One of the most memorable moments in my early days of being a pastor was the time I was meeting with a young couple, relatively new to the country and completely new to the church, who had recently decided to follow Jesus. Their experience in our church was their first introduction to Christianity, and I was discipling them in their newfound Faith.
This was one of our first meetings, and part way into it, the wife asked me, "How do you say grace before a meal?" It occurred to me that this simple act of thanksgiving was entirely foreign to them, but that they had seen folks in our church doing it, and wanted to know more.
So I explained the basics. Before you eat, someone says a simple prayer, thanking God for the food he has provided and asking his blessing as you eat it. It could be as simple as speaking to a good friend who has invited you over to dinner, thanking the host for his hospitality, so to speak.
And in one of the tenderest moments I’ve ever experienced in my pastoral work, the wife turned to the husband. “Ok, then,” she said. “You’ve been doing it right.” I call it tender because in that moment I was suddenly teleported to their dining room in my mind’s eye, and watched as this husband fumbled his honest way through this most basic of Christian tasks. Something I have been doing since childhood and taken for granted all my life, was to him a profound privilege and a beautiful mystery, something he knew Christians ought to do but was not sure if he was worthy of the task.
I’m sharing this story as the second stop on our journey through this “biblical spirituality of food,” because that moment with that couple gave me a brand new appreciation—even a new thankfulness—for the act of giving thanks before a meal. If you’ve been saying it since childhood, that God is great and God is good and so we thank him for our food, it may begin to feel somewhat rote, but if you can see it with the fresh eyes of a new disciple, you will discover how fundamental this simple prayer really is for Christian spiritual formation.
Because food, of course, is life. Literally. If we couldn’t eat we would die, and if we don’t we will. It is really that simple. And by pausing briefly to thank the Creator before we dig in, we acknowledge that we don’t just depend on him for our food, but for the very life it sustains. In doing this we adopt that singular posture which is the proper, natural, and necessary posture of the Christian: one of utter thankfulness.
Scripture actually enjoins God’s people to be thankful more than it does almost any other command. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever,” says the Psalmist. “Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus,” says the Apostle. And in another place, speaking about food specifically he says, “Everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” It’s not for nothing that the central act of Christian worship, the Lord’s sacred meal, is often called the Eucharist—Greek for “thanksgiving.” After all, the only thing we could ever really “give” to the Almighty Creator of everything is simply our “thanks,” and then open our hands to receive as an unmerited gift everything that comes from him.
What better way to practice this most fundamental attitude of Christianity, than to do it literally, three times a day, whenever we sit down to devour the concrete physical gifts he has provided to keep our concrete physical bodies alive? After all, like all the rest of his creatures, we too look to him to give us our food in due season (Ps 104:27).
This is where any spirituality of food must start, I think: with a deeper appreciation for and greater sincerity in the act of saying thanks. This has always been so, but it is more important than ever, in our modern age where human ingenuity has increased our ability to produce food beyond the wildest dreams of generations past, and it’s easy, maybe, to pretend that we’re our own providers, that we could feed ourselves without God’s help, thank you very much. Because of this, it’s perhaps all the more urgent for us to pause continually and renew our thankfulness, not just for the food we receive, but for the very privilege of getting to say thanks for it.
Another term for the prayer before the meal, of course, is “saying grace.” This is because when we thank the Creator for our food, we are saying the truest truth of all: that it’s all grace. The food that keeps us alive, yes, but also the table it’s set on, the good friends we have to share it with, the love of God, the mercy of salvation. It really is all grace. And the discipline of saying it’s so, three times a day before we eat, teaches us not just to be thankful for the food, but for every good and perfect gift that comes down from above—from the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to the simplest gifts of air to breathe and food to eat.
0 comments:
Post a Comment