Faith and Food (Earth Day Sermon)

There have been lots of threads on BT about nutrition, ethical and healthy eating, we've debated the organic vs local issue..  Meat vs no Meat...  It always gets pretty heated, but I always learn something in spite of the opposition's constant attempts to point out hypocracies...

Anyway, here is a a sermon from yesterday, Earth Day, that I thought some of you might appreciate or like to discuss.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

I am going to lay all my cards on the table and tell you right off that the purpose of this sermon is to cultivate a spiritual and relational theology of food and faith. Spiritual theology of food is the effort to combine prayer as a daily practice and theological insight informed by Scripture that shapes the way we think about, purchase and eat food. Relational theology of eating is about the web of interdependent relationships with God, humanity and creation At the risk of sounding simplistic, I suggest that we begin by grounding a spiritual theology of food and faith in seven words from the prayer Jesus taught his disciples. "Give us this day our daily bread." And adhering to the tradition of the three point sermon we will focus on three of the seven words: Give us bread.

We begin by asking who is us? We know that the first people who prayed these words were the disciples. They are us. In the reading from Acts, the community broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts. They are a congregation. They are us, too. Jesus brings more people to the table. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. This suggests to me that us is always one more than me or we. Us may include the homeless person on State Street, the tenant in a low income apartment who must choose between paying the electric bill or buying food to eat. The Biblical call to hospitality to the stranger means that us is always one more than me or we.

The noun "bread" or, more generally, food– is a bundle of nutrients that, in the right quantities and combinations, are essential for life. But Jesus reminds us with the first temptation in the wilderness that, "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4).

Jesus also says, "I am the bread of life." He is the bread that nourishes our soul more deeply than the bread on the table. We live by God’s word, and the Bread of Life, that nourishes and sustains our lives.

Let’s move this discussion about bread to bread systems, also know as food systems. Michael Pollan’s insightful book, Omnivore’s Dilemma, explores the history and underpinnings of four food systems. The dominant system is industrial agriculture. This is the way of growing, producing, transporting it to grocery stores and getting it on the shelves for consumers at the lowest possible price. Oil is the energy used to drive this bread system. Oil is used fuel tractors, make fertilizers, and for transportation. This bread system is controlled by a small number of transnational corporations.

The costs of this bread system to the environment, animals, and production laborers is well documented. I contend that there is also a spiritual cost to this bread system. Industrial agriculture has turned food, once understood as a gift from God, into a commodity to be purchased. Our relationship with food is transactional. You add vegetables, bread, honey, meat, milk and potato chips in your cart pay through them when you go through the check out line. It’s all quite efficient. But where does God fit into this system? We can track the milk in the cooler back to the cow, nourished by genetically modified seed corn, picked from a cornfield smothered with pesticides that kill everything except the corn. Ultimately the water, sunlight, and soil are traced back as gifts. And we give thanks to God. Is this what goes through your mind when you stand before the cooler to pick out a gallon of milk? I look for the lowest price! We call this free trade in a market driven economy.

If industrial agriculture is at one end of the spectrum, the system at the other end is the bread system of subsistence. Two weeks ago former members of Advent, Maite Lorente and Andrew Thoms were visiting for a few days. Andrew and Maite moved to Sitka, Alaska when Andrew was offered a job with the Sitka Conservancy Society. A group of us gathered to learn about the work of the organization and their life in Alaska. Andrew commented that many of the people where they live, catch fish, hunt deer, dig for clams and grow a limited variety of garden produce. This is a bread system of subsistence. Few, if any of us, fall into this system. But if you have ever gardened and harvest vegetables, or caught a fish, or shot game, you know that it is a different experience than picking it up at the grocery store.

I remember fishing with Jake Schneider late one afternoon when we were in the Boundary Waters last summer. Jake is a very good fisherman and he landed a very big large mouth bass. We were both delighted. I will never forget Jake’s words, "Wait until I tell my Dad hears about this!" Jake did not put up a fight when I offered to fillet the fish back at the campsite. While we chatted I was struck by the awareness that this fish gave up its life to nourish our hunger. The cooked fillets were delicious and we were grateful to Jake for sharing his catch with us, and grateful to God for the fish and the habitat that nourished its life.

Although not necessarily true, the subsistence bread system is more closely linked to God as the giver. I am not suggesting that we quit buying groceries at the store and go out and forage for food. At the same time, we will make choices based upon more reasons than buying food at the lowest possible cost.. We will do our homework and seek more information than the nutritional value and ingredients on the package. How far has this food been transported, where was it grown or raised, what chemicals were applied to the produce or what was injected into animal, what was the animal fed? We will also take advantage of locally grown food and grass fed livestock, consider becoming a member of a community supported agriculture and planting a garden. We might think of these actions as spiritual disciplines.

I like to shop at the westside farmer’s market on Saturday mornings. I like buying my yogurt from the people whose picture are on the container, tomatoes from the grower, milk from the dairy farmer. I bump into more of you at the farmer’s market than anywhere else I go, and I enjoy seeing you in this context. You aren’t quite as rigid and uptight as you are on Sunday mornings. The food Nan and I purchase at the market brings greater delight to our fellowship when we share a meal together. Our gratitude to God, the giver is magnified.

We find Biblical precedence to the spirituality of eating in the book of Daniel. As a young man, Daniel and his friends, are taken captive by Nebuchadnezzer of Babylon. They are enrolled in a strict regimen of learning, in preparation for becoming a member of King Nebuchadnezzer’s court.

He is also given a daily ration of food and wine by the king, but this he rejects, worried that the diet will defile him. He asks his guard to test him and the others by giving them vegetables to eat and water to drink instead of receiving the king’s rations, then so be it, the guards can do with him as they will. At the end of this time, true to his faith and his word, Daniel presents himself fatter and stronger than the rest, and as a result throughout his three years of training, continues to receive vegetables in place of the royal rations and wine.

This isn’t a story about eating vegetables. It isn’t a dietary lesson. No, it is a lesson in faith. Notice what Daniel doesn’t do. He doesn’t reject the lessons and learning the king has prepared form him. He even learns the Chaldean language. For whatever reason, these things are not the things he believes risk defiling him and corrupting his trust and reliance on the God of Israel. Instead, it is the food. Daniel’s faithfulness to God and reliance on God is grounded in what he firmly requests not to eat.

If we were to take Daniel’s actions as a model for our time, it wouldn’t be the particulars of his diet that we would emulate, but rather his unwillingness to simply eat what the regime set before him. We will choose to purchase and eat food in ways that honor God as the giver, fosters relationships with other people, nonhuman life, soil and creation. And let us remember to say our prayer, the seven words Jesus teaches, "Give us this day our daily bread.