Last year, there was an ad on tv from a Canadian grocery store chain. It starts with a woman arriving home from work, sharing her elevator with 5 or 6 others, all looking at their phones. She enters her apartment and her daughter is on the computer. The next scene has the two of them moving their table and chairs into the narrow apartment hallway, setting more than two spots for dinner and then waiting. Soon some neighbours come home with their pre-cooked chicken and the two women convince them to join. As more neighbours join, adding their tables and chairs and dinners, the song plays in the background: What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just…too little of.” Finally, a little girl knocks on the door at the end of the hall to invite what we imagine is the lonely old man. He closes we think he won’t come, but he re-emerges bringing a loaf of bread and a reluctant smile. The ad ends with the message: “Nothing brings us together like eating together.”
It’s a very well-crafted ad. It doesn’t make me want to shop for groceries, but it does make me want to know my neighbours. It does make me think about the power of food to build something among us.
We do it all the time. Someone comes into our home, and we offer them something…maybe it’s just a glass of water, a cup of coffee, maybe it’s more elaborate. It’s often how we show hospitality, to make someone welcome…it’s how we feel welcome that we know someone is thinking of us…
Our tradition has a history of eating together. Not just with potluck lunches, fall dinners in church halls the way we might experience it, but basic to our traditions very roots. Eating together was a core activity around which the very earliest christian churches gathered.
There are many stories of Jesus at dinners that involve food. Some have said that Jesus ate his way through the gospels…and it’s pretty accurate.
One of these stories, the one we heard today has a huge group of people who had been listening to Jesus teach at the water’s edge for three days. Food was running out, and he felt bad that all these people were hungry. He wondered what food the disciples had…it wasn’t much. Seven loaves of bread. Let’s remember the symbolism that gets used in these stories. Seven is a number, kinda like three, that when you read that in a biblical text, is basically a huge neon sign pointing to the story and saying: pay attention, something’s important here. Seven is a symbol for all that is spiritually significant – completeness, abundance, wholeness. So we know that there was some bread, and the number seven tells us that the amount was a good thing…it doesn’t matter the literal number of loaves, but that it was significant what happened next. They distributed it and everyone ate their fill. And just in case you missed the point, the storyteller hammers it home by saying there were seven baskets of leftovers. Abundance, wholeness, completeness. It’s the world as it could be, as it should be. And in this world, everyone has enough. That’s the purpose of spiritual community…to ensure that we take care of each other, and that all have what they need.
The early church put these challenging teachings they heard from Jesus into practice. Every time they gathered, they shared a meal with one another. Not only a ritual of communion that remembered Jesus through bread and wine, not just this re-enacting a ritual of the last supper that brought to mind Jesus’ death and the desire to remember his teachings; (There was that), but a real meal with real food…shared among the community. They called it the agape meal. The feast of unconditional love.
In new communities that brought diverse people together in a different way, a meal was a way of saying it didn’t matter if you had as much as others, it didn’t matter who you were, where you were from, or how you got there…there would be enough and you would have a place at the table.
It was a way of saying that in a world where the biggest, quickest, strongest, scariest, hairiest, dirtiest rats get the cheese, there’s a place where the cheese is yours; there’s a place where someone will ask, “Would anybody else like some too?”
As we honour our tradition with a meal…we will share food with each other. We’ll do as we always do…use the time of eating to talk and get to know each other…to talk about our weekend, what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with…to learn about other’s lives and families, their work and play.
And so we celebrate community today. We build a community where friends journey together, learn together, explore the spiritual life and help others do the same.
We build a community where we can satisfy each other’s hunger and thirst, where our quest for meaning and purpose is our ongoing hunger and thirst, where we are ever searching and ever satisfying.
We build a community in which our meal is a rehearsal for what we wish for the world: a world of unity and peace, where our highest ideals take precedence over disagreements and entitlements, where all might break bread together.
Our food sustains us, as we sustain each other. Let’s share our food and our lives with each other.
-Chris New
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