Meherrin Presbyterian Church
October 12, 2014, Ordinary 28A
Ruth 1:22-2:7; 1 Corinthians 11:17-22
A Table With Enough
For Everyone
A few weeks ago,
after my last visit to this congregation, my wife and I made a stop at a small
stand selling fruits and vegetables, a few miles north of here on Highway
360. We came away with several
apples, mostly eaten by my wife; some peaches, several of which ended up in a
peach crisp for dessert; and a goodly sized tomato that found its way into two
very tasty BLT sandwiches that week.
Oh, and a jar of honey.
Living in an area
where such goods can be found almost by accident, it’s easy to get
spoiled. Even in Richmond proper,
the number of farmer’s markets dotted around the metro area over the course of
a week can be challenging to keep up with.
Those farmer’s
markets, though, don’t cover the whole city. Additionally, the large supermarket chains that so carefully
preserve their dominance of the market in a city like Richmond are absent from
many of those same neighborhoods.
If you happen to live in such a neighborhood, it can be profoundly
challenging to find quality food for one’s family, especially if one relies on
the circuitous bus routes of the city’s transit system for one’s primary
transportation.
So it is that, in
close proximity to one another, one can find neighborhoods that qualify as
“food deserts” – reflecting the lack of options for finding good, healthy food
nearby – and neighborhoods with a glut of healthy and accessible food
options. Because one must not
interfere with market forces, or because poverty is near inescapable once one
is caught in it, no matter how hard one works, these inequalities of access
persist over time, and indeed even grow more pronounced as well as persistent.
This phenomenon is
only one of many that illustrates the complicated and difficult role that food
plays in the modern, technologically advanced world. In an age in which farms are capable of producing truly
unbelievable amounts of food, the number of people across the world, and across
this country, who go without food at some point in their daily lives continues
to grow. The food scarcity noted
above is hardly restricted to Richmond, nor even to cities as large as Richmond
– as this church evidently recognizes, based on the fact of the collected food
I see when I come to preach.
Today marks the
beginning of the Food Week of Action, sponsored by the Presbyterian Hunger
Program, an agency of PC(USA) under the supervision of the Presbyterian Mission
Agency. The Presbyterian Hunger
Program, or PHP, works
to alleviate hunger and eliminate its causes, responding with compassion and
justice to poor and hungry people in local communities in the United States and
internationally. It is supported by
the One Great Hour of Sharing offering and by regular gifts to the Hunger Fund
to support ministries of direct food relief, development assistance, public
policy advocacy, education, and lifestyle integrity. The PHP seeks to fulfill
its mission through strategic grantmaking, print and web educational and worship
materials, partnership collaborations, and participatory programs that allow us
to recognize and love especially the most vulnerable of our neighbors next door
and across the planet.
I suspect most Christians
don’t need to be told that we are to care for and help provide for those who do
not have enough to eat. I wonder,
though, how many would be surprised to realize just how much our scriptures
have to say about food and how God’s children are meant to share it. The scriptures read today only scratch
the surface of the Bible’s content on the subject of food, stories that stretch
from the many beautiful fruits of the Garden of Eden to the twelve kinds of
fruits on the Tree of Life in the last chapter of Revelation. On many occasions the gospels speak of
Jesus’ ministry in relation to the sharing of meals, whether within the four
thousand or five thousand fed from a few loaves to the turning of water into
wine, to bread and wine broken and poured at one last meal with his disciples.
What we do have in these
two stories, though, does illustrate two extremes in which the people of God
have existed in terms of providing for one another. In one story we see those with plenty taking care that those
without do not remain without, while in the other no such care is evident.
Perhaps the book of Ruth
is not wildly familiar to many people, or even many longtime Christians. Today’s scripture picks up with Naomi
and her daughter-in-law Ruth returning to the city of Bethlehem. Naomi and her husband had left Bethlehem
years before to escape a famine, taking up residence in the region called
Moab. Their two sons had married
local women there, Orpah and Ruth.
First Naomi’s husband died, and about ten years later the two sons died
as well, leaving Naomi with her two Moabite daughters-in-law. Having heard that the famine had passed
in Bethlehem, she resolved to return.
Orpah was persuaded to remain in her home country and return to her
family, but Ruth would not be dissuaded from following Naomi to Bethlehem.
With no husband to either
woman, Naomi and Ruth were left to the mercies of their kin in the region
around Bethlehem. One kinsman to
Naomi’s husband, Boaz, had large fields nearby. Ruth proposed to go gleaning—gathering up the grain left
over after Boaz’s workers had first gathered all the grain they could. In this time such was a custom that
allowed for those without food to get food. Boaz, though, could have placed restrictions on Ruth, or
even forbidden her to glean in the fields. Instead, Boaz not only allows for her to continue gleaning,
but instructs his workers to protect her as she works, provides a little extra
barley for her, and allows her to eat with Boaz’s own workers.
Of course, if you do
remember the story, Ruth ends up marrying Boaz, with a little machination from
Naomi, and ends up becoming the great-grandmother of King David. Still, this segment of the story is
instructive of how Israelite society was structured in such a way that those
without were not left without.
Even a stranger like Ruth was not set aside because of her foreignness,
but was able to provide for her mother-in-law. To be sure, Israelite society didn’t always work this well,
but the law given way back in Moses’s time had evolved and been interpreted so
that the Israelites knew that part of their covenant with God was the
instruction to take care of the poor among them, whether they be native or
stranger.
The world in which we live
is dramatically different than the world of Boaz, Naomi, and Ruth. Still, I wonder if we can, from our own
daily experience, bring to mind those who – like Ruth and Naomi – live in a
situation, or a system, in which their ability to provide for themselves is
compromised. They are unable to
work, perhaps, and have no family to provide for them. Or maybe they do work, maybe more than
one job, but still cannot make enough to avoid having to choose between feeding
family and paying rent. They are
out there, whether in the big city or a rural county, and they are who God
calls us not to overlook like the rest of society does.
We in the church, though,
are not always ready to follow here.
Too often, the voice of the church is more prone to condemn than to show
compassion – telling that one already working two jobs to “get a job” or
blaming him or her for not working hard enough. The church too easily looks for excuses to judge rather than
seeking to find ways to show God’s grace to the ones in need. Israelites like Boaz, out of the pages
of Hebrew Scripture, judge our modern coldness and failure to live up to the
standards God has set for us.
The passage from 1
Corinthians is regrettably a bit more reflective of the ways we are not always
so prone to fellowship around the table.
Were I to have continued from the end of that passage, you would
recognize the words of verse 23 and beyond as the Words of Institution spoken as
part of the liturgy around the Lord’s Supper. Our passage today, though, requires a quick explanation of
the context in which the early church observed that sacrament, still a new and
evolving practice at the time.
In the earliest days of
the church the re-enactment of the Last Supper Christ had with his disciples,
with the breaking of bread and pouring of wine that have become the core of the
modern Lord’s Supper, took place within the context of a full meal with all of
the community gathered together.
Meal practices of the time, drawing upon Greek traditions and Roman
adaptations of those traditions, involved a sequence of different courses to
the meal.
Adapting these Greco-Roman
practices to the particular interest of the Christian church involved
negotiating several problematic features of those Greco-Roman traditions; among
them the preference of more “important” guests of the dinner to be seated in
places of honor. This is also the
background to Jesus’s teaching in Luke 14, where he instructs his disciples not
to seek out places of honor at the table.
This wasn’t really compatible with the teachings of Christ, obviously,
but sometimes the church had trouble remembering this.
Apparently the church at
Corinth was such a church. As Paul
describes what he has been told about the goings-on there, some families or
groups were arriving early and gobbling up all the food, while the more needy
in the congregation were left with nothing to eat. Furthermore, the excessive behavior led to incidents of
drunkenness and ill behavior disruptive enough to be reported to Paul.
Food is, when you get
right down to it, a particularly strong example of God’s providence. It sustains us. As an added bonus, it’s enjoyable. And yet we are too easily led to abuse
that good gift one way or another, whether in taking too much for ourselves, or
hoarding the good and leaving only poor-quality food for the poor, or abusing
the labor of those who do hard, back-breaking work to provide the food we
eat; or some other way in which we make something painful and elusive out of
God’s good gift.
May it never be so with
us. Sharing a meal with our
sisters and brothers in Christ is not only emulating the model offered so many
times in scripture, but is also one of the greatest pleasures we can enjoy. When we share God’s good gift with one
another; when we give respect and honor to those who take upon themselves the
work of planting, nurturing, harvesting what we eat; when we give thanks to God
for that labor and care, and for what we eat itself; we are living, in a
microcosmic way, the fellowship of Christ in the family of God.
For the good gifts of
God’s creation, Thanks be to God.
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