More than a Meal
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
November 24, 2019
Proverbs 9:1-6
Wisdom has built her house,
she has hewn her seven pillars.
2 She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
3 She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town,
4 “You that are simple, turn in here!”
To those without sense she says,
5 “Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
6 Lay aside immaturity,[a] and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”
The idea that there are no “rituals” among Friends is interesting and has always made me wonder just a little. I think you would agree that we have rituals, but we just may not label them as such.
The central ritual for the greater Christian world has always been the celebration of the Mass or what is more commonly called the Eucharist, The Lord’s Supper, or simply communion. Yet, if you were to strip it of much of it’s religious ritual, at its core you would find that it was just a meal.
That is why, as Quakers we often talk of sharing in communion when eating together. We don’t need specific elements, like bread and wine to hold within them the presence of Christ. Because we know that Christ or God is already present, because as Quakers we believe that there is that of God or Christ in us and our neighbor.
And from my personal observation, the principal ceremony to mark most Quaker events, let’s be honest, is a meal (we almost cannot have any function without food, and when we do have food more people usually show up) - from new attender dinners, to Seasoned Friend’s luncheons, to Threshing Together with the guys, to Pitch-ins, picnics, Vespers’ Lite Dinner, to some type of meal after every memorial or celebration of life…and the list could go on. All of our events end up around a table(s) where Friends are gathered to share food (It literally keeps Dan Mitchel on his feet around this place putting up and taking down tables).
Let’s face it, the meal is an important ritual celebration among Friends whether we believe it or not, I believe that has something to do with giving thanks.
I like what Nora Gallager says about rituals in her book “The Sacred Meal”:
“Rituals may seem to originate in magical thinking: we see the ancient practices of primitive people as methods to hold off or thank the gods, to ward off evil, to suck rain from the dry sky. But these are not to be dismissed as the inventions of ignorant people. Our ancestors were tough and creative; rituals were part of their lives. Knowing there were larger waves of power, meaning, and connection in the world than the ones they could see, they created ways to recognize and inhabit them. While we may condescend to a rain dance, the need to see beyond this world into another one is inherent in that dance; and the need to communicate our deepest desires is there as well. While it is true that we want signs of God’s presence that are written in human language, it’s the only language we have. And while any ritual can be reduced to magic, just about all of them contain an element of something that is deeply meaningful and human: the element of thanksgiving.”
As I said before, most Christians today, will return to Jesus’ Seder meal with the disciples before he is crucified as the prime example of this type of ritualistic meal. Yet we must remember, Christians were notorious for repurposing things from other religions and making them their own. Christmas was a pagan holiday of the sun. Easter too was a pagan holiday celebrating Semiramis, and now the Jewish Seder, a meal about the redemption of Israel from Pharoh’s hands gets repurposed as the Last Supper of Christ which was to signal the redemption through his death. Actually, the church would later label this meal – the Eucharist – which in Greek actually means a meal of “thanksgiving.” A ritual to remember all that God had done for us.
Actually, if you go all the way back into Proverbs, God, HERSELF, (a.k.a. Wisdom or the female personification of God) institutes this very type of thanksgiving meal. As we heard read in our scriptures, she calls out from her home to the people around her, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.” She has slaughtered animals and set the table for a feast, and she has invited everyone to sit down and eat with her.
It seems eating together has been part of who we are for quite some time. The very act of what can be called a Thanksgiving Meal was possibly even instituted by God, continued on by many religions (not just Christians), and practiced by Friends in a multitude of forms, and yes, even instituted by President Abraham Lincoln for the entire United States when he proclaimed a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens," to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November. Even Abraham Lincoln created a ritualistic meal to remind us and point us toward the abundance of God with gratitude for all she has done and provided.
I have talked to many of you this week and heard your ritualist preparations for your meal of thanksgiving. But maybe as Quakers, we should take a moment and remember that our thanksgiving meal is really no different than any other meal at its core. When we strip-away our family rituals and get down to the core of the meal – it’s about partaking in a moment of thanksgiving with the Christ or God present in those we have invited to sit around our table.
What if that is how we looked at the Thanksgiving meal and holiday – as an opportunity to commune with the God or Christ in our family, neighbors, friends?
I bet the political arguments, the inter-family quarrelling, and the uneasiness of getting together may look a little different if we put on those eyes and sought to see the good first.
A few years ago, now, I was a part of a class that watched the movie Babett’s Feast. (How many of you have ever seen it?) It is a foreign film with English subtitles, but it is the message that makes all the difference. Nora Gallager wrote a beautiful summary of the movie that I would like to share this morning.
The movie Babette’s Feast is the story of two sisters, living alone in a remote coastal village in northern Norway. They are in their middle age, good women. Their idea of a good meal is a piece of salted cod. Their father, a pastor; has died; their church community dwindles and grows gossipy and backstabbing.
Enter into the scene, Babette, a French refuge. She offers to cook for them in exchange for room and board.
For fourteen years, Babette cooks salted cod, ale soup with bread, but with her own special touch. Her only contact with France is a once-a-year splurge; she buys a lottery ticket by mail.
One day a letter arrives for Babette. You guessed it. She’s won ten thousand francs, enough to pay her passage home and live on once she arrives. Babette askes her benefactors if she might cook them one last meal, a dinner for twelve at her expense.
Cages of quail arrive from France: wines, cheeses, fresh eggs and butter and herbs. The sisters begin to panic: what to do with such extravagance? Such excess?
The day of the feast comes. Babette sets the table with fine linens and candles, crystal and china. And the guests arrive – most of them the bickering churchgoers, and there is also a French general, a former suitor of one of the sisters. Middle aged and successful, he has put into his ambition all the energy and love he once felt for his beloved.
Their eyes widen as they begin to eat. For some, the sips of champagne are first in a lifetime. The general exclaims over the quail baked in a pastry shell, the wonderful cheeses. He says, “Surely, this food is exactly like a meal I once had at Chez Angelique, a restaurant in Paris. Its chef was the only woman chef in all of France.” As they eat and drink, their smiles begin. For some, it is the first time they’ve eaten really good food in a whole lifetime of deprivation. Hesitantly, and then with more gusto, they begin to talk. One man opens a sore subject with another “You cheated me,” he says calmly. “Yes, I did,” replies the other. “Oh, well,” the first man responds. “I cheated you too.” And they shake hands. Two women who have gossiped rudely about each other throughout their lives smile warmly at each other and lift their glasses in a toast. And as the coffee and dessert are laid on the table, with more champagne, the general lifts his glass to the whole community.
“Mercy is infinite,” he says. “All that we need is given to us.” Then he adds, “And even what we have rejected in our lives,” he says, looking at the woman he loved long ago, “will, in the end be granted to us.”
At the end of the film, we discover that Babette, or course, was the chef at Chez Angelique, but the greater surprise is she is not leaving at all. Why not? Because a meal for twelve at Chez Angelique costs ten thousand francs. Babette had given them everything. And this may be the final reason the dinner was so transforming: it was given with complete generosity, with nothing held back. Babette knew how to say thanks.
Babette’s Feast is a story about the healing power of extravagance, of extravagant generosity, or extravagant love.
This is the same feast that Wisdom (God) invited us all to when she said,
5 “Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
6 Lay aside immaturity,[a] and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”
I pray as we enter our Thanksgiving rituals, that we could take a moment and prepare ourselves. That we could ask ourselves,
· Am I looking for that of God in those around the Thanksgiving table?
· Where do I need to “lay aside the immaturity and seek to walk in the way of insight” this Thanksgiving?
· How am I being extravagantly generous and loving this Thanksgiving?