The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
Eat this Bread: A Sermon for August 11, 2024
Scripture text: John 6:35, 41-51
“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.”
These words are the opening lines of a poem[i] by Joy Harjo, the first Native American woman poet laureate in United States history. The poem goes on to describe the kitchen table as a place where “children are given instructions on what it means to be human” and adds that “this table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.”
Not everyone grows up with a kitchen table like that, where all the most important and most intimate things in a family’s life happen, or at least where they are shared and discussed. It’s hard to quantify this experience, but it does seem to be a diminishing phenomenon in American life today.
One 2019 survey reported that 70% of our meals are eaten outside the home. Whatever the exact numbers, we know there are many distractions drawing us away from regularly dining with others at a table, in a way that strengthens our connections and reminds us that food is more than fuel. We eat in the car as we run errands, or while watching tv or scrolling on our phones. Preparing a homemade meal and eating it mindfully and with gratitude, while sitting at a table, is a practice that too often falls victim to our hustle culture, our multitasking, our need to keep getting stuff done. It is an indication of our epidemic levels of loneliness and isolation, as well as our busy-ness. How we eat says so much about who we are and what we value.
The kitchen table in Joy Harjo’s poem is obviously more than a kitchen table; it is a metaphor for community, for fellowship, for the traditions that bind us together, and for the ways that we humans need one another and the rest of creation in order to survive and especially to thrive. “No matter what,” she writes, “we must eat to live.” The kitchen table is an emblem of reality, the givens of life, and our creatureliness.
As much as we might like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient, independent human beings, such self-perception is an illusion. Our lives are all bound up together. I can’t go a day without relying on food that was entirely grown and harvested by others, often prepared by others, and always part of a larger web of life of which I am only one small, contingent, interdependent part. Even our bodies are not made up exclusively or even primarily of cells that belong only to us; every human body is host to a whole community of microbial life, so much so that one science writer has said, “Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm, a little universe formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”[ii]
Much of the ministry of Jesus took place around a table, metaphorical or otherwise. Jesus loved to eat, to share meals and conversations with friends and strangers, with tax collectors and sinners and other ne’er-do-wells. We have domesticated this reality, calling it “table fellowship” and trying to replicate it with homespun church potlucks and hospitality programs. Don’t get me wrong, I love potlucks as much as the next middle-aged church lady, but most of the time they lack the subversive edginess that characterized the practices of Jesus. Where and how and with whom he ate shocked people. It’s wonderful if we feel the presence of Jesus over a table laden with Jello salad and sheet cake (or the California equivalents—maybe fresh strawberries and gluten-free biscotti?) but we still must look around from time to time to see who is not there at the table, who is not being fed.
Jesus shared meals with the wrong kind of people, shunning protocol and propriety in an outrageous effort to show that the sustenance he had to offer was freely available to everyone. His ministry was the embodiment of the radical notion that, given a choice, we should build longer tables instead of higher walls. It was about choosing abundance over scarcity, generosity over gatekeeping, inclusion over division. And in a final act of profligate hospitality, Jesus offered himself as bread for the world, demonstrating that he would stop at nothing to make sure that in his kingdom everyone–everyone–is welcomed and fed.
When we are invited to this table to receive Communion, we usually hear the words, “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.” We are encouraged to think of our whole life as a walk of love, a walk of solidarity and belonging, and an opportunity to walk each other home. We are asked to first lay down our grudges and our worries, to seek forgiveness and to offer it to others, and then to gather as equals, as brothers and sisters and siblings, at the banquet that God has prepared for us.
To receive Communion is to be engaged in a profoundly humbling and yet liberating act. We don’t get to choose the menu. Nobody can claim to have the best table in the room. We’re all guests, gathered together solely and entirely by the grace of God. We’re not consumers, in the usual sense of the word, although we are invited to partake of Christ’s body and blood. What else can we consume that has the power to transform us so profoundly, to break down all the barriers that divide us from other people and to make us part of one body? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.
This and more is what is being said by Jesus when he says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” Bishop Jake Owensby, an old boss and mentor of mine, has written about this passage that “Jesus offers to participate in our lives so that we can participate in his life. Our ongoing relationship with Jesus changes the very essence of our existence. When we worship, pray, study the Bible, serve the poor, and work for justice, we are not achieving a Christian life. We’re inhabiting the life that we’re being given as we eat our daily bread.”[iii]
In other words, we no longer simply eat to live. We eat and live. We eat so that we can see our lives as intimately and eternally connected to all other life. This is why we come to the table, week after week, in good times and in bad. We come because it has been “a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.” The table is where we experience our “instructions on what it means to be human.” And to quote Joy Harjo one more time: “At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” Amen.
[i] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49622/perhaps-the-world-ends-here
Can also be found in The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1994)
[ii] Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Harper Collins, 2024).
[iii] https://substack.com/home/post/p-147283565?source=queue
