Sermon for Year B, Proper 13: Food For The Journey

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My partner Denton and I took our time in setting up house together in the early days of our relationship. Friends and family, even my therapist, kept asking, “When are you guys moving in together?” But, we were happy to take our time about it, and by that, I mean I had laid down the law and said that there would be no cohabitation until we’d been together for at least a year. I was not moving all my worldly chattels in with Denton Lee Stargel until he had been well and truly tested and found worthy.

But when we did finally move in to our own apartment in an old pencil factory in downtown Jersey City, we made that first trip to the grocery store to stock the larder. Now, I had never really been much of a cook. And after years of working in – and therefore being fed at -- restaurants, I was not someone who kept a lot of food in the house. We were half way through the capacious aisles of the Jersey City Shoprite when I began to feel a bit faint. One cart was full and Denton was sending me back to the front of the store for another. I started to fret. “Do we need all this stuff??? And if we do, do we have to get it all now???” The answer to both questions was ‘Yes’ -- with the added admonition that we couldn’t live on coffee and left over sesame noodles; which was all I ever kept in my bachelor refrigerator. But the two carts of staples like mayonnaise and ketchup and tuna and pasta along with household items like a mop and broom and sponges was much more than I had ever walked out of a grocery store with. It astounded me that we could actually buy and then use that much stuff.

But overtime I came to realize that Denton has a special relationship with a well stocked larder. Denton has the innate ability to keep an up-to-the-minute mental inventory of the pantry. He can walk into any grocery store, and he knows instantly that we need aluminum foil, sugar, hamburger meat, and that we might as well get some vanilla for the cake he’s going to bake 5 days from now. It astonishes me.

But he comes by it honest. Denton was brought up to believe that a pantry ought to be kept fully stocked at all times. And that’s because Denton’s father, like many in his generation, ‘came up hard’ as we say down South. Like many who lived through the Great Depression in the rural South, Denton’s father knew what it was like to get by on not much to eat; knew what it was like to open the pantry door to find precious little. Therefore when he grew up, married, joined the navy and had a family, he made a promise to himself that his family would never face empty cupboards. And they never have. And to this day, he won’t eat leftovers, and hates rice, which his family ate a little too often in order to stretch their food budget. And he makes sure his house is stocked with food, and Denton has learned that lesson well, and in our house as in his father’s house, no one ever opens the last can of tuna.

Food is one of those things that carries great meaning for us, great significance. Each of us has foods we associate with special people and times in our lives. Turkey means Thanksgiving and seems somehow uniquely American. It doesn’t matter what the weather’s doing, but if there’s strawberry shortcake, it must be spring. And my grandmother Mama Robbins wouldn’t have been able to celebrate the resurrection of the Lord without a coconut cake for Easter Day. Families and cultures invest certain foods with great meaning. And we as Christians know what that is like. In a few minutes we will share a meal of bread and wine that for us has a very great meaning; a meal that is of miraculous significance.

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In our reading this morning from Exodus, the people of Israel are complaining to Moses. They’ve nothing to eat, and wouldn’t it have been better to stay in Egypt and, if need be perish there, where they were captive, but had plenty to eat. God hears the complaining of the Israelites, and he heeds it. At Aaron’s prompting the Israelites look toward the wilderness – and away from Egypt – and within the cloud they see the glory of the Lord. What exactly the cloud version of the glory of the Lord looks like, we can only guess. But what follows next is truly glorious, for that evening the Israelites see their camp covered with quail, and in the morning, the ground is covered with a new kind of bread, which they called manna. Only God can set such a table in the wilderness of the Sinai. And after seeing all this, the Israelites knew that it was the Lord their God who had rescued them from Egypt and who would preserve them in the wilderness until such time as the Promised Land was theirs.

By the time of Jesus, the Hebrew people had been recounting for more than a thousand years in scripture and song the saving deeds of Almighty God in bringing Israel out of Egypt -- chief among those deeds is the story of the manna from heaven, when mortals ate the bread of angels and God’s chosen people were preserved in the wilderness. So the crowd that Jesus talks with in our gospel passage today is well aware that their God is one who does mighty acts and gives great signs.

In one of those great moments of Biblical irony, the crowd has sought out Jesus because, well, because they think he puts on a great dinner party! Jesus tells them, you’ve shown up again not because you’ve seen signs but rather because you like the food! And he’s right; those questioning him are those who were miraculously fed with 5 loaves and two fishes, along with 5,000 others. But they couldn’t have known that that feast was derived from a mere 5 loaves and two fish – they just know that it was a good meal, and one they’d like repeated.

Like the Israelites fleeing Egypt, the people in our gospel today are looking backwards. The Israelites were pining for the fleshpots of Egypt. And the people in John’s gospel would like another banquet like they enjoyed just the other day by the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

But what is in store for God’s people is not the ways of living and persevering from of old, but rather a new life, and a new way of sustaining that new life.

As our reading from Ephesians says, there will be an end to our former way of life, our old self, corrupt and deluded. We are to be renewed in the spirit of our minds and clothed with a new self that is the very likeness of God.

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We learn at lot from our parents. We learn a lot, as the expression goes, “at the knee”. Denton learned the stories of his father’s childhood and their concerns for having enough to eat -- and he carries those concerns with him, and preserves his family’s traditions about making sure that our family always has plenty to eat.

It seems that we are programmed in a way to look backward. We do that in many ways, in the stories we tell of our nation, our families. And we certainly do that when we worship and when we strive to pass on the faith to our children. The word religion means literally “to bind back.” And it’s no wonder, for we know, as Shakespeare put it, “the past is prologue.” We are, as people, bound to the past through our personal histories, our family history, the history of our nation. And we are, as people of faith, bound to the past in the story of salvation that we tell and tell over and over again down through the ages.

But God is not about the past, God is about the future. Just as Israel looks back to Egypt, God turns their attention to the wilderness ahead, where there is freedom, and a homeland, and food enough to last for the journey. Just as the people questioning Jesus in our gospel today, yesterday’s banquet seems worth repeating. But Jesus points them towards something beyond food that perishes, to food that will last an eternity. That food is himself, his body and blood, which is the food and drink of eternal life in him

The God of our fathers and mothers is not the God of the past, though we do honor that past. The God of our fathers is the God of the future. There is always something more with God, something else. What’s ahead is what’s most miraculous, what’s next is what is really glorious.

As the old song goes, ‘This train is bound for glory.’ And your reservation has been made, your ticket paid for in the blood of our savior. The journey may be rough at times; it may be fraught with troubles. But there’s nothing really worth worrying about. There’s only one stop on this train, it only heads in one direction. Toward the future, toward the everlasting glory that is promised to the sons and daughters of the living God. And there is food enough for the journey, and sweet, sweet refreshment at journey’s end.

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins