Do you want to get well?
A good Sabbath Liturgy is to take stock. It is to sit and reckon where you are spiritually and calculate the gap between that and where you want to be—or, at least, where you know you ought to want to be. Do you want more grace, or trust, or peace? Do you want a greater sense of God’s presence and goodness? Do you want to live by Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians 4:29, to “not let any unwholesome talk proceed out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen”?
We’ve yet to find a cure for cancer or Crohn’s disease or the common cold. But we have discovered the cure for our souls. It may not come easy, but it is free for the asking and available everywhere.
But it begins with an honest answer to that question, Do I want to get well?
I have a friend who not long ago phoned a former pastor to apologize to him. My friend had been taking stock and was gripped by a conviction that years before he had failed this pastor. He had not supported him as Scripture commands. He had refused to speak words of life and instead had stood aloof, silent in judgment. He saw how his failure had cost both of them. He also believed that any future effectiveness in his own ministry, and maybe in this pastor’s, was tied to his willingness to humble himself and seek forgiveness and make amends.
He wanted to get well.
My friend did as God told him. He called the pastor and, without excuse, apologized. He simply walked in unquestioning obedience to his conviction. Out of that is blossoming for him a long season of fruitfulness and influence.
Recently, God confirmed a call in his own life to become a pastor.
My prediction: he’ll be a good one.
ELEVEN
FEAST:
Stopping to Taste the Kingdom
I never liked the Tilt-a-Whirl or Whirligig, whatever it’s called— that thing at the carnival that spins you round and round, so that you stagger afterward like a man drunk and blind both. The ground slithers beneath you, the sky twists above. It has disks that whirl clockwise within a larger disk that whirls counterclockwise, and the whole thing pitches and heaves worse than a dingy in a hurricane. It’s like a torture implement from the Middle Ages, one of those things with pulleys and levers, with ropes and manacles and great, cogged wooden gears. It’s a thing barbaric and exquisite all at once, operated by a fat man grown bored in his sadism. It makes me queasy just to watch. I did watch it once, and it convinced me, as though I needed convincing, never to go near it.
This one was called the Mad Hatter. You wedged in five or so people on a circular bench molded inside a giant teacup. The teacup swiveled on its dish, and the dish swiveled on its base, and the base turned and tilted wildly. I watched a group of four girls go on it and sit together in a single teacup. They were strapped in snug to the hard seats, and the machine started up, slow at first. Then, with a jerk, the teacups began to back-eddy. Everyone yelped. The whole awful contraption built up speed and flung the riders faster and faster, forever faster, in wide, dizzying circles. Their screams scattered windward with the motion.
One of the girls wasn’t doing well. Her face was taut with anxiety, her eyes shut. She gripped the handlebars in front of her with a death clutch and pushed her body close into the seat. The other girls around her were oblivious, laughing at each swoop and whoosh of the ride, tilting their heads out so their hair whipped hard in the wind. Every time their teacup spun into view, the scene was the same, only a bit worse: the laughing girls with their fanfare of hair, and their horrified, mortified companion. First her face was flushed red. Then blanched white. Then shaded green.
And then she threw up: a great sparkling arc of spew that gushed upward and boomeranged backward and spattered the inside of the teacup like those paintings you could do in another part of the carnival, where you dropped gobs of bright acrylic into a vortex that flung the paint in stringy spatters onto a canvas and you came away with something that looked like one of the works of Jackson Pollock.
But this was no artwork.
This was rock opera. This was Roman carnival. This was The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in 3-D. This was enough gore to cure you of cheap thrills for several lifetimes.
The girls stopped laughing, abruptly.
I had to turn away.
That happened a long time ago, but I’ve never forgotten it. I wish I could. It’s become a kind of metaphor for me, that Whirligig, that Mad Hatter. It’s become a symbol of the power of amusement to make us sick. Pleasure can be like that: a thing that spins you round and round, faster and faster. Some people enjoy it immensely, at least for short bursts.
They lean into it.
Others aren’t doing so well.
Of all the ways our culture spins us dizzy, its obsession with food is one of the most glaring.
Honestly.
We are a Mad Hatter culture, a nation of gluttons and weight-watchers. Go into any gas station food mart, and see for yourself. Magazines, rafts of them, depict men and women with bodies of impossible tautness and hardness and litheness. The women are svelte and buxom, with incandescent skin. They gaze out at you, brazen as harlots or coy as schoolgirls. The men are stone-faced, all of them, grim as though bent on some mortal quest, their bare stomachs an armor plate of muscle, their arms all sinew and veins.
These pictures are arrayed next to shelves laden with chocolate bars, tubs of candies, shrink-wrapped trays of mini-donuts, racks bulging with bags of chips and cheesies and nachos, walls of refrigerators stuffed full with creamy and sugary drinks. And that’s not all. Beside the magazines with our pantheon of beautiful people are other magazines, magazines that have on their covers photos of succulent, sweet-drenched desserts, casseroles dense with sauces and sausage and cheese, or mounds of pasta tossed in a rich cream sauce bejeweled with shrimp and scallops. “Details on page 70,” the cover announces. Invariably, somewhere on the same cover, in an inset on the top right-hand corner, maybe, is a picture of a woman in a tight dress or skimpy bikini—and she does it justice—with a caption beneath: “How to lose 10 pounds and rid yourself of unsightly cellulite before the beach weather hits! Page 73.”
Go up to pay for it, and there at the counter, next to the till, are several paperbacks on various diet fads, and usually a few dessert cookbooks, next to baskets bristling with chocolate treats.
We’re a culture stuck between Barbie and the bulge. We dream thin and live fat. We spin this way, spin that way, back and forth, round and round.
Some of us aren’t doing so well.
Sabbath is for feasting.
Only I’m not sure that means much anymore. We feast all the time. Which is ironic. Sabbath is often corrupted because we carry into it our weekday, workaday preoccupations. We don’t stop. We keep working, keep toiling, and even when we cease from that physically, we carry in our minds a constant nattering. So Sabbath gets stained by the rest of the week.
With food, this staining, this corrupting, goes the opposite direction. We feast like Sabbath-keepers most days, indiscriminately, and so feasting on the Sabbath has lost much of its richness. It’s just one more big meal. We eat ourselves stuffed daily. There’s nothing to anticipate, nothing to make us stand back, astonished and thankful. “Without a fast,” Dorothy Bass writes, “it’s hard to recognize a feast.”1 Overabundance is our common lot, muchness our birthright, and all Sabbath serves up is more of the same. And when we see anything as birthright, it ceases to be gift.
It used to bother me that the church had taken the Eucharist—the love feast—and reduced it to such meager portions. What had originally been a visible, bountiful demonstration of the banquet of grace had become, over the centuries, a token of scarcity: a mere crumb of bread, a single mouthful of wine or juice. But I wonder if, rather than scarcity, the meal now symbolizes simplicity. In a gluttonous age, where nothing is enough, the sparseness of the Communion meal becomes a reminder that grace is sufficient, that our daily bread is all we need.
I usually eat cold cereal in the morning. That seems frugal enough, ascetic even. But recently my wife bought new breakfast bowls to replace the plastic children’s bowls with pictures of Buzz Lightyear painted on the inside. The new bowls are much bigger than the old ones. They’re about twice the size, in fact. I filled it up. What good is a half-filled bowl? If God led a bowl maker to make a bowl that wide and that deep—with that much capacity—it must have been for a reason. So I filled it up.
At first, the extra helping hurt. I could hardly swallow those last few spoonfuls, and once or twice I even tossed out the soggy remains. But then I got so I could down it without blinking, and sometimes I even added another shake from the box—to use up the leftover milk, you understand. And then I noticed my appetite increased proportionally for lunch, for dinner, and for snacks between meals.
And then I noticed my pants getting tighter.
So I started to rein myself in. And, of course, I was at first hungry a lot, feeling shortchanged, like Oliver Twist turned away by the churlish soup ladler when all he wanted was a little more.
But I also noticed that the times of real feasting—a dinner we went to recently with good friends, for instance, where I got a jerked halibut, black with hot spice, and a half-plate full of thin, curled French fries—have started to mean more. Moments like that are starting to feel like gifts again, not rights.
I’m starting to enjoy being hungry.
In Deuteronomy, Moses—in a passage that connects with the Ten Commandments and so with the Sabbath—told the people this:
Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. . . .
Observe the commands of the LORD your God, walking in his ways and revering him. For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing. . . .
When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, . . . then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Deuteronomy 8:2–3, 6–12, 14, emphasis mine)
Be careful when you eat well. Be careful when God lavishes wealth on you so that feasting is your daily experience. Be careful lest you come to expect it. Be careful when those days of testing and refining and humbling and disciplining that hunger brings are long forgotten. Be careful when the days of having to look to God for daily bread and water from the rock are a murky memory, faintly embarrassing.
I don’t know how else the memory of hunger can be kept alive except by sometimes being hungry.
Fasting is good for this. But restraint in our eating—the practice of frugality—is good as well. Then, when we interrupt our frugality with feasting—on Sabbath days, wedding days, birthdays, national holidays, and the like—we are like workers in from the harvest. We are soldiers home from war. We are hunters returning.
Some quality of life should mark the difference between our days of rest and celebration and our days of toil and production. Times of indulgence mean nothing if all times are that: always eating, never feasting. But if we reserve our feasting for a few occasions, for holidays and holy days, for times set apart, then each acquires a richer luster, a purer and sweeter tone.
Thomas Costain, in his book The Three Edwards, relates a historical episode from the fourteenth century. Two brothers, Raynald and Edward, fought bitterly. Edward mounted war against Raynald, captured him alive, and imprisoned him in Nieuwkerk Castle.
But it was no ordinary prison cell. The room was reasonably comfortable. And there was no lock on the door—not a bolt, not a padlock, not a crossbeam. Raynald was free to come or go at will. In fact, it was better than that: Edward promised Raynald full restoration of all rights and titles on a single condition: that he walk out of that room.
Only Raynald couldn’t. The door was slightly narrower than a typical door. And Raynald was enormously fat. He was swaddled in it. He could not, with all his squeezing and heaving, get himself outside his cell. He might more easily have passed a camel through a needle.
So in order to walk free and reclaim all he’d lost, he had only to do one thing: lose weight. That would have come easily to most prisoners, with their rations of bread and water.
It did not come easy to Raynald. Edward had disguised a great cruelty as an act of generosity. Every day, Edward had Raynald served with the richest, sauciest foods, savory and sweet, and ample ale and wine to boot. Raynald ate and ate and grew larger and larger. He spent ten years trapped in an unlocked cell, freed only after Edward’s death. His health was so ruined, he died soon himself.2
To reclaim his kingdom, all he had to do was stay hungry.
But there’s another food the Bible speaks about. It is not physical food. It is God’s will—doing what he asks, finishing the work he sent us to do.
That’s the way Jesus put it.
It’s high noon on a hot, hot day. Jesus is exhausted, hungry, and thirsty. He sits down to rest on the stone edge of a well, and his men go into town to fetch lunch. And out of the heat-creased air a woman appears. A water pot perches on her shoulder. She’s alone. It’s an odd time of day for this—why not at sundown, when evening shadows spread their coolness over the land? It’s an odd thing that she’s by herself—why not with the women from the village, easing the burden of their work with the levity of their friendships?
She comes alone in the heat of the day.
Jesus asks her for help. Can you give me something to drink?
The question startles her, on several counts. A man, speaking to a woman. A Jew, speaking to a Samaritan. A holy man, speaking to . . . her.
Then Jesus does something that startles her even more. He offers her water. “Living water,” he calls it: water that so satisfies, so quenches thirst, one sip is enough, forever (John 4:10). She’s taken aback and starts an argument about sacred traditions and worship styles and holy sites. A familiar argument.
Jesus reveals many things to her. He tells her that God is looking for worshipers. He lets on that he knows she has lived—indeed, is living—a sinful life. But the most startling revelation is this: he tells her he’s the Messiah. She’s the first person to whom he reveals this. He hasn’t even told his disciples yet.
Jesus chooses these circumstances, this place, this person—his own weariness and thirstiness and hunger, the dusty outskirts of a Samaritan village, a woman who’s lived from one broken relationship to the next—to make the announcement.
His disciples return, appalled to find Jesus talking to her, though none of them dare speak that out loud. The woman runs off, amazed that he knows all about her—“everything [she] ever did” is how she puts it (John 4:39)—and more amazed that he loves her anyhow, that he does not withdraw or qualify in some way his promise to her of living water. If anything, his knowing her, knowing everything she ever did, makes him more vulnerable and extravagant with her. More willing to risk and bless and reveal. Many Samaritans, stirred by the woman’s testimony, come out to see this man for themselves.
Meanwhile, the disciples have brought food. They urge Jesus to eat some. They left him so bedraggled, so worn down. He had that pallor you get from bone weariness, and that darkness like bruis
es around the eyes. They were worried. He had let himself be stretched too thin.
Eat, Rabbi. Eat something. We’ve got chicken soup. We’ve got matzos.We’ve got falafel. We’ve got bagels. Take your pick—but by goodness, eat!
“I have food to eat that you know nothing about” (John 4:32).
Huh? What’s this? Did someone bring him food? Was it that woman?
These scenes always have a slightly comical tone to them, like a mild British farce. The bumbling disciples, quickly baffled, given to a flatfooted literalism, and the enigmatic Jesus, waxing metaphoric, trying to coax them into an awareness of things unseen. Only it’s like trying to get men wearing blindfolds and work gloves to thread needles.
So Jesus tells them straight up: “My food . . . is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work” (John 4:34).
Jesus began tired, hungry, and thirsty. He asked the Samaritan woman for water, but she gave him none. He was spent from the journey, but the woman’s needs interrupted his own. His disciples brought him food, but he never took a bite. None of Jesus’s physical needs were met, yet he was refreshed, alert. His thirst was quenched, his weariness lifted, his hunger satisfied.
His food was to do God’s work.
Work typically depletes us. Food gives us the energy to do our work, and then the work uses up that energy. So we eat again. And we have to work to make the money to buy the food. And so we’re caught, without relief, in this cycle: the harder we work, the more we must eat, and the more we eat, the harder we must work. In a sense, work and food are opposites, but they exist in this relationship of mutual dependency. Our work provides our food and uses it up. Our food empowers our work and requires it.
But Jesus speaks of a work that moves in the opposite direction: the more we do it, the fuller we get, and the fuller we get, the more we want to do it. This work is food, a thing that nourishes, satisfies, strengthens. We savor it, sit back content from it.
The Rest of God Page 17
