Holy Eating: Not by Bread Alone

Matthew 4:1-11

Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Today we begin our Lenten Theme, Holy Eating, with the story of a famished Jesus who fasted 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness and then resisted ego and evil with this truth: human beings do not live by bread alone.

Today we begin an invitation to 40 days of simple practices -- graces, poetry, prayer and meditation, feeding the hungry, small groups for study, support, fasting, feasting on Sabbath, play, calendars and cooking -- to challenge in community the temptation to live by bread alone.

In the Lenten brochure, or menu, that you received this morning, I wrote these words: For abundant and healthy life for all people, for the earth, for our selves, and for future generations, we need to make some changes.  Lent, traditionally a season of fasting and prayer in preparation for Christ's passion and resurrection, is a good season for makng some changes.

Today our Holy Eating takes many forms.  Following worship everyone is welcome to our Second Sunday Potluck Lunch, AT which there will be special Korean and Chinese dishes and decorations honoring the Lunar New Year, AS WELL AS a cake for Alina whose baptism we celebrate this day and whose first birthday is this week.  LATER there will be a 4:00 cooking covenant group open to all who will prepare our first Lenten Soup Supper that we will share at 6:15.  There is a whole lot of eating going on!

Holy Eating is beautifully described in these words from 18 year-old Emily Wells:  "We all need to eat and drink every day.  But food is more than body fuel.  It is a gift from God that connects us to the earth and to the needs of others.  At the table we share food and our lives.  We also thank God, welcome stranger, receive friends, and meet Jesus.  Eating together, we become companions for life." (Way to Live, p. 65)

Over two-thirds of our brothrs and sisters around the world go hungry every day, at real risk of death for lack of bread or clean water.  We live surrounded by an abundance of food and food-like substances, confounded by addiction to consumption.  We are at risk of death by bread alone!  There is a growing phenomenon in the U.S. of people who are obese and malnourished.  Holy eating sees the connections between death-dealing poverty, empty calories, and deadened souls.  Jan richardson wrote of Lenden disciplines, and said, "I want a fast from gluttony of nations, systems, policies that feed some well while others starve for grain, for bread, for dreams, for peace."

We are faced  with the temptations that come with distorted and manufactured appetites.

There are man ways to view the temptation of Jesus to turn stones into bread ... to meet every hunger, to be relevant, to be powerful.  I believe the temptations were Satan's attempts to divert and distract and defer Jesus from his vocation and from trust in God.  Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River as God's beloved child.  What that meant, what it means, is revealed in the choices Jesus made.  What it means for us to be disciples is revealed in the choices we make.

 Jesus said ... "human beings do not live by bread alone."  This season we will explore and experience in a variety of ways the choices we have in relation to the food we eat ... for God's future and the sake of the world God so loves.

Lauren Winner observed kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws.  She wrote of her experience keeping a Kosher kitchen:

Keeping kosher cultivates a profound attentiveness to food.  Because I kept kosher, I thought about the food I ate.  I thought about what I was going to eat, and where I was going to procure it, and how I was going to prepare it.  Eating was never obvious.  Food frequired intention.  Only after I stopped keeping kosher did I fully appreciate that kashrut had shaped more than my grocery lists.  It also shaped my spiritual life  Keeing kosher transforms eating from a mere nutritional necessity into an act of faithfulness (and hospitality).  If you keep kosher, the protagonist of your meal is not you; it is God.  (from Mudbath Sabbath)

As Christians we do not follow deuteronomic dietary laws ... but I am drawn to the mindfulness they instill.

We can also practice mindfulness through seasonal eating -- eating foods during the seasons in which they naturally grow where we live.  The edible schoolyard at Martin Luther King Middle School and the Local Eating for Global Change movement seek to shape mindfulness about food for environment and health and to foster seasonal eating.  Barbara Kingsolver writes, "Even if you walk or bike to the store, if you come home with bananas from Ecuador, tomatoes from Holland, cheese from Ffrance, and artichokes from California, ou have guzzled some serious gas."  ("Lily's Chickens" Small Wonder, p. 114)

The first question ... equipped as we are with markets that stock everything ... all the time ... at least the first question for me, is how do we even know what's in season and what's not?  I need to take time to learn and pay attention.   Mindfulness .... of our food ... our choices ... and their cost .. is an element of holy eating.

there is a movement that began in Italy in the 1980's not long after the introduction of American fast food chains ... called "The Slow Food" movement.  This movement is dedicated to the principle taht "a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life."  Michael Pollan writes, "To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of that word.  From freedom instead of compulsion."  (In Defense of Food, p. 196)

We gather to break bread ... and we bring our choices, conflicts, and temptations to the table ... slowly, pausing to be grateful, mindful of teh costs, savoring the season, community and hospitality.  What does it take to help us remember ... that when we eat we are not the protagonists?

Every week we pray the prayer that Jesus taught, "give us this day our daily bread" and we choose to live trusting God.  Every week we pray the prayer that Jesus taught, "lead us not into temptation but deliver us form evil."  We ask for help in the choices we make, and we choose our hunger for God.