The Long and Short of It

Tonight I am teaching at Meadow Oaks Baptist Church where I’ve been a member for about 4 years. I am teaching about my journey and calling toward agricultural missions and understanding the role food plays in our lives, globalization and justice. This is a pretty concise summation of why food is so important, my theology of mission and how food fits into God’s mission for the world. By concise I mean I had to cut a whole lot of important stuff out. Luckily I have a wife who listens to me ramble and tells me which parts to cut and which parts don’t make sense. So this is both very long for a blog post, but too short to say everything I wanted.

The full text after the jump.

What is Empire?

This may seem a digression from the topic of this blog, but if the question of what we should eat ultimately involves issues of justice then the answer must involve the church’s relationship to the state. There…now I’m justified in discussing this topic here.

I will be teaching the Netzer Co-op May 17th on “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire.” Some of you may recognize that this is one of the 12 “marks” of new monasticism. I’m in the early stages thinking through what I will talk about and how the evening will go. I thought it worth processing some of these thoughts here, particularly as they intersect my theology of food in numerous ways. I think I will organize the evening around three questions 1) What is Empire? 2) Where are the abandoned places of Empire? and 3) What does relocation mean? I’ll consider each of these questions in separate posts.

So, what is empire? Many call America an empire, but historians debate the accuracy of that description. In God and Empire, John Dominic Crossan defines empire as an entity that dominates in four areas military, economic, political and ideological.

Walter Wink calls empire a domination system. In order for this system to perpetuate its military dominance it must rely on the “myth of redemptive violence.” This is the idea that violence will be bring about peace and stability. This story so permeates our culture that we almost don’t see it. It is in almost every action movie, news story, cartoon, TV show and novel that we consume. It is the air we breathe. In fact the idea that violence can somehow achieve peace is so pervasive that we cannot even imagine the alternative, that nonviolence is a better way. We create elaborate “what if” scenarios to debunk the possibility of nonviolence. Empire dominates our imagination and molds us into a particular way of thinking, seeing and understanding the world.

Empire also controls economic power. This may be more difficult to put our finger on today than it was for Rome or other empires. Nevertheless, a shrinking number of companies and people control the flow of the world’s goods and capital. This could be an entire series of posts, but suffice it to say that the majority of the world’s people are not in control of the economic forces that run their lives. We have already considered how “free” the free market really is.

There is also the myth of democracy. In America this is most evident by looking closely at the two choices we seem to have in every election, Republican or Democrat. Both would have us believe that they are diametrically opposed to each other, yet they so often vote similarly and have similar agendas. The tell-tale sign is the money trail. All of the largest contributors to political campaigns and parties play both sides. Both Republicans and Democrats are beholden to the same corporate interests that finance them. It helps for people to believe that they have choices and can participate in the system, so that they can be co-opted to perpetuate as little change as possible.

Finally, empires dominate through ideology. Pax Romana or the American dream, what’s the difference? The thing that got the earliest Christians on the wrong side of Rome was not that they chose the wrong religion. Rome could care less who you worshipped…so long as you bowed down to Caesar as Lord. Imperial theology is the glue that holds the thing together. Propaganda is what allows empires to continue to dominate people and stay in power. The earliest Christians, indeed Jesus himself, got on Rome’s bad side because their message undermined the very glue that kept them in power.

After considering all of these elements I would like to suggest a definition of empire as that which defines the framework for thought and life and orders our lives over against the alternative imagination of the reign of God.

Reflections and Resolutions

I found this excellent list of questions that caused me to reflect on my journey towards ethical eating and the year that looms on the horizon.

1. What new local food did you discover this year?

2. What bad food habit did you give up or replace?

3. What’s your most memorable meal of 2008?

via

Here’s my thoughts on each. Please share your own in the comments.

1. Every area in America (the world really) should have easily accessible sources of local food. I do not live in an area that does. I would have to drive at least an hour in any direction before I could find a farmer’s market or CSA. It’s true that local food is growing, but I’d be interested in seeing a map that showed access to local food sources within 100 miles or so. So, that’s a pretty negative answer…

2. This year we stopped buying bread from the store altogether. We only eat bread made in our bread machine. It feels wonderful to know that you have cut one item entirely out of your grocery list (of course we don’t have local sources for the ingredients yet). As my wife often likes to say, “It feels good to know exactly what’s in the bread, because I put it in there.”

3. I posted about the meal we had with our friends Tim and Kathleen in Seguin, TX when I was at my alma mater to preach at the chapel. It was entirely local and absolutely delicious. In the journey towards eating justly meals like this taste so good on many levels.

I’ll add one more question for you WWJE readers (both of you…mom and mike)

4. What are your goals/resolutions for eating ethically in 2009?

Eucharist as Eat-in

I’ve been trying to be methodical about blogging through the Bible in an orderly linear fashion. However, my mind has been drawn lately toward the Eucharist as the starting point for a theology of food. As I began thinking about this it led to connections and tangents that are forming an interesting web in my brain (hopefully it’s not a cobweb…yuk yuk).

I love the possibility of Eucharist as Eat-In.

Not to belabor the obvious, but sit-ins were a form of protest from the sixties in which people just occupied a space and refused to leave causing business, traffic or whatever to stop in its tracks. Eat-ins are when a “group of people gather in a public space in order to share a meal” (via). These are modern day agape feasts of revolutionary food subversives.

Likewise, we should be willing to gather publicly to partake in a revolutionary meal that symbolizes an upside-down kingdom. Should the reenactment of the death of a dissident in the Roman Empire be done so privately and secluded from the public sphere? Perhaps we should think of taking the Eucharist as a seditious act. We are committing treason when we eat the bread and drink the wine. We are committing and uniting ourselves to an order of things, a kingdom, that is not of this world. It not only transcends nationalism, it obliterates it.

This iteration of communion would certainly incorporate many of the tenets of the slow food movement’s insistence on just eating practices. Paul and James both insisted that when the church gathered for meals and worship (not separate activities) that their gatherings be just.

This way of partaking in Christ’s suffering and death would revive the agape feast that the Corinthian church struggled with practicing in a just way. This way of ritualizing and embodying Jesus’ life, death and resurrection could not take the form of insubstantial elements, though their rich symbolism should be included. No, this version of the Lord’s Supper needs to be a feast, a glorious last meal on death row.

So, what would it look like to practice Eucharist as a form of public protest?

The Problem With Grace

Sharon Astyk had some insightful reflections about Thanksgiving and saying grace or blessing before a meal:

The problem with saying grace is that it can get you into tricky places. For those who believe that God is involved in all of this, it gets trickier still. Faiths may have theological differences, some quite major, but most of us agree that there’s a partnership of sorts with God involved. That is, we thank the farmer who grows the food, and we thank forth God who brings forth bread from the earth. We thank the vintner who made the wine, and God who sent the rains. At the end of the day, most theists will be thanking God for the food – and thus, implicating God in the food.

But it isn’t always clear that we should be grateful for the food we have.

My practice of saying grace has evolved over time, especially as my food and justice consciousness has risen. I can hardly pray before a meal now without thinking about those who are doing without at that precise moment. More and more I find it hard to pray without thinking about our connection to the food we’re eating whether it’s a local/organic/seasonal feast or a fast food fix.

Sharon’s whole post is well worth the read. So, do you pray before meals? If so, can we be thankful for food that may not be just or even good for us? Like the Pre-consumption prayer, the way we pray before we eat may just change the way we eat.