Today's sermon: Glorious Food

A few weeks ago I attended the Hayward Lectures at Acadia Divinity College, where Edith Humphrey was this year's speaker. She is a New Testament professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her series was called "What the Bible Really Says About Tradition." She is a recent convert to the Eastern Orthodox church, so her insights on tradition were new to many of us. It was also a good chance to learn more about the eastern church, so remote from most of our experience of Christianity.

In the talkback session, she recommended a book called For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann, as a good basic book from the orthodox perspective. Strictly speaking, it's a book on the sacraments and on liturgy, two things that Baptists and evangelicals in general don't have much to do with. But the book turns out to be a wonderful perspective on the Christian life as a whole, and shows how the sacraments are exactly appropriate to a Christian view of life in the world.

This morning's sermon (really an extended meditation before communion) was pretty heavily influenced by the wonderful insights I've gained from Schmemann's book, which I finished this weekend. Here's the text, pretty much exactly as I preached it, which accounts for some of the style of the writing. I'm very thankful that Dr Humphrey called this book to my attention.

Meditation - Nov. 7, 2010

When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church about their celebration of the Lord’s supper, he reminded them that “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

Usually when we celebrate communion we focus on what it reminds us of – the death of Jesus. But what about the other part of our celebration? What about the fact that every time we eat and drink this bread and cup together we look forward to the coming again of our Lord?

The book of Revelation refers to “the marriage supper of the Lamb,” and when Jesus shared his last supper on earth he told the disciples he would not eat it again until he shared it with them in the kingdom. But we were told to do this in remembrance of him. We were told to keep on eating together. In the early church we are told that “day by day…they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts.” The trouble Paul confronted in Corinth was that something had gone wrong with their suppertime together. He was concerned that when Christians eat, they have to do it right.

We might wonder, “What’s the deal with all the food?” Why did the Lord give us the command to worship and remember him by eating a meal together?

We need food to live. We can go a certain amount of time without it, but we know that our bodies were made to run on the fuel of food and drink. By a wonderful process that God has designed, we eat food and our bodies know what to do with it. They take it in, digest it, and convert it into the energy that powers our bodies. I’m one of those people who usually has to eat a little bit every couple of hours, and when I’ve gone a little longer than usual I can feel it. I start to get a little faint and I might get a headache. My body doesn’t run at full strength without food. Food gives us the energy that allows us to live.

For that reason farmers used to be at the centre of our social structure. We depended on them for our food, so we depended on them for our life. Farmers have lost some of the respect they used to have because we’ve figured out other ways to get our food, but the basic idea is still there: without our groceries we’d all be in trouble fast.

As we read the Bible we discover that that’s how it has been right from the beginning. The first man, Adam, was a gardener, given charge over God’s garden of Eden. In Genesis chapter 2 the first words God speaks to Adam are a gift of food.

It says that “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’”

Being human and eating food are bound up together completely. But as we just heard, food is not just our life. It is also our death.

God made humans, put them in a world of beauty, and gave them food to sustain them, to give them the life that they would fulfil by knowing and loving God. But there was another food, on another tree, that would bring them death and cut them off from the blessings they had known of life with God.

Some writers have seen food as a kind of representative of all the things in the world that God has given to us. This world was made for our good; it's the place where we live and thrive as we know and love God.

But that tree of the knowledge of good and evil was something else. The fruit of that tree was food that you eat not for the sake of living your life in God’s presence, but for the purpose of becoming your own God, knowing the things God only knows, and running your own life apart from God.

What Adam and Eve did with that tree of the knowledge of good and evil is what we all do with everything in this world before we come to Christ. We care about the things that will give us something, the things that will bring us profit, the things that will give us an edge, an advantage, a leg-up. We pour ourselves into the things that give us pleasures, and the things that give us escape.

So we devote ourselves to our work, or we convince ourselves that happiness will be found in fleeting relationships without commitment, or we drink too much or become addicted to drugs, or we make friends only with people who will help us get ahead.

There are clichés everywhere about this: It’s a dog-eat-dog world. “You’ve got to get ahead in the rat race.” “Climb the corporate ladder.” “Look out for number one.”

All of this is what happened when Adam and Eve ate the food that brought them death.

God had offered them joy and peace if they had remained in the garden, tilling it and keeping it, eating the fruit of all the other trees, and enjoying their unbroken fellowship with the Lord.

This was life: a life of work, a life of food, a life whose purpose was perfect communion and friendship with God.

But they threw it away because they wanted instead the food that give them something, the food that would cut them loose from God, and make them wise enough to be king and queen of their own lives.

Food was meant to sustain our life. But instead food was the thing that brought us death.

But when the Son of God came to earth, when he took on flesh “for us and for our salvation” he spent his time eating and celebrating with people, living life as if it were one great party of celebration, one joyful time of feasting. When Jesus was on his way to the cross, on his way to his death for our sins, on his way to take upon himself all the weight of what Adam and Eve had first done in the garden, he spent his last evening sharing a meal with his friends.

He told us to keep on sharing the meal together.

And that’s what we did. The early church met daily, we read, breaking bread together, and “ate their food with glad and generous hearts.” He told us to share the meal together. And we’ve been doing it ever since, not just in the communion meal but in twenty centuries of pot luck suppers and sunrise breakfasts and after-church coffee hours.

The ancient church thought anything worth remembering in the life God had given us was worth remembering with a feast. Jesus came and he ate with us, and when he left he told us to keep on eating this remembrance of him until he comes. Are you starting to see why?

Our relationship with food went wrong in the garden of Eden. God gave us food to sustain our life so that we could love and know him. But food brought us death when we used it to gain our independence from God. What we did with food is like what we did with the world itself, the world that God had made for us to live in for his glory. We took it and made it a place for us, and not for God’s glory. As a result our experience in the world is death.

But in Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, the mess that humankind has made of God’s world is undone. Everything we did to turn the world into death – because we wanted to make it a place for us and not for our life with God – is overcome in the incarnation and the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is called the last Adam by the apostle Paul. The first Adam had the world and lost it through disobedience and the abandonment of his God. The second Adam – Jesus – came into the lost world, and gave it life through obedience and faithfulness to God. Jesus has redeemed the lost world, bought it back with the precious blood that we remember at the table this morning.

Jesus has reclaimed us for God, and reclaimed the world for God and for us as the ones who were made to live in the world. We were made to be the rulers of God’s creation, rightly caring for it under the authority of our God and for his glory. What Jesus has accomplished for us is our restoration to the place of honour God gave to us. We were given so much in the beginning by God, but it wasn’t enough – we wanted to be gods – so we lost it all. But now Jesus has come to give us the life God has always wanted us to have, a life of both dignity and obedience, a life of both true humanity and true worship of God.

Jesus has redeemed us and he has redeemed his world. We live with the promise that one day we will live in the glorious new creation where Jesus’ redemption will be fulfilled. But even now we live as the people who have been redeemed, who have been renewed, who now reflect God’s work in Christ to the world of death all around us.

We are the sign of life. We are the sign of hope.

We live in the same world, but we live according to a different arrangement. We enjoy the world and life, but in a different way than those who do not know Christ. In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul says, “all things are yours, whether…the world or life or death or the present or the future – all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”

When Jesus came and sat us down at the table and offered us food again, he gave us life again. No longer is the world death to us. No longer do we live as the people who eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because we want to run the world, because we want to be gods.

No, we now live as the people who receive God’s gifts – of food, of life, of the world itself – as gifts from him, as tokens of his love for us. Now we don’t run away. We don’t want to get out from under his authority. We know he loves us. He has blessed us with life, and with food to sustain us to give him glory, with people to meet so that we might learn about his grace and creativity and love, with ground to walk on and birds to hear, to point us to the glory of the one who made us all.

When we become Christians we die to our old life, and are raised to walk in “newness of life,” according to Romans 6. The writer Alexander Schmemann, thinking of the white garments traditionally put on those who are baptized, says, “The meaning of this ‘newness of life’ is manifested when the newly baptized person is clothed, immediately after baptism, in a white garment. It is the garment of a king. Man is again king of creation. The world is again his life, and not his death, for he knows what to do with it. He is restored to the joy and power of true human nature.”

Jesus did a tremendous thing when he gave us a meal by which to worship and remember him. So much of our story, the long and tragic story of humanity’s fall into sin, and our redemption through the life and death of the one who was not only true God but also true man – so much of our story is found at this table.

It is a meal in which we celebrate our freedom even as we remember our slavery.

It is a meal in which we remember the love of our Lord who gave himself – his very real body and blood – for our salvation.

It is a meal in which we are constantly reminded of our mission in the world – to live as God’s new humanity, and as a witness to the rest of the world, dying in sin, that in Jesus Christ is found forgiveness, is found life.

As we share this meal together, this bread and this cup, let us receive it with thanksgiving, recognizing that everything that is worth having comes from the hand of our God.

As we share this meal together, this bread and this cup, let us pray that we will be ever aware of the life we’ve been given and that we will conduct ourselves in such a way that the world sees in us the life from God, the life of the kingdom, the life of joy: the life of the promised new creation. Amen.