The Ethics of Eating

Psalm 111

I Corinthians 8:1-13

Our reading invites us to consider a few questions.  How can the way we eat better express the good news of Jesus Christ in our lives?  How can we make sure our practices of eating express our identities as baptized people?  And does the way I eat express my love for God and for others in the community?

 

I mentioned to the confirmation group yesterday that when John Calvin wrote the Ecclesiastical Ordinances in 1541 as a guide for the city of Geneva, one of Calvin’s primary concerns was that Christians live simply and modestly.  And so there were laws against lavish parties.  If you wanted to host a dinner party, the guest list could not exceed twenty people.  And the number of dishes served during the meal were to be kept at a reasonable number.  Now we might find Calvin’s Geneva a little dour and stuffy, but I do want you to know that part of our Reformed heritage is to examine our practices of eating to see whether the way we eat is consistent with our baptism as followers of Jesus Christ.

Several years ago I was asked to officiate a funeral for a family who lived sort of off the grid.  They hunted rabbits and squirrels for food.  But more than anything else, they loved hunting and eating raccoons.  Going “coon hunting” was part of the fabric of their lives.  It was a form of entertainment.  And they told me that after laying their loved on to rest, they would gather for a feast of barbequed coon.  I admitted to them that I’d never eaten raccoon.  And they simply couldn’t believe it. 

As the friends and extended family gathered for the funeral, it was pretty obvious that the guy officiating the funeral was an outsider with no credibility.  And so I tried some self-deprecating humor, making fun of myself for my lack of country ways.  When I admitted that I’d never tried barbequed coon, they all roared with laughter and shook their heads at the pastor, dressed unnecessarily in a suit for the occasion.  There were two older women in the front row, both of them laughing.  And in the several moments it took for the group to settle back down, one older woman elbowed her friend, pointed at me and said: “Bleeping city boy!  He’s never had bbq coon!”  They laughed and laughed.

Now keep in mind, these were people who knew how to live frugally, how to get by on very little.  And they felt sorry for someone like me who had lost touch with those traditions of frugality and self-sufficiency.  To them, I wasn’t educated or sophisticated, I was soft and wasteful, someone who didn’t know how to skin and butcher a raccoon, a “city boy.”

One of Stephanie’s students in New York was the daughter of a chef.  And the kids in the class got to take a field trip for a behind the scenes tour of the busy kitchen in his restaurant in Trump Tower in Columbus Circle.  For Christmas, Stephanie’s gift from the family was a card inviting us to dinner at one of his newer restaurants downtown.  It wasn’t a gift card with an amount.  It was just an invitation to call a number and make a reservation. 

When we arrived for dinner, everything on the menu looked amazing.  We were planning to share something from the section marked “First Course” but the waiter just brought us three things to try.  When he returned later to see if we were ready for our next course, we asked a few questions and deliberated about what each of us would order.  He interrupted and said.  “Oh no, you don’t need to choose.  I’ll bring you whatever you want.”  And so he did.  And then later he brought us three desserts.  It was, to be honest, a little embarrassing to have so much food on our table.  When the feast was finally over, they brought us a beautifully wrapped tray of cinnamon rolls to take home for breakfast the next morning.  I shudder to think what that experience would have cost were it not a gift.  But to everyone else in the restaurant, it was just another Friday night, just another meal, just another four or five hundred-dollar tab. 

Now the tables had turned.  Now the economic gap was between me and the wealthy people for whom this was just another night out.  How we eat, what we eat, where we eat and with whom – these practices of eating are always related to wealth and social class.  And this link between economic status and eating habits is one key to our reading today. 

The problem that Paul addresses is whether the Corinthians baptized into the new family of Jesus Christ were able to eat “food sacrificed to idols.”  Paul deals with the problem by addressing two different groups within the congregation.  The “strong” group refers to Christians who were well-off financially and educated.  The “weak” group refers to Christians who were of the laboring class, and who tended to be more superstitious. 

The wealthier members of the congregation were arguing that eating food sacrificed to the local gods is no big deal.  You can see their argument to Paul in v. 4: “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and “There is no God but one.”  Their argument is that they were baptized into a new relationship to the one true God, to the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ.  The pantheon of Greek and Roman gods and the local deities with shrines aren’t real, so what’s the problem?  Paul agrees with them, but presses them to think not just about food, but about how their eating might affect others in the congregation.

The rich and the poor had different approaches to “food sacrificed to idols.”  The rich could afford to buy meat in the marketplace, and all of it had been sacrificed to the gods.  The rich were also accustomed to lavish dinner parties with others of similar economic status, parties that would have included meat purchased from the market.  Sometimes, on special occasions, these private meals for wealthy friends would be held within the religious shrines, devoted to one of the gods.  Thus eating “food sacrificed to idols” was a common occurrence that the wealthy didn’t worry about too much.

Those in the congregation who were of the laboring class or poor, on the other hand, could not have afforded to buy meat regularly.  So, the only times they were confronted with food sacrificed to idols would have been at public festivals held within the shrines to honor and appease the gods.  So for them, eating meat always carried with it a strong sense of devotion to a different religion and to different gods. 

I am following New Testament scholar Dale Martin for help interpreting what was going on at Corinth.  But most scholars agree that differences in wealth and economic status played a large role in the divisions within the Corinthian congregation.  This shouldn’t surprise us.  In chapter 11, Paul has to instruct the wealthy to wait on the poor to arrive for services on Sunday evenings, so that they can eat their meals and share the Lord’s Supper together.  The rich were at leisure to gather earlier and to begin eating and drinking together.  The laborers, whose time was owed to their employers, had to finish the workday before arriving at church later in the evening.

And so our reading today is only partly about food.  It is also about the difficult work of living together as rich and poor within the new family of Jesus Christ, since these economic markers will entail different experiences and different perspectives.  What’s really at stake is how to practice love for others in the way you eat.  Our job today is not simply to agree with Paul.  Our job is to think critically and creatively, along with Paul, about whether our practices of eating faithfully express the good news of Jesus Christ.  You might put it like this: does our eating divide us and isolate us from others, or does it connect us in new and interesting ways to others?  Can our meals become, like they were for Jesus, little pictures of how God’s love connects rich and poor, the healthy and the hurting, those blessed with friends and those who are lonely, those who have plenty and those who are hungry?

Paul asks the strong group, the group with knowledge that idols are really nothing, to give up their right to attend both private banquets and the public festivals.  He asks them to do this, not because eating meat sacrificed to idols is wrong, but because doing so might harm others in the congregation.  If those Christians who avoid food sacrificed to idols see others eating with no worries, they may join in and defile their conscience.  It would be for the “weak” a kind of religious adultery, cheating with other gods while in a relationship with the God of Jesus Christ.  So to the strong, Paul says, you have the right to eat food sacrificed to idols.  But I’m asking you to avoid it anyway out of concern for the health of the wider congregation.

Paul turns a question about eating into a question about love and fellowship.  We might want to know, “Well, who is right?”  But Paul won’t let us land on that question.  Knowing who is right is perhaps important but cannot be the goal of our community life.  The goal is to find a way of life that is wide enough to include a variety of people, where those in positions of strength and wealth care for and serve the more insecure members of the community.

So then, how can our own eating become more loving, and more expressive of the good news that very different kinds of people have been gathered into a new family around Jesus Christ?

We may not believe in idols or demons, but we do live in the shadow of a food industry that has more power than any idol ever had.  And so maybe our faith in Christ will lead us to protect ourselves from those who want to sell us processed food with high profit margins.  Michael Pollan, in his wonderful book, The Omnivore’s Dilmma, gives this pithy advice: Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  That is, eat food, not processed food.  Eat in moderation.  And make sure plants become the star in the show rather than meat.  This approach to eating would make us more healthy and the food industry less profitable.

Many of us are busy with work and family and other obligations.  This makes eating in restaurants or ordering food something close to a necessity some of the time.  But even so, we might want to consider how much we spend on eating out when there are many people here in our community who are hungry.  And we might want to devote some of what we spend on eating out to hosting more meals in our home, inviting others to join us for simple meals that foster connections and relationships.  We might want to prepare more of our own food, to slow down, to learn to cook, and to form relationships with local farmers.

In many ways, Paul’s encouragement to make sure that our eating is always an expression of love is a decent argument for church potlucks.  These shared meals can be opportunities to deepen our connections with others here in the congregation.  Potlucks (I read somewhere) are making a comeback among the millenials!  Some things roar back into style if you wait long enough.

We might experiment with growing some of our own food – a small garden, a few tomato plants, or even just some herbs.  These small efforts allow us to reimagine ourselves as responsible participants in the way we eat, resisting the ways industries and corporations want to mold us into passive consumers.  We might want to eat as much as possible from the farmer’s market and from friends with farms.  Christian Seals brought us eggs a few weeks ago and the scrambled eggs we made were delicious.

Let me close by commending you as a congregation for your deep, ongoing, and committed work with the Beacon’s ministry to provide for those who are hungry.  We host two large food drives each year and we provide financial support through our Deacons and through our missions giving.  I pray that this sharing of food with the hungry becomes not just something that we do once in awhile, but the very heartbeat of a new way of life.