What’s For Dinner?
4-6-08
Do you ever feel so busy you don’t know if you are coming or going? It seems that even my retired friends out there are running from activity to activity most the time. There are days where everything blends together so much I can’t remember who I have talked to, much less what I have talked to them about. Many of us have days like this, where we bounce from commitment to commitment, wearing ourselves down and feeling tired and stressed. When it comes to mealtime, we aren’t necessarily enthusiastic or energetic about our food choices.
If you are like most Americans, where are you going to stop for food at the evening meal? Many people might guess fast food, the Mexican restaurant, or the grocery store, which is likely where I would stop. However, believe it or not, there is a whole new trend. You may be part of a growing group of Americans who dislike fast food, but don't have time to cook up an elaborate home meal. You've discovered the joy of not cooking, and are snapping up what the food industry calls HMRs, We like initials in the United Methodist Church. Any Ideas what HMR stands for? It stands for Home-Meal Replacements. HMR’s are a growing $100 billion-a-year phenomenon. Let me give you an example of an HMR. You’re tired and stressed and you pull into a gas station to fill up on the way home. You duck into the store and there you find a counter that serves some fresh panini, and a three-cheese pesto, Home Meal Replacements are ready-made, already-warm, a little-classier-than-burger-and-fries type meals that you can pick up on the go. Even grocery stores are morphing into takeout catering services where you can pick up roasted chicken or Chinese sweet and sour pork to go.1 There are now even takeout services whose job is to go to the restaurant of your choice pick up that yummy spaghetti and meatballs and deliver it to your home within minutes - for a price, of course. One has to weigh cash vs. tired, stressed, limited-time schedules.
It seems that cooking at home in the kitchen has become more a hobby than a duty. Less that 30 percent of all meals cooked at home include at least one item cooked from scratch. We love eating at home; we just want or need someone else to do the cooking. Gone are the days of the elaborate Sunday afternoon or evening meals of pot roast and vegetables. Gone are the hours in the kitchen making meals for the entire family.
As a nation we’ve been working our way out of the kitchen for a long time. As early as 1879, Heinz produced the first bottle of catsup and marketed it with an ad that said: "For the blessed relief of mother and other women of the household." In 1954 the first "Golden Arches of Mickey D’s" (McDonalds) went up in Des Plaines, Illinois, starting a lasting fast-food trend. A year prior, the nation was getting all excited about a creation by a Swanson food dietician named Betty Cronin called the "TV dinner." These exciting innovations came at a time in our social and family history when a meal took an average of two hours to prepare. With TV dinners, a mother was promised an easy, nutritious meal "shrink-wrapped to a tidy 15 minutes."2
I would venture to say that very few of us want to spend two hours getting supper ready. We don’t want to take that kind of time and energy. Many of us don’t have the luxury; we have church meetings, and club meetings. Our children and youth have soccer practice, and karate practice, and ballet, drama, and band practice. We get home just in time eat, quickly and run off to the next activity.
However, there is a lot we miss when we skip supper together. Let us take a look at this morning’s story from Luke. Two grieving believers were walking the Emmaus road were They were discussing the unbelievable events of the past few days in Jerusalem. Jesus comes along and enlightens them with every scripture text that ever prophesies about the Messiah. Now I can’t decide if that would make for a really long seven miles or a really interesting seven miles. He has these traveling companions hook, line, and sinker. When Jesus was about to travel on, these believers wanted Jesus to stay and share a meal with them. Now, these men likely had women at home preparing a nice dinner, but that is not the point. The point is that it was when they took the time to share a meal with Jesus that these disciples realized who they were eating with.
Jesus didn't appear to these two guys at the tomb, or in a temple, or on a mountain peak, "but at a spiritual gas station, a refueling place: a home-cooked meal."3 Jesus was a companion. Companion literally means "with bread." Jesus is someone who comes to us with bread, with a home-meal replacement. And each time we share a meal together we are communing in a sense, breaking breaking bread together. The word communion comes from two Latin words ‘com’ and ‘munus’. The word Munus is derived from the Sanscrit MU which means a tie, bond, or link. Meals are important. Jesus still visits us at mealtime, often through the friends, family and strangers we entertain there. Christ is found in our companions, the ones we eat bread with, and the dinner table is God’s everyday church. It is in the gathering, the time spent, and the breaking of bread with one another that a meal with Jesus is celebrated, and I believe his resurrected presence is experienced.
Scholars aren’t quite sure were the biblical location of Emmaus was, but we can say that Emmaus is anywhere that Christian people gather for table fellowship. Emmaus can be anywhere, because Jesus travels wherever his followers are going, and will be present wherever we break bread together. I think we miss more than good cooking when we rush out of dinner or skip the sitting down together piece altogether. We miss not just the joy of cooking, but an opportunity to encounter our resurrected Lord. I believe communion begins at home. "The eat-in kitchen is a place of both nourishment and devotion," writes Leigh Schmidt of Princeton University; "food and family are blessed together through the common ritual of table graces." The Bible makes abundantly clear that Jesus loved to eat and drink. He enjoyed the wedding feast at Cana, He fed a crowd of 5,000, He ate with tax collectors and sinners, and sat at table with his disciples. In fact, you might remember that he spent some of his final hours eating with his disciples. We call it the Last Supper.
I used to go to a friend’s house after school sometimes and stay for dinner. They had a ritual of leaving an empty chair at the table. Not only was it to prepare for any unexpected guests, but that empty chair was assigned a spirit before dinner. "Tonight, we welcome Elijah at the table." Then the family would read together a passage about Elijah. Or tonight we welcome Simon Peter to the table. And so on. I every so often think about that ritual and how much of the Bible I learned from the few times I attended my friend’s family meals. Those meals remind me that the resurrected Lord is "The unseen Guest at every meal," offering us peace and guidance if we will only acknowledge his presence. The challenge for each of us in this insanely busy world is to slow down enough to make a connection with Christ, and with one another. We can do this as families and friends, singly, or as a clan. We can do this by scheduling a meal that we can consistently enjoy together, whether it is breakfast or supper; once a week or every day. "We can do it by resisting the lure of fast food, and taking the time to enjoy some slow food; food that is not prepackaged in individual servings, but comes from a common platter or bowl, and must be served to a group that is sitting down together." We can connect with the divine among us by taking the time we need to actually eat a meal; not shove food in our mouths as we run by the table on our way to sports practices, dance lessons, church meetings, and appointments. Our meals don’t have to be fancy, but well-planned, well-served, and well-paced.
It is, of course, a fact of life as we know it that schedules conflict and meals must be skipped. Activities these days run through the dinner hour, family members run in different directions, and food must be consumed on the run, or in the car. But there is a cost to this frenetic pace, one that is often forgotten as we dash from one important event to another: When we skip a meal with each other, we are skipping a meal with Jesus. When we dash away from the table, we are dashing away from the presence of Christ and fellowship with our companions.
The questions we need to ask are:
- Is this next activity more important than the nourishment that comes from breaking bread together?
- Is this event more valuable than the guidance I might receive from conversation over dinner?
- Is this schedule making me feel more at peace with myself and others?
Unless we can answer "yes" to any one of these questions, we would benefit by finding a way to spend more time at the table with Jesus and each other. We miss a lot when we skip supper! We miss a meal with our companions, our family and friends; we miss a meal with One-Who-Brings-Bread, our resurrected Lord. Thanks be To God. Amen.
Blessings,
Melissa
1This info can be found in a commentary, entitled $376.23 ,found in the March-April edition of Homiletics online.
2 (For more, see Stacy Perman, "The joy of not cooking," Time, June 1, 1998).
3 Thanks to Bob Kaylor, Senior Minister of the Park City United Methodist Church in Park City, Utah, for the sermon idea and some specific wording.