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Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Today's Frontline Devotion January 23, 2006 A Very Brief History of Food |
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FRONTLINE DEVOTION FOR MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2006 by Fritz Foltz
This passage reports on a first century problem we do not have to understand. It does remind us; however, that eating and drinking have always been an important part of religion. So I am going to recount a few observations about food in the Bible.
If we take the Bible just as its books appear on the library shelf, we find in the very beginning eating meat would be almost cannibalism. Humans and animals were buddies, conversing as friends, in the Garden of Eden.
We find God reluctantly gives humans the right to eat meat during Noah’s time. I don’t think it is clear why, perhaps because as usual people wanted more. He does stipulate that they should never eat the blood of the animal for this is the life spirit.
Next we see find clean and unclean foods appear in Moses’ law. (We all heard about that when in addition to other things, the notorious Jack Abramoff owned a kosher restaurant in D.C. that served creamed lobster. Huh?). People offer all sorts of suggestions why Moses called for kosher eating; usually claiming it must have resulted from observations about what foods could not be easily preserved.
At any rate, the regulations about such grew so large that Jesus thumbed his nose at them. Early Christians eventually dropped kosher teachings. It appears this was not only, because Jesus did not observe them, but also because it was difficult for Greek and Jewish Christians to share the Communion when the latter practiced kosher dietary regulations. So Paul, among others, declared there were no such things as unclean foods. God created everything and declared everything good.
However, we have taken this and have run berserk. We certainly now live to eat, rather than eat to live. We are constantly eating something or other. We frequent fast foods establishments that do not even necessitate our sitting down to eat. And we seldom do that, stuffing our faces alone and often standing before a television set rather than eating sitting around a table in communion with our family and friends.
Many of us feel we have to regain a compassionate and respectful kind of dining again. One of my very thoughtful friends will not go into fast food restaurants, because they foster “eating without giving dignity to the life that was given up that we might live”. When he put it that way, I shook. The words reflect those we use to describe Jesus’ sacrifice. Wow! Those words describe very well what we have learned about ecology and the biosphere. Some things are always losing life, so others of us can live. Our problem too often has been that we do not appreciate that and like wastrels gobble up everything around us, food and every other resource as well.
Hopefully we can enter a new stage in the history of food in which we dignify the life given that we might live. We can do that by eating with reverence. This will have an added significance if we make sure we eat in communion with the friends and family for whom we are willing to give our lives that they might live. There will not be a lot of obesity when that happens.
Take care as you dine today.
Let us pray: Help us to appreciate the gifts of this wonderful world, Father. Help us to learn to say “Enough”. And especially gather with us as we eat with friends and family. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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