“Questions Welcome: 
Why Do We Eat?”

Today we explore the question, “Why do we eat?”  Well, obviously we are human beings, and like all animals, we have to eat to stay alive.  But we eat for other reasons too.  When we are lonely, sad or stressed, food can be a real comfort, because it carries such deep emotional memories of childhood and “home.”  For me, sacred “home” space was my Nana’s maple kitchen table. There was nothing like a spring day with dappled sunlight shining through the crepe myrtle and plum blossoms outside her “breakfast room” window.  Over an after-school snack of tea and one of her cakes or pies, her prayers made Jesus seem very close – so close I could almost feel his embrace of me, his little child.  Let me tell you, her pies would make the most confirmed atheist shout “Halleluia!  The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!”  (And if you don’t believe me, just come to the White Steeple Inn on Saturday and try one of her recipes that I plan to bake.)

So in the Christian faith, breaking bread and sharing food is a deeply spiritual act – Jesus broke bread with his disciples and called us to remember him that way.  When we do that in our homes, we invite Holy Love into our physical families.  We we celebrate the sacrament of Communion, we invite Holy Love into our spiritual family.  But did you ever stop to think how weird it might look to someone from another faith that we actually eat in church?  I never saw it that way until a Jewish friend pointed that out to me.  You know, a couple weeks was the Jewish High Holiday of Yom Kippur, a day of dawn-to-dusk fasting and prayer.  Not long before that was the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan – where Muslims go without food from dawn to dusk for an entire month.  In that light, our Christian remembrance of Jesus where we eat in church – that’s odd, right?

You may remember how the Bible says Jesus was actually criticized sometimes for eating and drinking a little too much with his friends. Compared to his bug-eating cousin John the Baptist, who liked to fast and pray in the desert, Jesus and his friends were real “party animals.”  As his entourage traveled from town to town, they would attract these rock star-sized crowds, and Jesus would see that they all got enough to eat.  Jesus shared food everywhere he went – from simple meals at the home of Peter’s mother-in-law to picnics with thousands in the country to private wedding banquets and dinners with tax collectors and sinners.  Even after the resurrection, at the end of the gospels of Luke and John, Jesus had a BBQ on the beach with his old fishing buddies.

Today’s stories from Mark’s Gospel find Jesus returning home to Capernaum from a road trip with his disciples through Galilee.  We read that once he “was in the house... he sat down, called the twelve,” and settled their argument about “who was the greatest” by saying, “‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ 36Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, 37‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’”  I know it doesn’t say he sat down to eat, but I can well imagine that was why, can’t you?  Most people would want a “welcome home” that included food after a long road trip – especially after walking all around Galilee.  If that was the case, it would make sense for Jesus to praise those who were serving him at the table. We might even imagine this compliment aimed at Jesus’s wife, if the recent news reports are correct and he actually had one!  Who knows?

But I don’t think it really matters whether the child Jesus took into his arms that day was his own child or someone else’s.  The point was, it wasn’t exactly typical for a religious leader as important as Jesus to lift up a child, much less use one as the example of how to “receive the Kingdom of Heaven.”  We have no perspective on this story anymore, because we’ve seen too many pretty Sunday School pictures of Jesus welcoming the little children.  It’s the scripture we share at every baptism, right before we sing “Jesus Loves Me.”  We’re used to this gentle Jesus kissing babies now, but during the time he lived, people did not expect their God-anointed Messiah to do that –kids are just too noisy, too messy, too… sticky, right?  Priests and rabbis were discouraged from touching those you might expect to be the most ritually unclean – you know, children and women, the disabled and the sick people, and foreigners and slaves – “the least of these” that Jesus was always lifting up for special care.  In fact, you might say it was the very heart of the mission of Jesus – to proclaim and live out this inclusive Kingdom of God, a great banquet feast of love that is open to all of God’s children. 

And lest we forget, that “Good News” of God’s abundant love tends to make traditional followers of organized religion very angry, then as now.  Back then, Pharisees were always nit-picking and complaining about Jesus – how he and his disciples plucked grain on the Sabbath, and didn’t wash their hands properly.  Jesus enraged them, because he cared little about following all their strict policies and procedures.  But they were the cause of real indignation from Jesus, who called them out for going about “business as usual” and failing to care for the needy.  Like so many prophets who came before him, Jesus called people to care for the “widows and orphans,” the sick and the elderly, who filled the streets with their hungry and homeless, ritually “unclean” bodies.

Jesus condemned the religious leaders of his day as “hypocrites” who wasted their time debating questions of law and righteousness – who was right and who was wrong, who was “in” and who was “out” of favor with God – instead of fulfilling the commandment from Leviticus to “love you neighbor.”  Jesus kept pointing people to God’s top priorities – the “little ones” who were in the most need of care, a word that in Greek shares a root with our word for “peasant.” It translates best as “the little people,” not literal children. Remember how, at end of John’s Gospel, the last words of Jesus to the disciples were to “feed my lambs”?  When Jesus commanded us to “love one another,” I don’t believe he meant that to be only an abstract feeling or a prayer.  He wanted us to make sure actual human bodies got fed. 

What better way to remember that than coming together to eat in worship?  As we break bread and share it with our neighbors in church, it reminds us of how Jesus commanded us to break bread and share it with our neighbors out in the world as well.  This is what we do when we go on mission trips, as our men are doing in Boston this weekend.  This is what we do when we give through our Yankee Fair to those grieving and in special need of care.  This is what we do when we collect our annual Neighbors in Need offering, as we will do next Sunday.

As Communion makes our eating together sacred, it also reminds us to “receive the Kingdom of Heaven” as a child, trusting in the Divine hand that feeds us – just as our mother and grandmothers (and in my family, fathers) fed us from our birth, just as God cares for “the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,” as Psalm 8 says.  There are times when trusting God is very hard to do, but it is all that we can do.  I know many of you have been in that place before, and I suspect that many of us are in that place right now – where we are hungry for the steadfast love of God, where it comes to us like sweet manna in the wilderness of this harsh and judgmental world, where righteousness and red tape sometimes threaten to choke the life out of us!

That’s why my dear husband and I struggle to get our family to sit down at the table and eat together every chance we get.  We need food, of course, but we also need that spiritual break and reminder of our family’s love – so first we stop to hold hands and thank God for the food, even if we are so rushed and disorganized serving our plates that we say that prayer halfway through the meal.  Families get pulled in so many different directions today, I think we need this time of “grace” to feed us spiritually more than ever before.  We in the church can take the lead in consecrating this kind of “kitchen table communion.” Especially when we are in the midst of some special struggle or worry in life, we need to ask for the blessing of Christ’s peace – that peace that “passes all understanding” because it comes, ironically, when we remember that it is God who feeds us and not we ourselves.  May we be given the grace to relax and surrender care for our lives into God’s hands, as a child might do.  For there, Jesus promises us, we may the find real and everlasting peace that is the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

 

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Mark 9:30-41; 10:1, 13-16

³⁰They went on from there and passed through Galilee. [Jesus] did not want anyone to know it; ³¹for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.’ ³²But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.  ³³Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, ‘What were you arguing about on the way?’ ³⁴But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest. ³⁵He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ ³⁶Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ³⁷‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’ ³⁸ John said to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ ³⁹But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. ⁴⁰Whoever is not against us is for us. ⁴¹For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. …

10He left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. And crowds again gathered around him; and, as was his custom, he again taught them. …¹³People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. ¹⁴But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. ¹⁵Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ ¹⁶And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.