11/01/2009 COMFORT FOOD

COMFORT FOOD

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food,

a feast of well-aged wines….”

 Isaiah 25:6a (NRSV)

The summer’s God & Church class video shown two weeks ago was about time travel.  If time travel were possible & allowed you to bring into our day someone from a previous century, whom would that person be?  Would it be a famous character from history, a great, great grandparent, or some obscure common person from another culture?  Whom would you want to meet?  Tell us.

So now that we’ve considered whom we would greet, I think it safe to presume that we would have a lot of questions for these individuals &, subse-quently, listen intently to them.  Probably, we would want to introduce them to our lives, & what it’s like in the 21^st century.  So, what kinds of things would we want to show them?  Your ideas?

I would want to meet Niklaus Knoer, an Anabaptist pastor from the 18^th century, who worked to reconcile the warring religious factions in Basel, Switzerland.   For those of you who know my preaching, it will come as no surprise to learn that I’d want to take my visitor from the past to the supermarket.  I believe he would be astounded at the idea itself – a place where abundance & variety reign supreme.  It’s the street market taken to the nth degree.  Whether a Hebrew from Old Testament times, a wealthy medieval monarch, or your ancestor from 100 years ago, each one would be amazed by the vast amount of food.

From the average supermarket to the Wegman’s brand of hypermarket, our time-travelling guests would be flabbergasted at the variety, the far-flung countries that are represented, the fact that produce, meat, fish, breads, sweets, & spices are under one roof.  The bounty represented by today’s supermarket was totally unheard of, even in my grandfather’s day a few decades ago.  He managed the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. grocery store, the A&P as it was commonly known.  His establishment was one floor, 45’ wide by 35’ deep.

It’s not only the food stores that are so much bigger.  Convention hotels feed 10,000 persons at a sitting with banquet halls measured in acres, the food in miles & tons.  No wonder the average U.S. citizen consumes 4,270 calories/day, more than twice what’s required.[1]  Compare that with the 1800-calorie diet in Jesus’ day.  One-third of our intake is junk food & soft drinks, causing us to be obese & malnourished, simultaneously.[2]  There’s a 21^st-century advancement!    Why can’t they come up with something that’s both nutritious & slimming, simultaneously!?!

As I report these statistics there are still too many places where persons do not come close to consuming the Recommended Daily Allowance of 2000 calories.  Despite exceptional advances in the standard of living, as well as improvements in agricultural production & distribution, poverty, famine, & corruption deny the dietary basics to more of our fellow humans than we might believe.  These persons, as well as humans throughout history do not & did not know the cornucopia of foodstuffs we take for granted in middle class America.  (You know what it was like the first time you set foot in a Wegman’s!)  Our forebears could only imagine what has become the norm for us.

And imagine they did.  Wish, dream, & fantasize were all they could do.  The quantities & varieties of food such as we know did not exist in any culture.

  No wonder scripture is replete with images of food.  The story of Cain & Abel involved food.  The covenant with Noah involved food.  The Hebrew slaves who escaped from Egypt dined on manna in the desert.  Jesus fed the 5,000, told the parables of the wedding banquet & workers in the vineyard.  He celebrated the Passover feast that came to be known as the Last Supper.  Our scripture today, teaches about a heavenly banquet.

Biblical images of the “good life” always entailed great feasts.  Many persons today still refer to religious holy days as feast days.  Holidays regularly involve feasts from the chocolates on St. Valentines Day to fastnachts on Shrove Tuesday to the cookies & turkeys at Christmas & hams & dyed eggs & marshmallow Peeps at Easter.  And how about all those potluck, covered dish suppers we do?  Even our youth here know that whatever food is left from an earlier reception awaits consumption at their evening meeting.

Chapters 24 – 27 in Isaiah are known as his “little apocalypse.”  Apoca-lyptic literature is most often associated with the Book of Revelation & passages from the prophet Daniel.  It is scary stuff to most contemporary readers. Whether from Isaiah, or St. John’s Apocalypse, or Jesus speaking in Matthew 24 & Mark 13, we focus on the horrors announced in these passages.  The History Channel is making a mint on this type of stuff!   I believe we find these prophecies intri-guing because we live in a land of plenty & are captivated by the proclamations of what we won’t have.  Most individuals we know ignore, forget, or are unaware of the good news & promises contained in apocalyptic verses, as in our lesson.

The ancients, unlike us, clung to these images of goodness & glory, of what they would have in the future.  Life was so difficult any day of the week for them that they gravitated toward the beatific visions of heaven & paradise.  They held to the hopes of Revelation’s heavenly streets of gold & tales of grand banquets.  Much the same can be said for Christianity’s appeal where it’s growing exponentially in Africa.  In less affluent cultures, past & present, writings about bounteous food always bring reassurance, hope, & comfort.

While the Bible’s talk of food & feasts does not provide the same level of interest to us, as to these other peoples, we certainly understand the idea of comfort food.  Our waistlines serve as proof.  In lives with abundance, we don’t need to talk & dream about food. We have it.  The Bible’s images seem less compelling to us.  We don’t quite get it.  We don’t grasp why these verses were such a big deal thousands of years ago.

Isaiah speaks to a people whose country was destroyed & citizens exiled to foreign lands.  Most of us do not have lives as difficult as they did.  We do, on occasion, experience extraordinarily bad &/or sad days.  The worst of them may come when a dear friend or family member dies.  That grief can overwhelm. 

At times, fond memories comfort us.  What also brings relief is our belief about the soul & how that loved one’s soul alive with Christ during its earthly existence continues eternally.[3]  Christ, who lives beyond the tomb, died & rose so that we might live forever, too.  It’s part of the deal!  As we count on seeing him on the other side, we expect to be with our loved ones there someday, too.

Those images of heaven which the Bible imparts are many.  One of them is of this grand heavenly banquet, when we will all be seated at the most sumptuous feast of them all, a table whose diameter is measured in light years, dwarfing even the most expansive convention buffet.  It’s outstanding news to the depressed, discouraged, grieving, & suffering!   In heaven, it’s all comfort food, all the time!

The great hymn-writer, Charles Wesley, wrote that at holy communion, we, here on earth, are given a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.  Yes, at his table we remember what Christ did.  Yes, as we partake, we realize his mysterious presence among us.  Yet, so many of us during the Lord’s Supper look forward to the promised peace that will be one day, & anticipate who will be seated at the greatest feasting table.  There will be our divine brother, Jesus, & everyone who died in Christ.  Loved ones & strangers & you & I will be together.  We dine with our family & the entire human family of God, discovering that they are one & the same.[4]

Today’s sacramental celebration provides a glimpse of that heavenly feast.  It will be a far better day. It will be joy unspeakable.  It will be everything scripture promises.  Jesus, our host, welcomes us to taste that glorious future.

In the Name….                        Copyright 2009 by G.D.Knerr at Lansdale, Pa.  All rights reserved.