Preached on February 27, 2000
By The Reverend Dr. Thomas C. Sheffield
Text: Mark 2: 15-22
"What are you having for dinner?" It is
the question that is part of every call I make at dinnertime
to my mother or my brother and now daughters. "What are
you having for dinner?" It is part of our family. Why that
is, I am not entirely sure. That it is important to know
about dinner, about eating, about eating together, however,
I am sure.
I am also sure that for some reason eating
and eating together are important to Jesus and to those
who gathered around him. It is at the heart of the Gospel
reading today. Eating, eating dinner, eating dinner with
this one and that one are all significant for mention and
discussion and careful scrutiny. The opposite also is discussed
... not eating, fasting, fasting alone are questioned and
answered.
Something is going on here? But what? Why
is it all so important? It does not take too much thought,
reading or remembrance to know that when people sit down
together at a meal something begins to happen. Sometimes
it is like Ari Goldman who remembers in Searching for
God at Harvard the meals he shared in his home. In those
moments, with his arguing parents stilled and the table
aglow with crystal and candles, life was for a brief time,
he writes, the way it was intended to be always.
But meal times can also be quite different
than that. It can be the moment of confrontation and disappointment
rather than peace and promise. In Flaubert's Madame Bovary,
Emma becomes increasingly irritated with her husband,
Charles, at mealtime. Flaubert puts it this way: "It was
especially at mealtimes that she felt she could bear her
life no longer, in that little room on the ground floor
with its smoking stove, squeaking door, sweating walls and
damp stone floor. All the bitterness of life seemed to be
served up to her on her plate, as the steam rose from the
boiled meat. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble
a few hazelnuts or lean on her elbow and idly make lines
in the oilcloth with her knife."
In the wonderful film Avalon, the
disintegration of American family life following World War
II is portrayed through meal times. In the beginning a large
extended family is pictured at bountiful, noisy Thanksgiving
meals with loads of aunts, uncles, and cousins, all instructing
and telling stories and savoring together the good food.
However, as the film progresses, the family begins to fall
apart, pull apart and move apart. Toward the end, the large
family scene is replaced by a few people seated on chairs
in the living room, staring mutely into the large, bulbous
television screen of the 1950's and eating off their individual
TV trays.
But that awareness and remembrance still
are not enough. Simply being aware of such problems and
possibilities at a particular mealtime does not account
for all the interest in what and with whom Jesus is eating.
It must be something more. So we need to look and think
a bit more carefully about what is happening.
We'll start in the middle of the story with
the questioning about fasting. Why do they not fast? Jesus'
answer is that there will be no fasting while the Bridegroom
is there with them. "As long as they have the bridegroom
with them, they cannot fast." Christ is with them. The Holy
One who illumines their lives is with them. The Bread of
Life, the Light of the World, the Shepherd of their lives
is with them. It isn't possible to fast. One only can celebrate
... feast ... eat with joy and abandon. After all the kingdom
of God is being set up among them and with them and in each.
And where will that be seen? It will be seen where people
gather every day. It will not be in special acts, like fasting,
that may try to bring the holy into life. It won't be in
the fasting. It will be in meals, in lives lived in joy
and in agony, around tables where there is isolation and
around tables where hands are held in prayer and affection,
where there is silent anger and robust talk, where love
is remembered and where promises are kept.
Eating, that most fundamental and ordinary
act of life, becomes a way to find Christ is with you.
It is in the fundamental and in the ordinary,
in shopping for meals and cooking meals, in eating meals
and cleaning up from meals, in working and sleeping, in
being together and being alone, in keeping promises and
asking forgiveness, in driving down streets and walking
into stores, in the words used to talk on the phone and
in the words used to write contracts that the kingdom of
God will be seen. It isn't in fasting. It isn't in the acts
and moments reserved for holy things. It is in our lives,
in our ordinary practices of life that Christ's presence
can be affirmed and felt. It is the ordinary times of eating,
in sharing, and in giving ourselves, that we find Christ
among us. It is with those with whom we eat, it is the way
we work, it is the manner of our living together, it is
the time spent with friends and it is the time restoring
friendship, it is the way we greet each other, look at one
another, touch one another that express that we understand
we are in the presence of Christ.
In his book Growing in the Life of Faith,
Craig Dykstra tells this story entitled: "My Teacher, We
Made Bread...." "One Sunday many years ago, on returning
home from church, I was having the typical what-did-you-do-in-Sunday-school-today
conversation with my two sons. The younger, who was six,
came up with this: "My teacher, we made bread together and
I ate mine already and it was good." I didn't pay much attention
at the time, but the line stuck with me. "Made bread together."
To make bread together in Christ's name is to make life
together. And this is exactly what my son and his teacher
were doing.
"I ate it," he said. This is important,
too. To make bread together and then not to eat it is to
fail to let it do its silent work in us. We are nourished
in so many ways, and we don't remember two percent of them.
Yet if we take food in, we are changed. Thinking back, we
who were there as children can all recall certain faces,
certain very particular places and days and things we did.
Our memories are proof that we, too, ate the bread, and
that it is still working in us.
"We don't make life from nothing, as God
did," Craig writes. "We make it from the things God gave
us: flour and salt and milk and one another. But when we
do, for us it is the same. The light breaks, and the darkness
rolls up on one side and we say, 'That's good.' We know
it and God knows it. And God's blessing on us is that we
can say it together."
You know he is right, don't you? You know
that already you are fed. You know already that Christ is
in your life and that in the making of your bread, in the
eating of your meals, in the day in, day out living of your
lives are where you express that love that is the Kingdom
of God.
But how do we begin to do that? How do we
begin to realize that Christ is there? First, let us go
back to Jesus and then we will hear Craig's final words
to the story.
The first question that was asked Jesus
was about those with whom he was eating. They were hated
tax collectors. They were sinners who should be kept out
of view and definitely away from the table. "Why?" he is
asked, "why them?" Because they have need. Because they
know their need. Because they know their need to be with
Christ.
To know Christ is first to know our
need. It is to know that our joy has need for thanksgiving.
It is to know that our isolation and loneliness need a companion.
It is to know that our bitterness needs forgiveness and
our anger needs a savior. It is to know that we are weak
in facing life and that we fall and fail. It is to know
how often in the secrecy of the darkness that we weep for
what life could have been and might have been. To know Christ
is to know how much we need to be led from the darkness
into the light. But until they see that need, says Jesus,
what can I do?
Until we see that need, it is unlikely that
we will see much of the kingdom of God among us. It not
very likely that we will have a sense or much of a suspicion
that our lives are part of a much larger life, that our
meals are part of a much greater banquet or that our work
is part of a grander purpose.
But those who do see their need, those who
know that their lives do need to be fed in ways they have
not been able to discover, those who know the pain they
cannot heal, the problems they cannot fix, the collapsing
life that can no longer be shorn up, begin to find Christ
with them, working with them, living in them. They begin
to see that their lives ... making bread ... sitting at
tables ... going to work ... speaking with those they meet
... loving those to whom they have promised love ... are
part of something better, grander and greater.
Craig finishes his short story about bread
and about eating the bread with a reflection about church
school teachers. But in truth it is about each of us. It
is about each of us who is going about life in the most
ordinary of ways. It is about us who know how much we need
and how much we lack. And it is about us who in the midst
of the meal we call life with its pain and its possibility,
with weakness and with joy, find that Christ is among them.
"They come, each with his or her own piece
of life, in fear and trembling, most of the time feeling
they've got little to give and almost nothing to say. Probably
somebody asked them to do it, almost twisted their arms
to do it.
But the reason many keep on doing it, I
think, is that they are compelled to do it, from within,
maybe even by sometimes painful, sometimes satisfying grace
that works in and through them. They search through the
curriculum materials for something to teach and in the how-to
manuals for ways to teach it. But what they do more than
anything is bring themselves to another person. And there
they make bread together and eat it, and know from time
to time that it is good."
