6 On this mountain, the Lord of heavenly forces will prepare for all peoples a rich feast, a feast of choice wines, of select foods rich in flavor, of choice wines well refined. 7 He will swallow up on this mountain the veil that is veiling all peoples, the shroud enshrouding all nations. 8 He will swallow up death[b] forever. The Lord God will wipe tears from every face; he will remove his people’s disgrace from off the whole earth, for the Lord has spoken. 9 They will say on that day, “Look! This is our God, for whom we have waited— and he has saved us! This is the Lord, for whom we have waited; let’s be glad and rejoice in his salvation!” 10 The Lord’s hand will indeed rest on this mountain. Moab will be trampled down as straw is trampled into manure. (Common English Bible)
“A Place at the Table: An Advent in
Solidarity with the Poor,” Week Two
I
cannot possibly paint my usual word-picture at the beginning of these things to
tell you about what it might be like to live in the country of North Korea—not
simply because I have never been there, but because so few outsiders ever
have. But imagine a wholly evil,
brutally totalitarian government, replete with concentration camps, secret
police, and a real short temper. Now
compound that with a relative lack of arable land and you get a perfect recipe
for perpetual famine…something that the North Korean people have been facing
perennially since the mid-1990’s when the late Kim Jong-il ascended to the
office of his father, Kim il-Sung. But a
birthday present of mine from Carrie—a subscription to the food magazine Lucky
Peach—gave me an incredibly powerful, moving, and dare I say emotional look
into what it is like to eat in North Korea when they sent a journalist there to
do just that. And this is what he wrote,
in part:
A quick glance at any statistic about
health and nutrition in the country will tell you that each of our individual
meals would have easily dwarfed the average daily caloric intake of an ordinary
North Korean. Protein of any kind is
rare in the countryside, and fruit is a real delicacy; even the browning apple
slices (we received) were a relative luxury.
By local standards, the amount of food we were served was obscene. Which only makes our rejection of it all the
more ugly…
In the moment it feels strange, like
playing the fiddle while Rome is burning.
The feeling is vaguely horrible and acutely hypocritical. But you eat anyway—because the food is there,
and you’re hungry. You share your food
as much as possible, of course, and make other small gestures to allay the
moral dilemma. But you eat. And if the food is good, you savor. There’s some cognitive dissonance at play:
you understand that people all around you may be starving, but you enjoy your
meal.
In North Korea, we committed something
of a double hypocrisy: we knew people around us were starving, and that we were
being served feasts, but we didn’t enjoy them.
And
honestly, truly, I think the same can be said of us here, today, in the United
States. So often at our kitchen tables,
we serve ourselves feasts relative to the food insecurity of hundreds of
millions of people worldwide, and we do not enjoy them. We do not appreciate them as we ought. And it is something that this next
installment of our Advent series is going to tackle.
Another
new liturgical season, another sermon series, right? Well, pretty much, but this liturgical
season—called Advent—is relatively short, only four weeks long, and unique in
that it is largely a waiting game as we count down the days to Christmas
(which, let’s be honest, how many of us started doing after Halloween?). But even though Advent is a time of
festiveness in our culture, with Christmas carols on the radio station and
gingerbread this and peppermint mocha that, Advent actually began as a
penitential season—a season in which we were meant to follow the exhortation of
John the Baptist as he foretold Christ, telling us to repent and believe in the
coming Messiah. One of the most
prominent spiritual disciplines of penitence is fasting, and so for this
Advent, I chose a source of sermon series material you may be familiar
with. If you remember my “Advent
Conspiracy” sermon series two years ago, about trying to find Christ within the
crass consumerism of Christmas, well, one of the Advent Conspiracy authors,
Pastor Chris Seay of Ecclesia in Houston Texas, has written a sequel called “A
Place at the Table,” in which he details fasting as a spiritual
discipline. Though the book is actually
written for Lent, the season when we are supposed to give something meaningful
up, I have shanghaied it for Advent because I think that the holiday season is
probably when our charitable goodwill is often on the front burner, and I
wanted to be able to speak to that here.
This week, we turn to the chapter of Pastor Chris’s book entitled
“Miracle Bread,” in which he writes in part:
Many days I wake up, and the first
thought to enter my mind is, “What do I want to eat today?” I really like food, and here in Houston I
have a lot of good choices. It’s
embarrassing to admit, but many mornings (even before the sun is completely up)
I wonder whether to have Tex-Mex or Korean tacos. Or what about Thai cuisine, or Indian? It is not just the time I spend answering the
question that makes me feel so self-absorbed, but also the way my cravings have
the power to shape my day…
(But) a very simple realization broke my
will, pride, and eventually my heart. I
realized that the joy that food and material possessions bring to me is often
substantial, but that far too often I lack any sense of gratitude for it. The fact that God sustains our lives by a
gift from His hand should cause us to stop everything and offer sincere thanks,
but so often we do not. The same is true
for the air we breathe, our health and well-being, and sadly even the grace and
forgiveness offered to us through Jesus the Liberating King.
This
passage from Isaiah 25 should ring familiar, then, to all of us who are just
like Pastor Chris—and like me, for that matter—in our Falstaff-esque love for
food. Rich food is one thing, and
well-aged wine another, but the bone marrow that verse 6 mentions is something
else entirely—marrow, to this day, is a delicacy and a luxury. A little bit of it goes an awfully long
way. But Isaiah is prophesying foods
“filled” with the stuff—it’s over-the-top food porn, it’s the Food Network on
steroids. This verse is obscene in how
decadent it is.
And
it is probably supposed to be that way, because those sorts of visions and, if
you will, daydreams are the stuff that people who eat minimally sometimes
indulge in. I know that during my
student days, I would order off the dollar menu and think about a fabulous
nine-course meal at the French Laundry instead of thinking about the six-inch
BLT on honey oat that I was actually eating. (I’m sorry, Subway…our entire
relationship was built on lies and fantasies…)
The
difference is that Isaiah probably knew what the stuff tasted like. Unlike the other Old Testament prophets with
books to their names, Isaiah was a prophet of the royal court, and so he
probably wasn’t out on a street corner wearing a pickle barrel and shouting
that the world is going to end. Isaiah
instead is promising this sort of life—the life that he enjoys—for everyone.
And
the thing is Isaiah doesn’t stop there.
He builds on this to talk about how God will swallow up death forever
(we get to consume marrow and wine, God has to consume death…I think He may
have gotten the short end of that stick), how God will wipe away all of our
tears, and how God will take away all of our shames and our disgraces. It is incredibly hopeful, incredibly powerful
stuff. But it is also potentially very
dangerous stuff to the way our world works.
Because
the way our world works, the poor are not supposed to enjoy these sorts of privileges. Much less the taste of good food, the poor
are not supposed to have their shame and disgrace taken away from them. We do things that are meant to shame and
disgrace them every day. Letters to the
editor suggesting that the names and addresses of welfare recipients be
publicized. Hateful comments about the
poor being leeches on society, even if they work full-time. Even something as subtle as handing a WIC
check over to the supermarket clerk to endorse, in full view of everybody else
in the checkout line, can carry with it its own form of humiliation, since now
everybody knows exactly how you are paying for your bread and baby formula.
Bread
that does not have to be bought and paid for in this way, that is true miracle
bread. It is the bread that Jesus
multiplies thousandsfold in order to feed the five thousand men, plus their
women and children, after John the Baptist is executed. It is the bread that Jesus consecrates as His
body at the Passover, giving new meaning to the liberation of sin that God’s
children experience. And it is the bread
that would be included in the feast that Isaiah prophesies.
It
is the bread that enables us to offer a place at the table to all comers, all
takers. It is the bread that entire
faith testimonies, entire spiritual journeys, entire God experiences are made
from.
What
is the miracle bread in your life? What
is the spiritual food that motivates your hungry spiritual body the second you
wake up in the morning, like how Tex-Mex or Korean food motivates the hungry
physical body? Maybe you even have to
ask yourself, “Is there any miracle bread in my life?” In other words, am I spiritually starving
right now?
Of
course I hope that isn’t the case: if I’m completely honest—and completely
selfish—that doesn’t reflect well on my own work as your preacher and teacher. But perhaps if you are spiritually poor, it
can give you a small window into the life of someone who is materially
poor. I know that I have looked at some
incredibly spiritually rich pastors, colleagues, and friends, and envied them,
thinking, “I want what they have,” just like we would want our neighbor’s big-screen plasma television or
spanking-brand-new Audi. It’s still
jealousy. It’s still envy, whether we are
envying a spiritual wealth or a material wealth. In other words, like I said at the beginning,
we still are being served feasts in our lives, but so often we do not enjoy
them.
And
why is that? Honestly, I think that we
use what power we have as a weapon to tear down, rather than as a tool to
build, because really, it is far easier and far quicker to tear someone else
down than to build them up. Building
someone else up—in any capacity, material, spiritual, emotional, anything—is laborious,
time-intensive, and sometimes, well, frustrating.
Now
imagine having to build the entire world up, starting with a small circle of
twelve disciples, then a larger circle of seventy, then the church entire. That is why the birth we are about to
celebrate is so special: what we struggle to do sometimes with just one person—to
build them up instead of tear them down—is what Jesus managed to do in the
course of His birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection. It is why we call Him Savior.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longiew,
Washington
December
8, 2013
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