IN DEFENSE OF FOOD
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church
February 24, 2008
In his book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollen challenges our fast food culture values: “that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel, and not a form of communion...”
Pollan asks this question: “What would happen if we were to see food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?”
This Lenten season at Epworth we are exploring “Holy Eating.” At the center of our fasting, feasting, studying, praying, feeding the hungry, and giving thanks for daily bread is a desire to nuture our relationship with God, with others, with creation, and with our selves.
Our story begins in a Garden. God placed human beings in a garden ... a garden of extravagant beauty and abundance ... God placed human beings to keep and care for the garden. According to the story... God commanded, “You may freely eat from every tree of the garden; except -from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t eat from it. On the day that you eat from that tree you shall die.”
This story is about human nature. We are created in the image of God, but again and again that just doesn’t seem to be enough for us. We’d rather be God, or play God, than trust God. And again and again, our actions have...consequences.
Have you ever been told that you could have anything you wanted, ... except for one thing? (then what did you want?) That you could eat anything...except for one thing? Except for one to 200 things? Have you ever rebelled... against limits, boundaries, exceptions, and prohibitions? Attraction to the forbidden is powerful.
In our family, when someone was dangerously disobedient, we would use the “c” word to warn them: “If you do that...there’ll be... consequences...”
That one forbidden tree, of course, becomes the tree that human beings cannot resist ... with the help of a clever one, a serpent, God’s command begins to seem an unnecessary restriction, and that one tree becomes a delight to the eyes, a tree to be desired to make one wise...
I hope that you will hear this story from Genesis as your story. I know it is mine. It can be hard to do because we think we know the story of Adam and Eve so well that we do not hear our story in it at all! Or we remember the ways this story has been used against women, or workers, or children, or even snakes, and we don’t want to hear it at all! Or we are so used to the doctrinal language of original sin that we do not hear the story that is in the Bible. The word sin is not in this story. This story begins with original blessing. It is not a story of God’s punishing nature. It is a story of God’s grace that sustains life even when human beings act in ways that threaten life. It is a story of God’s love beyond... consequences. Don’t distance yourself from the story of the garden and the forbidden fruit. Enter it.
Can the garden survive the way we continue to use it? Can we survive the way we continue to consume? Excesses of unchecked individual and corporate self-gratification and unrestrained appetite threaten sustainability for the garden and for our lives. Most of us know more than we ever wanted to know about broken relationships. What does it mean to our future that the web of life has become so tattered and distorted?
Walter Brueggeman writes of this story, “Lent is a season to sort out the voices of life and the countervoices of death...this text is not only an expose; it is also an invitation back to the single voice that speaks the lean truth of our future.”
We need to replace our rampant addictions and excesses with new patterns of reverence and responsibility. God is the Creator. We enjoy and tend the garden. Michael Pollan encourages humility in the food “industry” and in food science because, “We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again.” Pollan urges us to subvert our consumption of isolated nutrients by cultivating a living and lively relationship with food as a gift,“... in the eye of the cook or the gardener or the farmer who grew it.. food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.”
George Washington Carver was a man of faith and science and service. He was a person of great humility who understood that relationships are at the heart of the garden we have been given.
George Washington Carver was born to a young slave woman, Mary, just before the end of the Civil War. While he was a baby, his father was killed in the fields, and George and his mother were abducted by Confederate nightriders ...he never saw his mother again. After emancipation proclamation, George and his brother Jim lived wtih Moses and Sue Carver who had been their slave owners. Even as a child, he wrote, “...my very soul thirsted for an education. I literally lived in the woods. I wanted to know every strange stone, flower, insect, bird, or beast. No one could tell me.” His thirst for education led him miles away to school, and then to high school in Kansas, rejection from colleges because he was black, and in 1891 he enrolled in Simpson College, a Methodist School in Iowa to study piano and art. He later transferred to Iowa State where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Agriculture. The only African-American student, he became Iowa State’s first African-American Faculty member before answering the invitation of Booker T. Washington to join the Faculty of the Tuskegee Institute where he taught for nearly 50 years.
Early in his scientific career, Carver was advocating crop rotation to care for the soil and feed the poor. One day, he went into the woods, to his favorite place to pray, wanting to understand what God was calling him to do. Carver later wrote this description of that conversation with God:
“Oh, Creator,” I cried out, “why did you make this universe?”
And the creator answered, “You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask me something more your size.”
So I said, “Dear Creator. Why did you make man?”
And again he spoke to me and he said, “Little man, you are still asking for more than you can handle. Cut down the extent of your request.”
Then I asked my last question, “Creator, why did you make the peanut?”
“That’s better,” said the Lord. And he gave me a handful of peanuts and went back with me to the laboratory and we went to work together.
God and George Washington Carver went on to discover over 300 uses from the peanut, including mayonnaise, cheese, instant coffee, flour, soap, gasoline, plastics, nitroglycerin, axle grease, and pickles.
Carver also discovered more than 100 uses for the sweet potato, another soil renewing and biodegradable crop --uses including - library paste, vinegar, shoe polish, and molasses. And hundreds of uses for soy beans....including ink and paint.
Despite constant racial prejudice and barriers, Carver testified before Congress, and gave counsel to Henry Ford and to Thomas Edison. Edison offered Carver a position for $100,000 ($1million dollars!). Carver refused, staying at Tuskegee Institute at a salary of $1500 per a year. He lived in one room on campus, and he followed his calling – in science and art, dedicating his life in service, to empowering African American students, to helping poor farmers, and loving God and God’s creation.
Carver died in 1943 and was buried with this epitaph, “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.” In his own words, “God gave freely, how could one do otherwise?”
Each one of us has the capacity for wonder ... and ... gratitude and service. God so freely gives. God’s garden ... is entrusted to our care ... even our food sustains right relationship with God.
“What would happen if we were to see food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?”
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