We Never Dine Alone
Third Sunday of Easter
April 6, 2008
Luke 24:13-35
I like to eat. You may know that. You may have seen me do it. I think eating is a fine and important thing.
When I interviewed for the position of Rector of St. Luke’s Parish, on Palm Sunday Weekend 2006, I found it fitting that the Vestry and I completed our time together with a fine lunch in the Parish Hall. I was served a slice from a beautiful and delicate cake – orange marmalade – and I then declared to the Vestry: “I don’t know if you’re interested in me, but I’d come here on the strength of this cake!”
But now that I’ve established my credentials as an eater, I’d like to clarify a point: I’m usually not terribly interested in eating in and of itself. Eating as mere sustenance has little attraction for me.
It’s a daily ritual in our office. Our parish secretary, beginning about 11:30, will announce: “Michael, it’s getting closet to your lunchtime.” As a general rule, I don’t eat as early as 11:30, but she knows that it may take an hour or more to convince me that I should eat. And she knows that without prompting I’m likely to forget to eat entirely.
I think it’s self-preservation on her part, because if I skip lunch I’ll get very, very cranky and headachy and generally be unpleasant. It happens to me a lot on my days off and when I travel. A friend recently told me, “You’re the only person I know who seems to have no internal trigger to eat at a regular hour.”
Perhaps. I believe that’s because dining alone, to me, is the most spectacularly uninteresting thing one can do. It’s a bit like going to the filling station – which may be why so many filling stations have hot dogs and other barely edible offerings inside. We’re just filling up without thinking about it when we eat on our own.
Dining, I am convinced, is an inherently social activity. There was a book sometime back entitled Never Eat Alone, and I liked the title. Unfortunately, its premise was that you should always be networking for business, and mealtimes ought to be used for that purpose.
I am otherwise persuaded. When business is transacted over a meal, the meal is secondary. I happen to love the Pita Stop restaurant in Birmingham. I love Middle Eastern food and I used to eat there often with my wife. But last week a group of us conducted business while eating take-out from the Pita Stop and … well, I couldn’t tell you what I ate or how it tasted. Score that: Business 1, Food 0.
Remember my interview with the Vestry? The meal came after, and it was a gracious invitation to relax. Dining isn’t about business. It can be, and it should be, about bringing people together. It can be, and it should be, about feeding one another on many levels, in many ways.
Almost 200 years ago, a Frenchman wrote: To invite people to dine with us is to make ourselves responsible for their well-being for as long as they are under our roofs. [1]
That’s not a Biblical text, but it makes a scriptural point: We are bound to care for one another, and feeding one another is a primary way of doing that. To invite someone to dine with you is a way of saying, “I would like to take care of you.” If the invitation is merely a social formality, a repaying of a debt, a business obligation, then the food and company and overall experience will be flat and unsatisfying. Protein will have been ingested, but the body and spirit not fed.
Think of the ways that we feed each other. When somebody dies, we bring food. When someone is ill, we bring over some hot soup or maybe a casserole. Many a casserole has come to me when I’ve been at life’s lowest points, so I’ve always said the taste of a casserole is the taste of love. Such feeding is instinctive, deep in our culture.
When we are wooing someone, we take her out for a candlelit dinner. Or invite him in for a homemade meal. We mark milestones with gala meals– birthdays, weddings, anniversaries. And we gather to get to know one another and to remember who we are – I think of our countless family reunions in Germania Springs and Noccalula Falls and the hundreds of deviled eggs and gallons of banana pudding I’ve eaten at them.
We gather and feed each other to show we care. We do it to say I love you.
One of my favorite writers, M.F.K. Fisher, once put it this way: People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? […] The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one. [2]
As it is with us, so it was with Jesus. Jesus liked to be at table with friends, and he liked to be at table with those with whom nobody else would eat – outcasts, the lower-class, the friendless. That is why his enemies said, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Jesus loved those people, so he invited them to table.
Sitting down to share bread and wine was one way Jesus could show his love for others. Not the only way – remember that Martha was told to come out of the kitchen to listen with Mary – but it was a way that Jesus showed us time and again.
St. John at Patmos had a revelation, and Christ said to him, Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. [3]
If you hear my voice and open the door … if you hear my plea you will feed me … if you will have me, I will come in … if you have me to table, we will eat together … for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. [4]
Feeding as ministry is not always about soup kitchens and food banks, though it is about that. It is mostly about coming together face to face. I say over and over that hosting coffee hour after service is a ministry for this very reason. It is an invitation to others – anyone who walks in these doors. It is hearing the voice of Jesus, saying, “I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”
That is our Easter potluck and our Men's First Sunday Breakfasts, dining with with one another, our Campus Ministry gatherings with students, and our Thanksgiving dinner with everyone in town. “Hear my voice and open the door.”
Our ECW, in a stroke of genius, recently decided to better organize our ministry to the ill and the homebound. A couple of volunteers every month will take on responsibility for seeing that food is prepared and delivered to those who may need it that month – perhaps after a death or a hospitalization. It’s a way of making sure that we express our love at a time when it’s most needed.
I hope this year to begin a round of dinners here in our Parish Hall that, over time, will include newcomers and longtimers alike. An opportunity to sit and break bread with one another, to get to know each other. For each of us to come in and eat—I with you, and you with me.
When Jesus breaks bread with others in the New Testament, it prefigures the Eucharist. We are with him at this table, the altar. But when Jesus breaks bread with others in Scripture it also is a model for us, for at table we meet one another in love, and where there is love there is Christ.
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. [5]
[1] Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 1825.
[2] M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me, 1943.
[3] Rev 3:20
[4] Matt 25:35
[5] Luke 24:30-31
April 6, 2008
Luke 24:13-35
I like to eat. You may know that. You may have seen me do it. I think eating is a fine and important thing.
When I interviewed for the position of Rector of St. Luke’s Parish, on Palm Sunday Weekend 2006, I found it fitting that the Vestry and I completed our time together with a fine lunch in the Parish Hall. I was served a slice from a beautiful and delicate cake – orange marmalade – and I then declared to the Vestry: “I don’t know if you’re interested in me, but I’d come here on the strength of this cake!”
But now that I’ve established my credentials as an eater, I’d like to clarify a point: I’m usually not terribly interested in eating in and of itself. Eating as mere sustenance has little attraction for me.
It’s a daily ritual in our office. Our parish secretary, beginning about 11:30, will announce: “Michael, it’s getting closet to your lunchtime.” As a general rule, I don’t eat as early as 11:30, but she knows that it may take an hour or more to convince me that I should eat. And she knows that without prompting I’m likely to forget to eat entirely.
I think it’s self-preservation on her part, because if I skip lunch I’ll get very, very cranky and headachy and generally be unpleasant. It happens to me a lot on my days off and when I travel. A friend recently told me, “You’re the only person I know who seems to have no internal trigger to eat at a regular hour.”
Perhaps. I believe that’s because dining alone, to me, is the most spectacularly uninteresting thing one can do. It’s a bit like going to the filling station – which may be why so many filling stations have hot dogs and other barely edible offerings inside. We’re just filling up without thinking about it when we eat on our own.
Dining, I am convinced, is an inherently social activity. There was a book sometime back entitled Never Eat Alone, and I liked the title. Unfortunately, its premise was that you should always be networking for business, and mealtimes ought to be used for that purpose.
I am otherwise persuaded. When business is transacted over a meal, the meal is secondary. I happen to love the Pita Stop restaurant in Birmingham. I love Middle Eastern food and I used to eat there often with my wife. But last week a group of us conducted business while eating take-out from the Pita Stop and … well, I couldn’t tell you what I ate or how it tasted. Score that: Business 1, Food 0.
Remember my interview with the Vestry? The meal came after, and it was a gracious invitation to relax. Dining isn’t about business. It can be, and it should be, about bringing people together. It can be, and it should be, about feeding one another on many levels, in many ways.
Almost 200 years ago, a Frenchman wrote: To invite people to dine with us is to make ourselves responsible for their well-being for as long as they are under our roofs. [1]
That’s not a Biblical text, but it makes a scriptural point: We are bound to care for one another, and feeding one another is a primary way of doing that. To invite someone to dine with you is a way of saying, “I would like to take care of you.” If the invitation is merely a social formality, a repaying of a debt, a business obligation, then the food and company and overall experience will be flat and unsatisfying. Protein will have been ingested, but the body and spirit not fed.
Think of the ways that we feed each other. When somebody dies, we bring food. When someone is ill, we bring over some hot soup or maybe a casserole. Many a casserole has come to me when I’ve been at life’s lowest points, so I’ve always said the taste of a casserole is the taste of love. Such feeding is instinctive, deep in our culture.
When we are wooing someone, we take her out for a candlelit dinner. Or invite him in for a homemade meal. We mark milestones with gala meals– birthdays, weddings, anniversaries. And we gather to get to know one another and to remember who we are – I think of our countless family reunions in Germania Springs and Noccalula Falls and the hundreds of deviled eggs and gallons of banana pudding I’ve eaten at them.
We gather and feed each other to show we care. We do it to say I love you.
One of my favorite writers, M.F.K. Fisher, once put it this way: People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? […] The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one. [2]
As it is with us, so it was with Jesus. Jesus liked to be at table with friends, and he liked to be at table with those with whom nobody else would eat – outcasts, the lower-class, the friendless. That is why his enemies said, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Jesus loved those people, so he invited them to table.
Sitting down to share bread and wine was one way Jesus could show his love for others. Not the only way – remember that Martha was told to come out of the kitchen to listen with Mary – but it was a way that Jesus showed us time and again.
St. John at Patmos had a revelation, and Christ said to him, Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. [3]
If you hear my voice and open the door … if you hear my plea you will feed me … if you will have me, I will come in … if you have me to table, we will eat together … for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. [4]
Feeding as ministry is not always about soup kitchens and food banks, though it is about that. It is mostly about coming together face to face. I say over and over that hosting coffee hour after service is a ministry for this very reason. It is an invitation to others – anyone who walks in these doors. It is hearing the voice of Jesus, saying, “I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”
That is our Easter potluck and our Men's First Sunday Breakfasts, dining with with one another, our Campus Ministry gatherings with students, and our Thanksgiving dinner with everyone in town. “Hear my voice and open the door.”
Our ECW, in a stroke of genius, recently decided to better organize our ministry to the ill and the homebound. A couple of volunteers every month will take on responsibility for seeing that food is prepared and delivered to those who may need it that month – perhaps after a death or a hospitalization. It’s a way of making sure that we express our love at a time when it’s most needed.
I hope this year to begin a round of dinners here in our Parish Hall that, over time, will include newcomers and longtimers alike. An opportunity to sit and break bread with one another, to get to know each other. For each of us to come in and eat—I with you, and you with me.
When Jesus breaks bread with others in the New Testament, it prefigures the Eucharist. We are with him at this table, the altar. But when Jesus breaks bread with others in Scripture it also is a model for us, for at table we meet one another in love, and where there is love there is Christ.
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. [5]
[1] Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 1825.
[2] M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me, 1943.
[3] Rev 3:20
[4] Matt 25:35
[5] Luke 24:30-31
posted by Michael+ at 5:08 PM
