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This Month: "Food for Thought"
By Randy Eagle , North Hills Christian Reformed Church
Of all the suggested reading for preaching, cookbooks and short stories about food do not top the list. But someone gifted me with two books which, when read hand in hand with the Scriptures, yield a feast of homiletical insights.
Consider Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet Keeps the Feast: Recipes and Stories That Explain How the Ancient Table May Be Celebrated in Our Time and How Food Functions as Theological Talk in the Bible (New York: Morrow, 1995). Smith’s book is chock full of culinary insights; his discussion of lamb is especially poignant (p. 60). According to Smith, shepherds often wake to find ewes whose infant lambs did not survive the night. In addition, ewes sometimes die, leaving orphaned lambs with no mother. Common sense would suggest uniting an orphaned lamb with a childless ewe. Apparently that doesn’t work since the ewe knows by smell that the orphan is not hers, and so the orphaned lamb is left starving without its biological mother. The shepherd can do only one thing, and that is to slit the throat of the dead lamb and with its blood wash the orphaned lamb. The ewe then recognizes the orphaned lamb as her own and allows it to nurse; it is adopted through the blood. If we know this, Revelation texts will never sound the same: "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain. . . . and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation" (Rev. 5:9, 12).
Another work worth considering is Isak Dinesen’s novella Babette’s Feast (available on video or in any number of anthologies). At first, this reads as an amusing tale of Calvinistic puritans trying their best to cling to their starched and sour way of life. But when Babette—a foreign chef from Paris—comes to town and wins the lottery, she chooses to lavish the cash upon the townsfolk and prepare an elaborate feast. Biblical overtones of the Last Supper become obvious: doves follow Babette whenever she’s outside, the sisters sing of Jerusalem, twelve guests are seated around the table, Babette refers to her home "across the waters," and so forth. But it is the meal where Babette expends her all that becomes the centerpiece. And strangely, the people who first came only to endure the meal now embrace it, and then are actually changed by it: calloused hearts soften, an estranged couple makes amends, the dining room fills with delight, wonder, and light. Babette is last seen alone, depleted, having given her all for those she loved. It is Eucharist.
Why can culinary works be so enriching for preaching, and why does the Bible repeatedly talk of bread, feasting, honey, milk, water, fish, and the like? The answer may be, because, as our Lord showed, sometimes sitting at a table is the best place to preach.