April 19, 2009

One of my favorite landscapes in the Bible is the one in John 21, of Jesus standing on the far shore of a lake. Perhaps I love this because I grew up on boats in the Ct. river and far shorelines always have been places of anticipation, refuge and mystery. Or perhaps I love this image of the far shore because I’ve always thought of heaven this way, as our far shore. Yet this sighting of the newly resurrected Jesus by his first disciples, as they are out fishing one night, seems like nothing else in all of my—or their—imaginations. Jesus seems both otherworldly and immensely real. Why he’s even attentive to their work, to their fishing: “Cast your nets to the other side,” he yells at them.

Now as often happens when I read the Bible, I get stuck in one picture. In my familiar picture of this lake’s shoreline, Jesus is more spiritual than physical. Perhaps this is because I still have some trouble accepting Jesus’ promise that the body, our bodies, as well as our souls, will be resurrected. So as I’ve looked to that far shore, heard his voice calling to his fishermen disciples, watched Peter drop his nets and run to him through the water, I’ve seen, up until now, more of a ghost Jesus than a still living embodied Jesus. Even that wonderful detail of the charcoal fire: I’ve seen that as a ghostly fire. And so, when Jesus three times asks Peter if he loves him, and three times now Peter will not deny him, but will say, “You know I love you Lord,” when Jesus then gives that simple command, If you love me, feed my sheep, well I’ve narrowed Jesus’ command to me, to us. I’ve heard, up until now, Jesus say to Peter, “give my people spiritual food.” Feed their spirits.

Much as I might still like to dwell in the dream-like refuge of this luminal shore scene, I have to go another way this morning, another way in this season of our country and our world, a world in which real food, real, good food, is scarce for so many people. I have to go this way because every week, for some weeks now, we’ve been feeding over 900 people from our food pantry. 900: here in one of the most affluent shorelines in Connecticut! It is Earth Day that we celebrate this Sunday, and Earth days calls us to think about our earth and the state of feeding on our earth—and, for us Christians, how we are doing at following Jesus’ command to Peter.

What if Jesus isn’t just saying to Peter, “spiritually feed my sheep”? What if “feed” isn’t just a metaphor for something else? What if Jesus is saying, “give them real food, my people of this earth?” And what are the full consequences for us, as Jesus’ followers, if we take this message to heart and act on it? What will it mean for us to follow our saying “I love you Lord” with “I will feed your sheep,” feed the world with real food as well as the spirit’s food? Yes, we are told “we do not live by bread alone,” but neither does this mean “we don’t need bread at all.” Look at Jesus throughout the gospels: what a feeder he is—the loaves and the fishes, the water into wine. Jesus is always aware when people’s bodies are hungry and he takes care of that first, first. Nor does he give some more because they are rich or from a certain tribe. Everybody eats. Why Jesus himself even eats with his disciples in this scene after his Resurrection, eats the fish they cook over that charcoal fire!

Now the more I’ve been reading lately about our global food crisis the more I am realizing how dangerous Jesus’ gospel preaching to feed others is, if we take it to heart and to hand. What would it mean for us to work to feed the people of the earth, feed them abundantly yet with the loving respect for all God’s creatures and the earth that Adam and Eve practiced in the first garden? We may not feel it’s very dangerous for us here right now to champion the rights of the underfed poor as well as the rights of all living organisms, animals and plants. We may not feel we are in the same dangerous position as the priests in El Salvador were in the 1970s—a couple of us watched the film “Romero” a few weeks ago in our film series, a film made by the Catholic Church. There, in El Salvador, Archbishop Romero and other priests were told, threatened even, by the wealthy who owned all the land (and who wanted to keep that land, so they could be wealthy just like the Americans, they said), the priests were told to just “stick to the gospel,” stick to the gospel, never mind getting involved in the feeding of the dispossessed peasants. Well the priests thought the gospel was about real feeding of the poor, body and spirit, and they paid the highest price. The priests were arrested, some tortured, some murdered. Even Archbishop Romero himself was assassinated in the cathedral while he was in the very act of celebrating holy communion. In the very act. Archbishop Romero is in line for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. If we are ever so challenged here in our gospel work of feeding the world’s poor, and it could come to this, I pray that we will also be as strong, as resolute, as fearless as those priests were. I hope I am.

For it is a dangerous situation we are in. I’ve been reading a book called The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming.[1] This book has opened a door I’ve long suspected was there, but one that I have been anxious, even scared to open until now, emboldened by Jesus’ command. As a small child, raised in Sunday School and taught about the world’s poor, I was constantly reminded at the dinner table when I wouldn’t clean my plate that I should remember the starving in India. Of course in my childhood logic, I would think, what good would this do—how could I get that food over there anyway—it only made me feel more guilty to think about others who were starving while I ate. So I knew that door was there, the door to the wider world of starvation. I also knew as a child about the door into animal slaughtering practices. I had an uncle who was a butcher, and we regularly killed chickens in our farm yard. But these animals had a good life and were killed humanely. But then I saw some photographs from the Humane Society. I was 12. I never forgot them. So I knew, again, there was a door to a wider and harder world out there. And I have been afraid.

Every time we sit down to eat I think all of us somewhere face that door: we are haunted by questions we do have to push aside in order to enjoy our dinners: where did this food come from? Is it safe? Was the animal kindly treated? How is my eating affecting the world’s food supply? Who is not eating at this very moment? This is not a consciousness many of us have. Yet, as Emerson wrote, “You have just dined and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” It’s easier not to think about the slaughterhouse and our urbanized way of life doesn’t make it any easier. Our imaginations stop at the supermarket. Few now remember farm life (once I remember someone visited me and we were cooking chicken. I said to her, I used to raise chickens for the 4 H—and we’d slaughter one or two on Saturday. She looked at the plastic-wrapped package in horror and said, “oh no, chickens come from the supermarket.” (Of course it probably wasn’t the best time to be bringing this topic up)). But here, in the context of Jesus’ command and his strength, calling us to feed people, I think it’s time I opened the door a little into the serious feeding obstacles we face as we work to feed others and ourselves well and justly.

One door I will not in this sermon open widely enough for you this morning is the door to what’s going on in the world’s factory farms, which are responsible for 74% of the world’s poultry and 68 percent of the world’s egg production. That is a hard door to open. What’s inside there is hard for the animals and hard for the workers. But we must all open this door, join with those globally who are working to change cruel practices, read books such as Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human. Grandin, a professor of animal science, also suffers from autism. She says her autism made it hard for her in school—but it made animals easy for her to understand. I am grateful that Grandin has been hired by some large corporations and slaughterhouses to improve how we treat animals. But as she herself says, it’s but a drop in the bucket. Once farmers raised and slaughtered their own animals. The animals had a life outdoors, with their young, and their owners had a long relationship with them and so there was more probability of their treating animals with respect at slaughter time. We all need that respectful and loving relationship with animals again, the most helpless of God’s creatures.

But I will this morning open the door wider into food production and food consumption in our world. If we are to feed others, we have to assess the shelves of our global larder, our global food pantry. And we have to know who holds the keys to it so that we can open it.

First we need to know how full is the world’s food pantry? Is there enough in it for the whole population of the world? Many of us I suspect think there is not. Yet the UN World Food Programme suggests, on the contrary, that the volume of food produced is more than one and one half times what is needed to provide every person on earth with a nutritious diet. One and one half times!! For every person! This despite the world’s growing population! The global food pantry is well-stocked. There is enough. It is not scarcity that is our problem, nor over-population. The problem has to be that some people’s larders, some people’s pantries, some countries’ pantries, are too full and others are too empty.

We tend to think that most of the well-stocked pantries are in developed and developing countries. We tend to think that the worst suffering is over there, in underdeveloped countries, in places such as Darfur. Famines are newsworthy, as well they should be. But of the 842 million people on the earth who suffer from chronic undernourishment, 800 million of them live in developing countries. 800 of 842 million, an often invisible sub-continent of the hungry, people dying quietly behind their doors.

In the United States, too many often hidden people do have empty pantries. Add to these, the 12 % of Americans, who are “food insecure,” people who wonder where their next meal is coming from at all, and we get a sense of what we face even in the richest country in the world.

As we assess the world’s larder, and our individual ones, something else we need to look at is what kinds of food are in them. Currently 65% of Americans are considered “overweight and obese”—a condition the Surgeon General in 2003 said will soon be responsible for killing as many Americans each year as smoking. Some of us have food, but many of us aren’t eating the right things.

The question that haunts all of us is why are our pantries stocked so differently? Why are some empty, and some full of the wrong things, food that isn’t good for us-- or the world’s animals and plants?

Now this is where we are called to be hard looking as Christians. There is a difference in our pantries because food in our world is seen as a commodity and not as a basic right. A commodity and not as a basic right. You pay your money, you get your food. When Native Americans slaughtered an animal, all would share in the eating. You had a right to eat just because you were part of the tribe. When Jesus ate fish in that shore meal, all shared in the eating. These are people, like the early Christians in Acts, who share all they have, so no one is in need. Every pantry is wide open to everyone else. There are no keys.

But food in our world is not seen this way. Food is big profit, big money. Just as we need to learn to see the plastic-wrapped chicken as once a live chicken, so we need when we look inside our own pantries to see what’s under that plastic. And what’s under there is the work of a principality and a power of our time.

Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, talks about the principalities and powers that we have to fight as Christians. Principalities and powers. Large structures. Invisible structures. Structures that threaten our ability to do Jesus’ work. I believe that the way food is produced in our world is a principality and a power. The principality is real. It is in here, in the way we don’t think about food as a right of all. And it, this principality, is out there as well: it is out there in form of powerful and ever more greedy agri-business.

Of late we have had the plastic packaging ripped off of Wall Street and the Madoffs of this world. We now know that so very much was rotten underneath, product of a greed that has hurt all of us, and our children, and our grandchildren terribly. I think it is time for us to see agri-business with these same eyes. It is time for us to blame their greedy practices for the world’s empty, poorly and inhumanely stocked pantries.

One analyst has likened our food situation to an hour glass. On the top sit a large number of food and meat producers (though family farms are shrinking), and on the bottom sit us, the consumers. But in the narrow middle, the narrowing middle, sit a few massive firms. They control the quality, quantity, type, and price of the product. And, we all know, they have the ear of some in Washington.

What’s this narrowing middle done to our food and our earth? Small farms have gone under. The increasing hybridization of seeds (to discourage people from saving their own so they have to buy) is killing off more and more precious varieties. Chemicals are ruining our soil. Hormones and antibiotics are infecting our animals and us. And, because this is profitable, meat production, and so slaughtering, has astronomically increased. Though the human population has only doubled since 1950, meat production has grown nearly five fold, with the 20 percent of us who live in the world’s richest countries consuming about 40 percent of all meat. What is in our pantries, its price, its wholesomeness, its humaneness, is not an accident.

What then is to be done? How can we, facing this principality and power, really follow Jesus’ command to feed others? One thing we have been talking about here for some time in this church is that many small acts, the ways we live our daily lives, do change things. Agribusiness’ ways may seem like a Goliath. And there will be real political and legal consequences for those of us who try to challenge its ways, the rights it claims. But lest we become overwhelmed, we must remember this structure has not always been in place. Factory farms, for instance, are only 50 years old. It is a mistake in reading history to believe that particular principalities and powers have always and will always control everything.

And just as we need to remember David’s victory over Goliath, we need to remember that one man in history, Jesus, has done more to disturb, even topple these seemingly permanent structures, which is why Jesus is so revolutionary, which is why he was so dangerous he had to be put to death. He resisted. He said, love your neighbor, whether Samaritan, woman, child, criminal, ill. Feed your neighbor. Open every door and every pantry. Be kind and gentle to all that is living. Everything that lives is holy. Everything. Take, all of you, and eat it. All of you.

These are propitious times for us all to be taking bold small steps, for we are living in a new time of hope. Why I just read that the Obamas’ new dog Bo comes from a litter named the “Hope and Change Litter.” Let’s rename all our slaughterhouses and farms with the words “Hope and Change.” We are all filled with hope. Small steps to feed the world well and justly can topple systems. They always have. So what are some of our possible small steps, for today?

· We can learn about and become involved in all the transnational resistance movements to agribusiness as usual.

· We can buy only Fair Trade products (and we use Fair Trade coffee here), which ensures a decent wage to third world producers.

· We can support the growing farmers’ market and organic foods movements. We can adopt the slogan, and make it real, “organics for all,” and not just the affluent.

· We can encourage our schools to teach how we grow and distribute our food. We could have school gardens and teach children more about animals. I understand there’s a project underway in Guilford to do just this.

· We can choose to save heirloom seeds—have an exchange here; give our oversupply of cucumbers and squash away to others, choose what we eat. We can participate in food boycotts, write letters to legislators, talk to our store managers about where their meat comes from, get to know local farmers.

In taking these steps, we will be travelling to that far shore where Jesus spreads out the meal for all to eat. We will see food not with dominating and all-consuming eyes, but with gentle and loving eyes as we watch each other eat. We will come to see plants and animals in their loving connection with ourselves. And we will at last be able to sit down and eat a meal of which we can say, and mean it in every way, “this is good; this is very good.”

Pollen, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.

[1] Weis, Tony (London: Zed, 2007)

1st Congregational Church of Old Lyme Last modified: 03/26/10

1st Congregational Church of Old Lyme
Last modified: 03/26/10