July 12, 2009:  HEALING, HOLY FOOD
1 Samuel 21:1-6; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; Psalm 24
Eileen Parfrey  --  Springwater Presbyterian Church

            If this story of David eating the holy bread is an excuse iron-clad enough for Jesus to use in all three synoptic gospels to justify his own Sabbath law-breaking (1), you’d think we would hear it preached more often.  But the lectionary committee doesn’t even assign it to the cycle.  Just when we could all use an effective excuse!  Get out of a speeding ticket because it’s how your grandfather drove. Let your teacher know you did homework last year, so you don’t need to this year.  Cut your kids’ allowances because that’s what the legislature does.
           I prefer to think that David’s story, despite the context in which Jesus uses it, isn’t so much about excuses as it is about the holiness of food.  David is running for his life, hungry, without even any weapons with which to hunt for food.  To their credit, he and his men are begging, as opposed to stealing food.  David may play fast and loose with where he’s going and why, but the priest’s compassion in giving the men something to eat is rooted in a religious Jewish respect and care for both body and soul.  As Christians we inherit of a couple thousand years of uneasy body/soul connection.  The ancient Greeks saw body and soul as two separate things.  The body was profane and temporary; the soul was pure and eternal.  In Jewish thought, the body and soul were one integrated whole.  But if holding together body and soul is good Jewish practice, why doesn’t Jesus practice good self care in today’s gospel lesson?  Ignoring his weariness and that of the disciples, he responds to the crowds’ needs.  Two thousand years of Christians trying to be like Jesus, and we take only his example of caring for others at one’s own expense.  It gives the Greeks the apparent victory.   
           Which is maybe why the fourth century Church worked so hard to suppress the heresy of body/soul separation.  We still alternate between the twin poles of binge and purge.  The Apostles Creed tried to address these heresies by affirming our faith in “the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”  We call this the doctrine of resurrection, and it has everything to do with how we get today’s David story to help with how we live right now.
           When we affirm belief in resurrection of the body, we affirm that humans are more than an eternal soul, more than a temporal body.  Unlike ancient Greeks who believed humans by nature have eternal souls, Christians believe that only God is eternal.  The transition from “life” as we presently know it to real “life everlasting,” is always gift, always grace (2).   Resurrection doesn’t mean just continuing what already exists, as if it’s the natural consequence of things as they are. Resurrection is an act of God, an act as mighty as that of creation itself, one which affirms the value of the material world.  The practical implication of belief in resurrection of the body and life everlasting is that we get “to love our own physicality and the worldly environment appropriate to it (3).” 
           And what does that have to do with life in our ZIP code?  Family meals and eating together.  Stephanie Paulsell, in her book Honoring the Body, tells why they are important.  At a time when, every day of the week, 1 American in 3 will eat at least one meal in a moving car, Paulsell has the nerve to talk about how important it is to sit around a table together to eat.  She makes it sound almost religious, like it’s something that equips us to live faithfully as disciples of Jesus Christ.  She makes it sound counter-cultural.  It’s easier to withstand cultural pressure about thin as beautiful when one enjoys food in company with others.  But also, delight in food counters messages about food as a means to an athletic end—bulking up to excel or reducing body mass to increase performance. 
           Eating together is more than our relationship with food; it’s about our relationship with each other.  When we sit at table and eat together, we discover that everyone’s voice is important.  We are fed on more than food as we learn to feed each other with words of gratitude.  We’ve been experimenting with that at Springwater.  Both session and the youth Vacation Bible School leaders have been practicing affirming and expressing gratitude.  Thank you for sitting between those two kids who were having a melt down; it settled them down.  I love it that you fix things.  Thank you for faithfully writing church checks for 14 years.  You were so organized for snack time, everything felt hospitable.
           Speaking of hospitality, that’s another outcome of the family meal.  In my family, we assumed Sunday dinners would include someone my parents invited home after church.  Many of you say that you continued attending at Springwater because Ken and Winnie had you over for lunch after church.  It wasn’t anything fancy and, one of you confessed, it was a little more eclectic in both means of preparation and in the result than you were used to, but everybody pitched in and you felt welcome. And you’re still here.  I don’t know when we lost the custom of sharing Sunday lunches.  Maybe in our rush to our next Sunday obligation—games or errands.  When the family table does not keep a space open for unexpected guests, we lose something of how to be people of faith.  For people who live alone, “family” is more than literal blood or marriage connections.  Family can be temporary.  Family becomes those people you gather at your table.
           In her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver shares the experience of her family’s commitment to being locavores for a year (eating only food produced in a fifty-mile radius of home).  In the process of learning to steward food as locavores—the purchase, preparation, and consumption of food—her family discovered each other as well as a simpler, more manageable lifestyle.  Rick and I don’t have the joy of growing our own food, so I rely on the farmer’s market for our locavore experience.  It has taken me some practice and self-discipline to learn to not buy every pint of berries I see, every peach and apricot as they come into season.  By reminding myself that there will be another market next week, and by attending to each item, I’m not just more restrained at the market, I find eating more enjoyable.
           As Paulsell connects eating with our faith life, she notes that the family table is a place for seeing and being seen.  Not in the Hollywood sense, but in the sense of seeing others as they really are, of being known in one’s own right.  Jean Vanier (and my Uncle Doug) says that, more than anything else, people just want to be known for who they are and loved.  Period.  For Paulsell, family table practices are learned abilities—hospitality, affirming one another, acknowledging that each voice is valued, seeing and knowing and loving.  She writes of a woman named Diana who was training for ministry.  Born with cerebral palsy, Diana was serving her internship year, nervous because her supervising pastor had asked her to help serve communion by holding the cup.  Diana was aware of the involuntary jerks caused by the limitations of her body, and so she grappled with what it meant to serve the church in such a state of brokenness.  The chalice she held was silver, and as she caught sight of her body reflected in the cup she thought, “This is my broken body, serving this church.  This is my body teaching people what we do with brokenness in the church.  Here in this cup is new life, and here is my body, expressing the truth of what this new life means!”  Paulsell concludes this story by saying, “In the table life of God we are received and welcomed, our bodies are blessed and nourished.  In the table life of God, we are seen as we really are, and we are deeply known.  In the table life of God, nothing is wasted, not even our own brokenness (4).”
           As you prepare this week to receive the sacrament of communion next week, you might consider what your table practices teach you.  Hospitality?  Gratitude?  Knowing and being known?  Perhaps they teach you the grace of your own brokenness.  It’s all grace.