The Food That Endures (sermon for Thanksgiving Sunday)

I went rock fishing with my wife yesterday during the short 36 hour visit she had down here before returning this morning to care for her mother in Boston. Our 10 hour trip yielded exactly three fish.

The ways of fish are impenetrable. Our captain, whose apt nickname is "Pudd'n," assured us that there were many fish, but that they simply weren't acting right. To bring home his point we were usually surrounded by large numbers of other vessels, their hind ends bristling with trolling lines, implying that like Pudd'n, the captains thereof were convinced of the immanence of fish.

For a time we were in the Piankatank, right where the river bends sharply northward toward the bridge. We circled there so many times, and passed the same homes so often, one of our group commented that we might send those folks Christmas cards this year. But while we were there, we did have the privilege of riding through one of those fascinating moments in the great cycle of nature, of which, of course, we were a part.

Waiting patiently on various docks around this particular stretch of water was a large flock of seagulls. At one point they rose as a body into the air and fell like kamakaze fighter planes on a little area just off our bow. This was one of those feeding frenzies brought on by the bait fish rising close to the surface, where the seagulls could get at them.

We rode right through it, our eyes fixed on our lines. Why? Because the rise of the baitfish to the surface most likely had been caused by the rock fish hunting them. Did we catch one? No, we did not.

Like I said, the ways of fish are impenetrable. My point here is that we were there and the baitfish were there, and the seagulls were there, all involved in the amazing dance that has gone on for lo, these many millennia. I have no doubt that native american indians had for hundreds if not thousands of years also been out there in their canoes doing just the same thing, albeit probably with greater success.

And at the same time, you know, we in the boat sidled back and forth, from port to starboard, following the sun on that crisp fall day. Whenever the boat would turn, the roof over the deck would cast its shadow and we would be too cold. A move to the other side put us in the sun, which quickly warmed us. I am sure there were any number of other living creatures, all around us out there, plants and animals of all kinds, that were similarly turning themselves to receive the warmth of the fall sun.

We caught three fish, but I also caught a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of the huge and loving and impartial generosity of God. The world was filled with light and air and warmth and food. Who did it all belong to? Certainly not me. And yet it was all there before me, like the table of a feast.

Much of the industrial food production system that we have created in this modern world is turning out to be not so good for us, if not positively bad for us. One of our party remarked that few rural people starved during the depression because the country was accustomed to growing and trading local foods, a practice that required no cash. Before the advent of the single-planting seed, seeds could be harvested and saved and planted again. When only local populations were eating the produce of the bay, fish and oyster and crab populations could easily stay large and vital. God provided pretty much all that was needed for life. Now, when very few people grow their own food, and even farmers have to purchase seed every year anew, and when seafood is shipped in great quantities all around the world, an economic crisis might very well leave people hungry.

In North America we produce enough food to feed the world, but how it is distributed and marketed somehow ends up leaving huge populations hungry. The weight loss industry in our country alone is worth about 45 billion dollars a year, and the impact on the health care system of obesity-related disease is in the billions as well. It seems every time we turn around there is another outbreak of some infection spread all over the country by industrial food production.

I believe it is a tenet of the Jewish and Christian tradition that scarcity is caused by human beings. And by scarcity I don't mean some spiritualized idea of poverty, but the kind of scarcity that actually causes people to starve or to die of diseases for which there is a simple cure. Scarcity is caused by fear.

Jesus invites his followers to stop orienting their lives and the morals and their choices around their fears of not having enough, and begin to live into the generosity of God. He'd just finished multiplying the loaves and fishes. The people were chasing him because it seemed to them that he could continue to feed them. Of course, Jesus feeding the five thousand was a concrete example of the power of God and of God's abundant provision for everyone. That was the lesson it was to teach, but the people were still being motivated by their fear.

Jesus is hoping that we might hear about the deeper significance of the feeding miracle. Jesus is hoping that we might see that the world as God has created it is a place of abundance and plenty for all of God's creatures, including humankind. Jesus is hoping that we might take in that the problem of scarcity is not caused by God not providing enough, but by the inequities of human systems of sharing.

Thanksgiving is one of the basic practices of Jewish and Christian people. Indeed one of the traditional Greek names for the ritual of the Lord's Supper means "thanksgiving." It's interesting to me that one of the levels of our Thanksgiving tradition is the remembrance of the ways native people helped the Pilgrims to make use of local foods, thus saving them from starvation. For the native people of the Americas, a person could no more own the land than own the sea or sky. Everything was there by the generosity of their idea of God. If the Pilgrims had been open to the native's beliefs, they might soon have discovered some real similarities to their own.

Thanksgiving is the way that God's generosity becomes ours. This story we heard this morning comes to us from the gospel of John, in which is written many a Christian's favorite verse. Say it with me now: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son." God loved, and God gave.

In our gratitude for God's provision is the seed of our own generosity. As we gather with our families, and give thanks for food and love and life and sun and children and old people, let's open our hearts to the marvelous truth of Christ: God provides enough for all.

Amen.