, “I chewed it and swallowed it.
it was at the absolute center of my faith;
wheat and water and yeast and heat;
grape and sun and time;
bread and wine, transformed into life.
I ate it up. I kept coming back for more….”
She discovered that every time she fed someone
she felt the presence of Christ
every time she offered a small morsel of food
to a dying friend who couldn’t eat much
she was giving the sacrament….
Jesus was everywhere, in the breaking of the bread
because THAT is what Jesus wants
Jesus, finally, wants us to feed each other with the bread of life
to not hoard it selfishly
or to deny it from anyone
but to give it away every chance we get
to always be acting, living toward Jesus’ vision
of everyone, absolutely EVERYONE
eating together at God’s Great Feast
It’s all about feeding and being fed
That early morning on the beach
the smell of fish cooking on the fire
the morning Jesus appeared, alive, resurrected, to his friends
that had given up hope and gone fishing
Jesus cooked them breakfast…
“Here, have something to eat…”
He didn’t teach them until he fed them
because he knows we can’t learn much
when we’re so desperately hungry
When we’re hungry, we tend to be blind and deaf to anything else
we tend to get mean and cranky
and so he fed them
And then he turned to Simon Peter,
and glanced toward the multitudes on the horizon
and said, “Feed my sheep, all of you, feed my sheep.”
Just as he had said, “this is my body, broken for you….
take, eat, be full
and then, go, give out of your fullness …
never try to give out of your emptiness
Feed my sheep
share my vision of the heavenly banquet
where lines and boundaries are finally blurred
and we are all one in the presence of Christ
We are all hungry
we all need to be fed
Let us never deny bread to anyone
because it is in the breaking of the bread
that we find our life
Take, eat,
and make room at the table
come for a little something to keep body and soul together
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