Maybe it’s just my own current preoccupation with food – or maybe it’s because I was writing this sermon yesterday just before lunch, I don’t know - but I can’t help noticing how much of the gospels centre around eating and drinking: think of the feeding of the 5000, the wedding at Cana, the last supper, all those parables about food.
We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘you are what you eat’. It’s certainly true that what we eat, where we buy it (or whether we’ve grown it and made it ourselves) and how we eat it, and crucially with whom we eat it, does reflect a great deal about us.
Certainly this was true for St Peter and his fellow apostles. In the reading from Acts, Peter is accused of the cardinal sin of ‘sitting down to eat with the uncircumcised’. Of course, from Peter’s time with Jesus, he will have been used to such accusations: one of Jesus’ most radical actions was to accept the hospitality of those that others thought were untouchable. He literally shared his bread with sinners, and was willing to share in their bread, too.
Eating with someone in the time of Jesus, and in the days of the early church had a hugely important cultural meaning. And of course it still does. Eating is highly symbolic – eating with someone it is an act of trust, of companionship, of belonging. It cements relationships. It helps the members of a group gain each other’s confidence: it’s no accident that the Alpha Course recommends starting each meeting with a shared meal.
But what has all this to do with a sermon series on healing and wholeness? The answer is, quite a lot.
Because it’s at this point in the sermon series that we look outwards – just as Jesus did, and just as St Peter was taught to do. And when we look outwards we see that healing is required not just in our own lives, but in the life of the world. This can be a daunting prospect, but to even begin, we first need a way of grasping the fact that, as human beings, we are all in it together. And that we are all made in the image of God.
How hard it is to remember this! Hard enough with people we know, sometimes! But much harder with people lives so very different from ours, at the other side of the world. Yet we are undeniably related to them: these are the people who grow the tea and coffee that we will drink after this service, who produce the sugar that went into the biscuits that we will eat. Make no mistake, we are intimately related to these people already, and there are ways that we can begin to take this on board.
As most of you know, I am a fairtrade enthusiast, and part of the reason for this is that fair-trade seems to me to be the ideal way of remembering that we human beings are all in it together. Because fair-trade is not about charity, but about fair pricing, it involves genuine respect for the people who produce the bananas and chocolate and sugar that we eat, and who grow the coffee and the tea that we drink. Fairtrade actually changes how we feel about these people, and what they mean to us.
And here’s where we come back to food: because I end up with excellent quality bananas, chocolate, tea, coffee or whatever, which I then eat and drink, it’s as if I’m eating and drinking with the people who produced them. The physical act of eating engages us so much more deeply with people than any intellectual argument, or even, dare I say it, than any appeal just to the heartstrings. We are whole people, and by eating according to our beliefs we involve our bodies, not just our minds and hearts. Like St Peter, we have to learn that those who seem different from us and so very far away, are our brothers and sisters, equal in the sight of God and infinitely precious in his eyes. One way of learning this is to be confronted, like Peter was in his vision, in all our senses. By engaging our sense of smell and taste, as well as our minds, we can begin to understand what it really means to be one body.
And of course this opens up the question of what it is we think we are doing in the Eucharist when we say ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.’ Because we physically eat and drink in this service, we are celebrating Christ’s presence among us with our whole, embodied selves. This fact has an impact on how we live out our embodied lives. Although the body we speak about today is the Eucharistic body of the Church, it also has serious implications for our relationship with all those with whom we share our humanity – with all God’s children. The Eucharist asks us to question what our relationship really is with our fellow human beings: all of them.
The truth is that our relationship with our fellow human beings on a global scale is not good. I’m not just talking about situation in Iraq, the bloody divisions in the Holy Land, and constant backdrop of civil war in parts of Africa. No, the really uncomfortable truth is that the main reason that many people in developing countries need our ‘charity’ is because of the unfair trade practices of the richest nations. That’s why Christian Aid is as concerned with campaigning for trade justice and the remission of third world debt as it is with collecting money. An awareness of trade injustice means that we can begin to see how we are complicit in the global divisions between rich and poor, and how we might start to obey God’s call to heal those divisions, and so bring wholeness to God’s broken world.
Our own healing and wholeness, ultimately, is bound up with everyone else’s. No one exists in a moral and spiritual vacuum. My sense of wholeness and healing cannot be complete while I know that I am complicit in the exploitation of others. I cannot be completely whole, fully the person God intended me to be, while I am part of what is preventing someone at the other side of the world from doing the same. We, in common with all the Churches, earnestly pray week by week for the healing and renewal of this broken world. But for the world to be healed, and for everyone to have a shot at wholeness, what is demanded of us is nothing less than that we follow the example of our Lord, the most wholesome person who ever lived, and who never kept anyone at arms’ length, breaking bread with prostitutes, tax collectors, and any number of other outcasts.
Jesus lovingly placed himself alongside those who were marginalized, and invites us to do the same, and it’s in this light that I hear today’s gospel. The new commandment is that we should love one another, just has Jesus has loved us. Just as Jesus shows us the nature of God as love, so we are called to show others this same love. In reflecting on to all our neighbours, both near and far, the love we have received from God we reflect the God whom we believe in and restore his image in ourselves.
It is our humanity – our own wholeness and healing, our own nature as created in the image of God - that is at stake here. Meeting together for worship, and especially taking part in the Eucharist has implications for how we live the rest of our lives. In these terms, a healing ministry in this Church is already happening: it happens once a month at the Youth Group’s fair-trade stall, it happens through the Children’s Church link with the Mashambanzou Trust. It happens through our charitable giving, through the intercessions, and it happens through all the ways in which our sharing in the body and blood of Christ spills over into our lives. What we eat and drink, what we wear, and what we buy actually matters. If we are to live in the light of the Eucharist, we each need to consider how our choices reflect God’s nature as love, how they reflect our responsibility to and relationship with our fellow human beings, and how they are contributing to the wholeness of ourselves and all people.
So let us eat and drink – and allow ourselves to be changed by what we have tasted. And above all, let this meal remind us of us the divine image in all God’s children, and give us the strength to strive towards the true healing and renewal of God’s world.