Bible Readings:
OT – Daniel 1:1-15
Gospel – Mark 6:34-38a
NT – Cor. 11:17-24
CBC – 3/4/11
Tastes that are worlds apart
Just recently Prime Minister Julia Gillard travelled to the US where she spent time in meetings with President Barak Obama. Media coverage of the event focused on some trivial aspects of the visit: The PM “teaching” the President to hand-pass a football (AFL style) and the sound bite of the day was the PM’s assurance that Australians and Americans would always be the very best of mates!
Yes, agreed the President, except that we’ll have to disagree about … the taste of Vegemite. And the expression on his face indicated that on this particular issue even mates are worlds apart.
For many of us, perhaps the majority, finding this particular flavour acceptable or even enjoyable is traceable back to Mum or Dad putting the black substance on narrow pieces of toast at a time when we were still eating meals in our high chairs. And so we acquired a taste.
This shaping of the taste preferences of children is taken seriously by parents and for good reasons. The impact of food advertising on children’s food consumption is prompting some governments to impose restrictions on when certain foods can be advertised. Pretty clearly we want to modify the diet of our children – and modifying tastes is where you start.
Children’s preference for things sweet comes as standard equipment for the newborn – they’re all ready for appreciating the sweetness in mother’s milk when they enter the world. Later this taste preference has to be curbed and other tastes introduced. Hence the frequency of conversations at the dinner table which start with, “here, just try it, you’ll really like it.”
But a larger part of the development of taste has to do with simply being who you are, where you are. Few of us have acquired a taste for walrus meat or stick insects both of which foods belong to other “worlds” but we all know what a hamburger tastes like (even if, again, an American would wonder why anyone would put the things on we do).
These taste preferences, not only the ones that register on our tongues but the taste for certain art forms, clothing styles, leisure pursuits and what might be described as national ideals and values go to make up our world… our reality.
And to the extent that they may be worlds apart from other peoples in other places, simply proves that the world is a colourful and diverse place that makes travel and cross-cultural encounters exciting and enriching.
For many, of course, tasting foods and flavours from quite different “worlds” does not hold out an exciting prospect, only probable distasteful outcomes. If you’ve ever been on an ocean cruise it’s easy to see the people who will avoid any food that looks at all unfamiliar in favour of large quantities of the bland and predictable.
But to the Bible, which records quite a number of stories that remind us of how food preferences feature when different worlds come into close contact.
Take, for instance, the people who cried out to God for deliverance from Pharaoh who discover, under the leadership of Moses, the first taste of a future marked by freedom in the wide open spaces beyond Egypt.
But freedom’s first glow is quickly dimmed when they are confronted with the scarcity of food at which point the story relates that they began to “murmur” … “grumble” …. Might we use the word “whinge”?
Yes, we’re told that it was hunger that prompted their grumbling but hunger is relative. We use the word to describe how we feel at the end of a long hard day when we pick up the aroma of something special coming from the kitchen but we use it as well in the context of malnourished children in drought or war affected areas. We’re left to fill in the gaps of the story and make judgment as to just how desperate they really were.
But it’s what they hungered after that gives the meaning to the story. It was the “fleshpots of Egypt” where they remembered eating “their fill of bread” (Ex 16:3). And we’re meant to understand by these words that they were willing to exchange the great freedom project for (to use another food reference from the Jacob/Esau story), “a mess of pottage”.
So for these wilderness wanderers, slavery plus three square meals a day was infinitely preferable to freedom minus certainty about tomorrow’s food supply.
We heard read to us earlier a similar story but with a different outcome. The four young men we meet at the beginning of the book of Daniel: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.
The piece of writing is interesting. It purports to tell the story of these men in Babylon (6th Cent BC), that is, men from Judah who were in exile. But it’s generally accepted that the story has a 2nd Cent context and the “world” confronting these men is not Babylonian but Greek. And so the writer uses knowledge of their history to say, ‘Yes, this problem of worlds which threaten to overwhelm us has happened yet again’. First the Egyptians, then the Philistines, then the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians and now, the Greeks.
These four young men are given other names by the palace master. They swallow this indignity prepared to work according to their abilities in the place where they were.
But when the very best of food and wine is placed in front of them they knew what was happening and here they drew the line. They refuse what is always hard to refuse: good food and plenty of it in exchange for a diet of vegetables.
This is a story first meant to strengthen the resolve of fellow Jews in the 2nd cent BC to resist the dominant power, the dominant world from overwhelming their own world. Their identity was at stake and while we may find it hard to relate to their stand on food laws their principle is still relevant.
Through this stand they sought to bear witness to God.
We will live alongside you, we will serve you, we will help you in our work but we will not become you. We will be whom we have been called to be. We live in your world but we are defined by another. We walk a different path.
In the New Testament reading this morning we’re again confronted with the issue of food and identity. Apart from the specifics of the Jewish food laws which have no immediate application to us we are perhaps being reminded that in every age our food choices and attitudes are in some important way, markers of identity.
Paul, takes the Corinthian Christians to task over the conduct of the community meal gathering … the Lord’s Supper. He expresses pained disbelief that they could not wait for the late-comers, those who, had to work long hours and could not get off till late in the day.
So the wealthier members of the community take to the food and consume most of it leaving nothing more than the sacramental vestiges of the full meal.
Archeological work from ancient Corinth has unearthed the remains of what would have been the homes of wealthy citizens. And social customs of the day recorded in Roman records describe how the special guests were given the best food and ate separately from the second tier of guests.
It has been suggested that this established world of social norms had found its way into the setting of the Lord’s Table. Paul’s criticism: ‘You have forgotten who you are.’
Your essential ‘oneness’ has been overwhelmed. This oneness is not defined by the common ground of social status, ethnic origins, gender or political affiliations but one defined by membership in the community of those who have tied their futures to the story of Jesus.
This was their world … the reality that was meant to define them.
Take … eat … together … from the one loaf … and remember:
Remember the Cross which you proclaim;
Remember the One through whom you are linked in a common faith.
And in this way remember who you are.
So where does this lead us in this current series on the senses, specifically the sense of taste?
Well, perhaps there is a word of caution and word of encouragement.
The caution: in a world which seems to have become obsessed with new taste sensations, exotic recipes and, a deal of overconsumption, it’s good to be reminded of those who’ve gone before us and the struggles they often had in staying in touch with the call to be different in the world.
Mark records the gathering of the large crowd who came to listen to Jesus. And when it was late in the day the disciples offered advice to Jesus that the crowd should be sent away to find food for themselves. Reasonable advice we might conclude. Thinking that had been shaped by life’s experience.
Jesus’ blunt reply was simply: ‘You give them something to eat” which, in the end, is what they did. The irony of this is that they have just returned from a mission on which they had been told to take neither bread nor money.
The disciples perhaps preferred to let the crowd fend for themselves while they remained and ate their meal in peace and quiet. Shades of Coninth?
The Men in the Book of Daniel wanted to bear witness to their God and wanted to demonstrate that another world was not going to overwhelm their world and their food choices was one of the means they chose to do this.
For us, …
The food we eat
The food we discard
The food over which we offer thanks
The food we would try to put into the hands of those whose living is a struggle to find even basic supplies of food
The food we share generously with others and in the process say …
We offer you our best
This food says not only step over our threshold but come closer to us as the enjoyment of food and conversation takes us deeper into one another’s lives.
… speak a lot about a world, who we are, and a particular taste for life we have sought to acquire.
And the encouragement:
Jesus uses the great feast, the messianic banquet as the image of the full and final realization of the alternative reality he lived among us. And every encouragement is present in this life to create small expressions of the alternative reality/world which anticipate that great hope.
We could do worse than to embody in our lives the man’s prayer over his meal:
Thank you, God, that there is enough food;
Thank you God that the food we have is good food;
And thank you God for … taste buds with which to enjoy it together.