Ora et Labora

Sandwich line volunteers and clients

A sermon on 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

“Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” Who knew that was in the Bible? When we think of the great teachings of the Christian faith, we’re more likely to think of “Love God and your neighbor” or “Blessed are the poor in spirit” or “Nothing can separate us from the love of God.” Sometimes we mistakenly think that all the harsh, punitive, and legalistic texts of the Bible are found in the Old Testament, and that the New Testament speaks only and always of a God of grace, mercy, and niceness. But tucked away in the dusty and neglected corners of the New Testament, we find teachings that appear just as troubling as the difficult texts of the Hebrew scriptures. There it is in black and white: “anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” 

This passage comes from Second Thessalonians, a letter which may or may not be by the apostle Paul. Although the author identifies himself as Paul, in the ancient world, it was common for people to write under the name of the great thinkers whom they admired and hoped to emulate. For a Christian to write a letter that appears to be by Paul would not have been seen as dishonest or unethical – it would have been the moral equivalent of playing in a Beatles tribute band. Second Thessalonians is the most heavily disputed of the epistles which claim to be by Paul – there are solid scholarly arguments to be made either way. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just refer to the author as Paul today. But ultimately, whether it is by Paul or by one of his followers, it is there in our Bible. It would be a mistake to try to write it off as non-Pauline and therefore unimportant just because it makes us uncomfortable. In some ways, the scriptures we struggle to make sense of are the most important to wrestle with, because they can be so easily misused. 

This very passage was being misused in the news this past May. In debates about cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (more commonly known as food stamps) Representative Stephen Fincher pointed to this verse from Second Thessalonians as justification for cutting the program’s budget by $4 billion. Of course, the congressman was arguing based on the false assumption that food stamps recipients are primarily people who could be working but are not. In fact, 41% of households receiving food stamps have at least one working adult – but fulltime work at minimum wage still leaves people in poverty, and so many turn to food stamps to help stretch their paycheck. Furthermore, 76% of households receiving food stamps include at least one child, elderly person, or handicapped person. Hardly a good application for a scripture verse about those “unwilling to work”! 

But more importantly, using this verse to argue about poverty relief legislation misses the context of the verse entirely. Second Thessalonians is a short letter addressed to the Christian community in Thessalonica, which is located in modern-day Greece, a community which was founded by the Apostle Paul. Paul and the Thessalonian church believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent – they assumed that it would certainly occur during their lifetimes, and they awaited it anxiously and with great anticipation. The entirety of the letter is crafted in response to this assumption, and to the things that were happening in the community because of it. 

Given that most of the rest of the epistle deals with concerns about the return of Christ, some commentators suggest that this section about work and idleness flows from those concerns as well. Some of the Thessalonian Christians, they suggest, were so certain that Jesus was returning imminently that they stopped working – after all, what need is there to work if the world as we know is going to end and the Reign of God will begin within weeks? They wouldn’t be the last – many sects and cults in the centuries since then have asked believers to leave their lives, jobs, and families to make final preparations for the end of days. 

But, of course, Jesus did not descend from the clouds in glory, and as the weeks and months and years stretched on, commentators suggest that perhaps those early Christians turned to the church to support their material needs as they continued to watch and wait, and that the passage addresses these people. Perhaps they even saw their imposition on the community as a sign of spiritual superiority – that they were truly devoting themselves to the life of faith, rather than spending time on the mundane matters of daily life. In response to this, the epistle points back to Paul’s ministry: Paul worked as a tentmaker to support himself, even though he also declared that those who devote their lives to spreading the Gospel should receive financial support from the Christian community. If even Paul worked to support himself, the letter argues, why shouldn’t these believers? 

This passage is not addressing the question of whether nations or churches should support programs that relieve poverty – although I would argue that both Paul and Jesus believe in feeding the hungry. The passage does not address at all the question of people who are unable to work. It focuses on the internal workings of the Christian community, calling for a community where everyone cares for their own needs and contributes to the needs of the community as they are able. Our seminary intern Stephen noted in our conversation this week that the word “work” need not refer specifically to employment as we understand it – “work” could refer also to the work of the community, the work of parenting, the work of ministering to the wider world. 

In the sixth century, a great saint of the church named Benedict fleshed out a vision of a community of faith working together in a text which we now know as the Rule of St. Benedict. Christianity was taking a new turn, as some people began to form monasteries, organized Christian communities separate from the rest of the secular world, to live out their faith. Benedict founded several such monasteries, and crafted the Rule to guide those communities. The Rule calls all members of the community to “ora et labora,” or prayer and work. Benedict offers guidelines for balancing work and prayer: at certain hours of the day, the entire community is to engage in the work that keeps the monastery going, tending gardens, working in the kitchens, and so forth. Those with special skills can be set to specialized tasks, but only if it does not lead them to feel superior and haughty toward those without special skills. And those who are ill, infirm, very old or very young should be given work that neither leaves them idle nor wearied by the strain of hard labor. I like to think that, although the language of Second Thessalonians is shockingly harsh, its intention is to point toward this kind of vision of a community living and working and praying together. 

For many years, our church has offered a sandwich line for hungry people, a ministry that we cosponsor with our Catholic brothers and sisters from the Franciscan Community Center. For years, the sandwich line took place outdoors: dozens of people, many of them elderly and physically impaired, would line up outside the church, waiting for waiting for almost an hour in the cold or the heat or the rain for a bag lunch. About a year ago, we made a big change: we opened our doors, set up chairs in the basement, brewed an enormous urn of coffee, and moved our sandwich line inside. We weren’t sure we would be able to manage it, because we knew it would be a lot more work. But something amazing happened: when there was good work to be done, people were excited to do it. Our team of volunteers grew and is growing, and more importantly, the sandwich line clients themselves help out as they are able. Some of the able-bodied folks help us to put the chairs away. People bring cups of coffee to the frailest, like Felicia, who will turn 92 this Wednesday. When there’s an announcement to be made, one of our bilingual clients helps us by translating into Spanish. When the elevator broke, one woman took it upon herself to care for the people who couldn’t make it down the stairs, carrying pastries and sandwiches up the stairs to them, making sure they felt included. 

When I hear a congressman justify cutting food stamps with the words “anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” I wish I could show him our sandwich line: the sense of community, the willing hands, the people caring for another; the very people he dismisses as lazy, working together to create an oasis of grace and mutuality in an unjust world. 

So I don’t mean to make excuses for Paul. But the more I think about it, the more I think I understand where he was coming from: frustrated at the failings of human communities, he admonishes them in the hope of motivating them to move toward a vision of a different way of living. A way where willing hands offer what they have to strengthen the church. A way where holy purpose shapes the community and its members in their living and their giving. A way where those who know the grace and love of God pour that grace out into the world. 

Thanks be to God. 

Amen.

It’s Not About Losing Weight: Lent, Food, and Five Countercultural Ways to Fast

 As Lent begins, many of us “give something up” for the forty days (forty-six, actually, if you count the Sundays, which the Church traditionally does not) between Ash Wednesday and Easter. For long centuries, Christians have practiced Lenten fasts, abstaining from certain foods, and abstaining from food altogether on certain days. Contemporary Christians often give up sweets, chocolate, coffee, fried foods, and so on. 

But our culture is rife with harmful messages about body image; it tends to define our worth by our weight and attractiveness. In the midst of such a culture, Lent’s call to simplicity and austerity can sound an awful lot like one more message that we would be better people if we could just lose five pounds.  But the purpose of Lenten practices has nothing to do with our culture's claim that our worth comes from our physical appearance.

So I offer to you a few things I hope you will remember this Lent, and five ways you might choose to fast from our materialistic, body-obsessed, consumer-driven culture. 

• You – including your body exactly as it is right now – are made in the image of God. All of humanity, in our many colors and ages and shapes and sizes, our beautiful diversity, reflects the Creator. Any cultural claim or critical comment that tells you to be ashamed of your body is not from God. 
• Your body is a good gift from God. Don’t hate it. Give thanks for it. Make friends with it. Steward it well. Give it exercise and water and nourishing food and enough sleep. Take good care of it because it's healthy and feels good, not to try to conform to impossible cultural beauty standards. 
• Food is a good gift from God. As the Psalmist says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” There are no inherently evil or inherently virtuous foods. God will not love you more if you eat more kale and less cheeseburgers. God gave us food – all food – for our nourishment. Besides, God already loves you. 
• Lenten practices should draw us closer to God. So go ahead and give up chocolate, if you normally turn to it for emotional comfort you could draw from prayer or meditation. Give up coffee, if you fear you’ve made it a false idol. Give up fast food in solidarity with fast food workers. Take up exercise, if you feel called to better stewardship of the body God gave you. But remember, no matter what: you are made in the image of God. And you are loved beyond words, just as you are. 

“The Fast I Choose” – Five Countercultural Ways to Fast 

1. Fast from body-negative media: Mute the television during commercials.  Fast from websites and tv shows that focus on weight and image.  Stop reading body-negative magazines. 
2. Fast from artificial sweeteners: Eat fruit. (Or real dessert with sugar in it!) Drink water. Sweet things are supposed to have calories. Our desire to satiate our sweet tooth without sacrificing our waistlines might come at great cost to our health. 
3. Fast from unjust foods: This is basically impossible. But you might choose not to patronize restaurants that don’t pay a living wage. Or you might choose to abstain from factory-farmed meat. Or switch to some fair-trade products (even if paying more means consuming less). 
4. Fast from mirrors: Again, basically impossible. But what better way to resist cultural messages that our worth is external? One account of a “mirror fast” is here. 
5. Fast from disposables: Give up the paper cups, pizza boxes, and plastic take-out containers that deplete our earth’s resources and clog our landfills. Bring lunch from home. Take a reusable cup to the coffee shop.

For more about Lent, food justice, and body image, check out this sermon I gave a few years ago.

Holy One, we give you thanks for the many good gifts in our lives, and most of all for the gift of your love made known in Christ.  Bless us this Lent, that whatever fast we choose, it might draw us closer to you.  Amen.

God's "Free Market" Economy

A Sermon on Isaiah 55:1-13

The only riot I have ever been in was in a library. It was spring of 2006 and I was a junior in college. One evening, it was long after the dining hall closed, I was halfway through a paper, and I was so hungry. Out of ramen noodles and low on cash, I opened my email and saw something from the student council with the subject line “Free Felipe’s and Finale.” Those were like magic words to me. Felipe’s was the Mexican place on campus – not very authentic, but so greasy and salty and carbalicious. And Finale was the fancy-schmancy dessert place that made tiny, perfect desserts topped with gold flakes and architectural spirals of chocolate. These were the crème de la crème of campus food, and they were free for the taking if I just went to this party in the library celebrating the longer library hours which the student council had convinced the administration to agree to.

Well, it turns out that some other people also were interested in free Felipe’s and free Finale desserts. One thousand, five hundred people. Fifteen minutes before the reception was supposed to begin, the library lobby was as crowded as a mosh pit, and security guards were standing like bouncers at the library doors. Then the food arrived: about a hundred burritos, and two medium-sized catering trays of desserts. It was pandemonium. Hundreds of students lunged for the food. There was screaming and shoving and scratching. The student body president, fearing for his safety, started throwing burritos into the crowd as a diversionary tactic. I saw one girl stuffing four or five quesadillas into her pants. And I do not mean the pocket part of the pants. The food was gone within seconds. That’s when the police arrived. My feet made only the most fleeting contact with the ground as the crowd began to stampede toward the doors. I was terrified; the crowd was crushing me and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t move and finally I got swept out onto the quad panicked and shaken. All for some free burritos. What was wrong with us?

Nothing that hasn’t been wrong with people for as long as we can remember. It would have been understandable if we were starving. But no one in that library lobby was starving. (And I know that because you needed a valid student ID to get in, and every student was required to buy a full meal plan.) I think in the Great Lamont Riot of 2006, I saw a particularly dramatic expression of this dark part of human nature – a drive to conserve our resources and lay in supplies. An old and deep anxiety that someday in the future, there might not be enough and we had better get what we can while the getting’s good. A fear that we’ll miss out and someone will get what we ought to have for ourselves. It happens around a lot of things, but it happens especially around food. You see it on that television show Hoarders – have you ever watched that show? These people just cannot stop acquiring stuff, and their houses fill up and become unlivable and hazardous and unsanitary, and so often their fridges and cupboards and whole kitchens are full of more cans and boxes of food than they would need for the rest of their lives. You see it when you look at the sizes of drinks you can buy at Starbucks shops and convenience stores and movie theaters – we buy coffees and sodas in these bucket-sized cups, as if we were preparing for a month in the desert! And you see it when fifteen hundred college students stage a riot over burritos and chocolate cakes. We sometimes let stuff – and food – take over our lives. We are sometimes deeply afraid that there is not enough, and sometimes we let that fear drive our shopping and our consuming and how we treat one another.

There’s nothing wrong with a bargain. Nothing is wrong with planning ahead, and nothing is wrong with being prudent with the resources you have, and God knows nothing is wrong with not having much money to spend on food. But something is wrong – very, very wrong – with the way our society relates to food, and stuff, and money.

Arturo Rodriguez in his article, “Cheap Food” in the companion to the documentary Food, Inc., tells the story of a young farmworker named Maria Isabel Vasquez Jiminez. “Young grapevines thrive in the fierce summer sun of California’s Central Valley,” he writes “But the same early summer heat that helps bring life to the bountiful produce millions of Americans enjoy can also destroy. Unlike the young grapevines, assured of constant irrigation and hydration, farmworker Maria Jimenez had to do without water as she labored in the fields in direct sunlight on a 95-degree day in May 2008. After almost nine hours of work, Maria became dizzy and collapsed to the ground. Her boyfriend Florentino Bautista ran to her, held her in his arms, and begged for help. The foreman walked over to them and stood over the couple, reassuring Bautista and telling him that ‘this happens all the time.’ . . . By the time she arrived at the hospital, her body temperature was 108.4 degrees.” Maria died three days later. The grapes she was picking are part of the supply chain for Trader Joe’s line of “Two Buck Chuck,” the wine which costs two dollars per bottle – although this is New York, so of course it costs three.

So on the one hand, we have this society which wants cheap food, free food, at all costs; and even if we only pay two dollars for the bottle of wine, even if a hamburger can be purchased for a dollar, there are other costs. Costs to the environment, costs in the lives of farmworkers and food workers and their families, and costs to our own bodies. On the other hand, we have the imagery from today’s ancient testimony: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” This is a totally different image of free food – and it undercuts everything about the way our society deals with food. We live in one kind of “free market” – an economic system which crushes people in order to sell me a bottle of wine for two dollars; an economic system which sees very little value in human life or human dignity or wholeness or wellness or caring for this planet; an economic system which plays on our anxieties and insecurities and worst impulses so that you and I will buy more and more and more.

But the text today speaks of another kind of “free market”: a marketplace where everything is free because it flows out of God’s abundance. A marketplace that speaks not to our fears and anxieties, but to our needs and, yes, our delights! A marketplace that says, instead of “buy two, get one free,” “everything you need is here. There is enough. Enjoy it!” And the text connects this free marketplace directly with covenants – in this case, God’s covenant with Israel, since this book was written to Israelites in the Babylonian exile. But that idea of covenant – that idea is crucial; because part of the idea of covenant is that we are called to relate to one another as human beings, not to take advantage of one another in order to get ahead. In contrast to our “free market” with its cheap food, this is a “free market” of abundance in community.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of the difference between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” Cheap grace is when churches try to water down religion, to make it all about feeling good and not at all about living well. Cheap grace says, “your sins are forgiven! Go back out into the world and don’t change anything. Go ahead and harm people, if you want. Don’t fuss with trying to change the world, it’ll be fine. We’ll see you next week.” But costly grace, he wrote, is free but not cheap. Costly grace is the love which calls us to transformation. Costly grace means taking a hard look at ourselves and our world, and knowing that we are good and beautiful and beloved and worthy, and so are all the other people around us, and trying to live that out even when it is really, really difficult. Costly grace means entering into the hard and scary task of standing up to a world that crushes people. Cheap grace is a two-dollar bottle of wine. Costly grace is trying to live as if food is from God, and the earth that produces it is from God, and the farmers who grow it are from God, and the workers who transport it and sell it are from God, and our bodies that need it for nourishment are from God. And trying to live that way is hard.

I think that costly grace is what God’s free market of abundance is all about. It is about a lot more than food. It is about treating people as if God made them and they matter. It is about naming and resisting the things in the world and our own minds that tell us that we should be afraid, and anxious, and fighting all the time. It is about seeing one another as human beings rather than objects.

But in a way, it is about food as well, because every spiritual teaching we have in Christianity plays out simultaneously in the tangible, material world of food and eating. Every single high-minded, abstract theological idea we have – grace, redemption, creation, justice – is connected somewhere in our scripture and tradition with what we put in our mouths. We embody what we believe through communions and coffee hours, feasting and fasting, saying grace and sipping wine. The Christian tradition is full of food stories and food teachings and food rituals because food is one of the places where what we believe meets how we live.

God’s ways are not our ways, the text says, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. It is really difficult to break away from a world which tries to teach us to fear scarcity and look out for only ourselves. So this is not about guilt and shame and feeling bad every time you buy something other than organic, fair trade quinoa. But it is about imagining what it would look like if the ways that we bought and sold and ate food honored what is sacred. I don’t know what it would look like for you. Maybe it looks like giving away some of the extra cans you keep “just in case.” Maybe it looks like a discernment process about what God wants for your grocery budget. Maybe it looks like pausing to give thanks before meals, and seeing how that changes things.

Or maybe it looks like this: There’s a wonderful movie from 1987 called Babette’s Feast. In that movie, two sisters live in a rural village in Denmark, leading a small Christian sect that their father founded, practicing total austerity and solemnity. One day, a French woman arrives at their door, a friend of a friend, fleeing political persecution, and asks them to take her in as their housekeeper because she has nowhere else to go. For ten years, she lives with them, making their terrible bleak soup and cleaning their cold and dreary house, until one day she gets word that she has won a large sum of money. She asks the two sisters whether she can prepare a feast for them and their friends as a gesture of gratitude for welcoming her in, and they agree. They start to regret their decision as her supplies begin to arrive – rare and expensive wines; live turtles in crates; exotic fruits that they have never seen before. What is this, they wonder? It must be sinful to eat so extravagantly; maybe even satanic. They meet in secret with their church, and they agree that everyone will eat the feast, but they will all do their best not to take the slightest pleasure in it. But as they gather and Babette expresses her love and gratitude through the medium of food, a transformation begins to take place. The austerity begins to break; there are smiles and laughter; old grudges are mended and old romances are rekindled. Joy breaks through the solemnity, and they begin to delight in God’s abundance and each other’s company. And finally we learn that Babette, the first great female chef in all of France, has joyfully spent her fortune to offer this one meal, this one experience of taking joy in God’s creation. It is costly grace, freely given.

And that is the vision that echoes through the text today; it calls us to delight not in two-dollar wine or free burritos, but in God’s gifts of creation and community. It invites us to care for one another, to share out of our own abundance when we can, rather than fearing scarcity. It declares that God’s vision for the world is a different kind of free market, a table where everyone is welcome, a feast where everyone is fed. And although God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, it challenges us to live our way into it. May we have the courage to try. Amen.

Sermon: Not by Bread Alone - On Lent and Dieting

Not by Bread Alone
Matthew 4:1-11
March 13, 2011 – First Sunday of Lent

In the early days of Christianity, asceticism was all the rage. In order to practice their faith, people would abstain from food, drink, sex, and sleep. They would wear uncomfortable clothing and refuse to bathe and inflict pain on themselves. A community of Christians called the Desert Fathers went out into the wilderness to devote themselves to Christ through extreme forms of bodily deprivation. Their stories are so excessive that they sound almost surreal. In one, a man has been fasting from food and drink for days, and he feels tempted to break his fast. And so in order to strengthen his ability to overcome temptation, he hangs a cucumber from the ceiling of his hut and continues to fast, meditate, and pray for days more, all while gazing at that hanging cucumber.

And as crazy as that all sounds, they were doing their very best to follow Jesus… and when we look at today’s Gospel lesson, the connection is pretty clear. Jesus is still practically dripping with the water of the Jordan River when the spirit leads him into the wilderness. After he has fasted for forty days, the text says, the evil comes to him. It’s impossible to say what Jesus might have seen, and nearly impossible to know for sure what Matthew meant when he talked about the devil, but it is important to remember that the devil as we picture him these days is the product of centuries of Christian artwork and theology. The Old Testament says lmost nothing on the topic, and the New Testament doesn’t say all that much either, except in the book of Revelation. But Satan, or actually “the satan,” is mentioned in the Book of Job. In that book, Satan seems to be a servant of God, although in a different way from the other angels – Satan is sent to test Job with God’s permission to see if Job is faithful. And in our Gospel lesson today, Matthew tells us that Jesus is in the wilderness “in order to be tempted.” So perhaps this Satan, too, is supposed to be understood as a servant of God.

In any case, Jesus and the devil have a conversation, and the devil tempts Jesus three times. First, the devil tempts Jesus to use his power to satisfy his own hunger – to turn stones into bread. Then he takes him to the highest point of the holy temple in Jerusalem and tempts Jesus to perform a flashy miracle in the sight of all the important religious people. Finally he takes Jesus to a tall mountain and tempts him with political power to rule all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus always responds with scripture, although the devil quotes a little scripture himself, which ought to remind us that just about anyone can use the Bible for their own ends.

This is the story that gives rise to the church season of Lent. Although Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness come at the beginning of his public ministry, we remember them in connection with the last days of his life, because the church has traditionally understood that first period of temptation as preparing Jesus to eventually face his passion and death. So for forty days we observe a season of solemnity, repentance, and preparation. In our Protestant tradition, we don’t have any structured dietary changes for Lent, like our Catholic and Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters do. But even in Protestantism, our church services become darker and more solemn, and many of us try “giving something up for Lent” – sometimes a favorite activity or a bad habit, but most often a food or drink.

One of my favorite twitterers is a person who tweets these funny little prayers that also often contain a startling grain of truth, and on the first day of Lent, she tweeted this: “For those who are using Lent as a diet plan, Lord have mercy, amen.” And first I laughed, and then I thought about how neatly Lenten disciplines fit into our cultural baggage about food and eating and weight loss and self-control. Because we live in a very different culture than the one that Jesus lived in, and a very different culture from that of the Desert Fathers.

Some things haven’t changed. We all have human bodies, like Jesus did, and that means that we get hungry when we haven’t eaten. It means that we crave particular kinds of food – things that are salty or sweet or fatty. It means that food is meaningful for us – it’s associated with memories and relationships and emotions.

But some other things have changed a lot, and when we give up a food for Lent, or fast on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, it taps into a whole different culture’s baggage. Have you heard of the Master Cleanse? It’s that diet where for days on end, you eat nothing and drink a mix of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Its inventors say that it’s for ridding your body of toxins, whatever those are, but tabloids and gossip columns praise it for helping celebrities lose weight fast. If you really think about it, it’s not that much weirder than staring at
a cucumber for days on end, but it’s in pursuit of a different purpose, and we’re used to people doing strange things to try to get thin. And if you listen carefully to the subtext of the commercials and television shows and images and speeches that make up the fabric of our culture, you will hear messages that thin people are good and virtuous and worthy, and overweight people are bad and lazy and stupid. You hear it when a movie reviewer talks as much about Natalie Portman’s weight loss as her acting. You hear it when grocery stores give bigger employee discounts to employees with lower body mass indices. You hear it when almost every overweight character in the movies is either a villain or a clown.

On the flip side, our culture also surrounds us with food that is terrible for the animals it is made from, the workers who produce it, the earth, and our bodies. In the book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes about the system that brings us fast food hamburgers. He describes feed lots where thousands upon thousands of cows live their entire lives without ever seeing a blade of grass, and the waste that they produce is deposited into vast, reeking lakes of manure. He describes slaughterhouses where workers work long shifts for low wages, with one of the highest rates of on-the-job injuries of any industry in this country. And the goal of these food companies is to make sure that as many people as possible buy as much of their food as possible as often as possible – and that’s as true for groceries as it is for hamburgers – so they try to convince us that the more of it we eat, the happier we will be.

And that is what a broken food system looks like. It looks like school lunch policies that limit the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables to this nation’s poorest children. It looks like big business spending millions of dollars on lobbying and lawsuits to make sure that no government agency or public figure ever says “eat less red meat.” It looks like a commercial promising you that sugar-free gum that tastes like strawberry shortcake is finally going to make you attractive
and happy. It creates shame and guilt and anxiety about bodies and eating.

That shame and guilt and anxiety make the observance of Lent complicated. When I hear someone say that they’ve given up chocolate or hamburgers or soda for Lent, it makes me want to ask, “what’s behind that”? Because my hope is that when we choose to practice a Lenten discipline around food, it makes us more aware of ourselves and of the world around us. My hope is that Lenten disciplines remind us that there are people in the world who not only don’t have chocolate, but don’t have adequate food or clean water. My hope is that Lenten disciplines prepare us for the work of healing the world, because that work is hard and sometimes uncomfortable, and Lenten disciplines can teach us that we can do things that are hard and uncomfortable. That is my hope.

But my fear is that many people take on Lenten disciplines in part because the world has convinced them that their bodies are not good enough, and that the enjoyment they get from eating tasty food is a sin, and that if they give up sweets for forty days, they will lose some weight, and that will mean that they will be a better and more loveable person.

Friends, if you want to use Lent to become healthier, I’m not going to stop you. But I do want to be perfectly clear: your body, exactly as it is at this very moment, is made in the image of God. And Jesus did not go into the wilderness to lose ten pounds.

The passage of scripture that Jesus quotes, the passage that says “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord,” comes from Deuteronomy. And in that passage, God is reminding the Israelites who are about to leave the wilderness and enter the promised land that God fed them with manna in the wilderness. The Israelites came out of slavery terrified of starvation. They were so frightened of what would happen to them that they kept asking to go back to Egypt, back into slavery. But a miraculous bread-like substance would appear on the ground each day, and God told them to just take what they needed. When they tried to gather more, only a day’s worth of bread would remain in their baskets. When they tried to hoard it overnight, it would rot, but more bread would be on the ground.

When the devil tempts Jesus to turn stone to bread, and Jesus quotes this passage, he isn’t extolling the virtue of fasting; he’s invoking a story about learning to trust in God. He’s invoking a story of God leading people out of a broken and anxious relationship with food, teaching them to stop worrying about their next meal and focus instead on building up their spirits and their community.

If you give something up this Lent, I hope that it helps you build up your spiritual life, and your capacity to do God’s work in the world. That’s what Jesus was doing – he didn’t go into the wilderness because starvation is virtuous. He went into the wilderness for a time, to help himself prepare for the ministry that lay ahead of him. He went into the wilderness to pray and meditate and think, and to learn that he could endure pain and discomfort and withstand temptation, if he had to – and he would have to. He went into the wilderness so that when he came out, he could serve the world better.

As we go into the wilderness with him this Lent, as we in this congregation observe a period of simpler, more solemn Sunday worship, as some of us give something up, or take something on, let it be for the same reason. Let it be an act of defiance against everything in the world that tells us that we need more stuff in order to be happy. Let it be an act of solidarity with those who lack the basic necessities of life. Let it be an act of preparation for the difficult and terrifying and beautiful work of changing the world. Amen.