Food and Faith
Exodus 16: 2-25
(God provides quail and manna)
Now that the children have left, I can tell you something that I did not want to mention in their presence. If this were a movie theatre, what I am about to say would be rated R, for restricted audiences. It is not suitable for the squeamish.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts – and the states of Oregon, New York, California and Illinois – are all in various stages of acting on the restriction or regulation of a food item, considered a delicacy by many, that appears on the menus of upscale restaurants. The delicacy is foie gras. Foie gras is made from goose or duck liver and is served as a pâté.
The problem with this delicacy – the reason it is facing legislative regulation – has to do with how it is made. Foie gras is produced by force-feeding grain to ducks and geese. Several times a day the unfortunate birds are force-fed through a pipe inserted in their throats. This causes their livers to expand up to 10 times their normal size within weeks. Foie gras is French for ‘fatty liver’. A more literal translation would be ‘gross liver’, a double-entendre the French did not intend.1
The story of foie gras could not be in more stark contrast to the story we have just heard from the Book of Exodus. The first is a story of a gross distortion of the gifts of God; the second, tells the story of nature’s prodigious and indiscriminate bounty.
Shortly after escaping from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites find themselves in a wilderness. Back in Egypt, everyone had agreed that slavery was a terrible ordeal. They longed for freedom. When Moses and God presented it to them, they leapt at it. Since that time, however, on their own and in the wilderness, conditions have deteriorated.
The people are unsure of where their next meal will come from. They are afraid for their children and their livestock; afraid for frail elders and for themselves. Hunger is a potent and disturbing enemy. So, too, is the fear of hunger.
Restless and anxious, the people begin to grumble and complain. Their complaints soon turn to accusations. And so a food crisis becomes a faith crisis. The people have lost faith in God and in their human leaders, Moses and Aaron.
How does God respond to their fear and lack of faith, to their complaints and accusations? God, who understands human hunger, responds by saying, “I will rain bread on you. I will give you bread in the morning and meat in the evening.”
The writer of Exodus then offers a detailed description of two, natural phenomena in the Sinai Peninsula: the phenomena of manna and quail.
In the story, however, this provision of food from the sky is greeted with suspicion. When the Israelites first see it, they ask, “Man hu?”2 which roughly translates: “What is this stuff?”
Well might they ask. Manna is produced when a3 type of lice punctures the fruit of the tamarisk tree and excretes a substance from the juice, a yellowish-white flake or ball. Rich in carbohydrates and sugar, it congeals in the cool of the night, but disintegrates with the warmth of the day. The natives still gather it before the sun comes out and bake it into a kind of bread. They call the bread manna.
We also read that quail appeared in the evening. Quails and other migratory birds still fly across the Sinai Peninsula today. They fly from Africa on an age-old migratory route or are blown off course from the Mediterranean. Touching down in the wilderness to rest, they are often so exhausted that they can actually be caught by hand.
In other words, the story in Exodus is at pains to report the naturalness of these gifts of God … of foods that appear freely and abundantly. This is no miracle story. Upon the earth God has created, abundance is the rule, not the exception. Fecundity is ordinary, not extraordinary. God provides graciously, freely and with abandon. Even in the wilderness, food abounds.
God knows that our material and spiritual well-being are closely linked; that faith and food are intertwined … that we eat to live. And so God provides. The earth pours forth its treasures of fruit and vegetables and grain, of meat from the earth, fish from the sea, and fowls from the air.
The matter of food, and assuring that there is enough for all, has been a question about which Christians have been interested from the start. From the earliest beginnings of the church, Christians took an interest in assuring that all had enough of the bounty God provided. This was in stark contrast to the ancient practices of Greeks and Romans.
The Greek and Roman ‘civilizations’ understood the ‘city’ as the basic unit of human society. They regarded ‘citizens’ as composing and expressing that society. If you were not a citizen, you were a nonentity. Official welfare, where it existed, was distributed according to citizenship, not according to need.4
The Roman Empire operated a system that shipped food from areas with a surplus to those with a deficit. It was an enormous enterprise. Annually over 18,000 tons of grain from North Africa and 5 million pounds of pork from Italy were distributed throughout the Empire. But they were distributed exclusively to citizens, without regard for the needs of other hungry people.
The Christians helped change all this. Early Christians did not accept the notion that humanity was divided between citizen and non-citizen. Rather, they perceived that the most important division was between rich and poor … between those who could fend for themselves and those who could not. They understood the poor to include not only the destitute, but also those who were vulnerable to poverty: widows, orphans, the lame and ill, as well as foreigners and strangers.
Over time, Christians built up institutions to shelter and care for such people. But they did more than that: Christians were largely responsible for the notion, new in the 3rd and 4th centuries, that society included all human beings within a given region, rather than only citizens.
Thereby, early Christians gave witness to, and as far as they were able, imitated God’s prodigious and indiscriminate generosity.
Today, Hurricane Katrina has exposed the degree to which this nation is no longer organized to surround the poor and vulnerable in the ways we were only a few decades ago. Congress routinely fails to raise the federal minimum wage to keep up with inflation. The gap between rich and poor continues to grow and inequality in this grand experiment in democracy has reach scandalous proportions.
Louisiana and Mississippi are just the latest tip of a colossal iceberg of hunger and poverty. ‘Extreme poverty’ is the phrase that most aptly captures the vast and dire landscape upon which so many suffer today … especially across Africa and Asia. This nation, the richest in the world, gives only 1% of the entire federal budget to foreign aid.
Extreme poverty has exposed the kind of distortions symbolized in the cruel and obscene production of foie gras. We are capable of producing this: gross liver – and there is no shortage of it for those who can pay – while we cannot distribute the bounty of an abundant earth to those who are most vulnerable to hunger and disease.
The story from Exodus, however, recalls us to the Church’s conviction that, because God is focused on the common good, so must we be. In God’s economy, food is not the privilege of the rich, or the deserving, or the citizen, but the undisputed right of every human who shares space on this small and beautiful planet.
You know the story about an Irishman who came upon a brawl in the street and asked, “Is this a private fight or can anyone get in?” The failure to distribute the world’s stores of food can no longer remain the private fight of public officials. This is a public fight, our fight, the church’s fight … a fight Christians must join on behalf of a God whose generosity is prodigious. It is time for us to roll up our sleeves and join the fray.
We can prepare for this fight, firstly through prayer and reflection about the God who so generously provides … reflecting on stories like today’s story about manna and quail, and then contemplating our response to God’s prodigious and indiscriminate gifts.
We can also prepare by keeping informed: reading about the crisis in the Sudan, and following the plight of the victims of the Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and holding those people on our hearts.
And we can enter the fray by giving of our own resources … giving to this church. Old South commits money, time and resources to the poor in Boston. We also support the wider United Church of Christ. Through the UCC we engage in public policy advocacy on behalf of those least able to fend for themselves. We are a part of a network of responders to disasters. Through the UCC we have collectively pledged 3 million dollars to the victims of Katrina and we have ministries that reach around the world.
We can also enter the fray by insisting on a notion the early Christians learned from Jesus: that it is not citizenship that separates us, one from another, but human need.
In these and other ways, we can follow the early Christians in recognizing that food is not a privilege that must be earned, but God’s free gift to all. In the company of the earliest Christians and on behalf of a generous God, let us join the fray.
Footnotes
1. The New York Times, Thursday, September 15, 2005 (Section A12) story reported by Gretchen Ruethling.
2. From Homiletics OnLine, Commentary on Exodus 16. 2-15 (September 19, 1999)
3. Fretheim, Terrence E. Interpretation: Exodus (John Knox Press: Louisville, 1991), pp. 181f.
4. Hill, Jonathan. What Has Christianity Ever Done For Us? (Lion Hudson: Oxford, 2005), pp. 158f
Copyright © 2005, Old South Church and by author.
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