Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 10.12.14
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 25:1-9
No matter what the time, or the season, there seems to be a single truth in our family life: We really, really need to clean out our fridge.
It starts in a well-intentioned way. You need to have food, after all, and there the fridge is, this giant behemoth of a thing, towering in our kitchen like the monolith from 2001, assuming the monolith had been an innocuous off white. The fridge is, like all fridges these days, a colossal thing, a giant yawning chasm.
Back in the day, nine-point-five or ten cubic feet was all the space a household needed to store food. Now, though, we need more. Our fridge is a “Large” sized one, meaning it’s the smallest one our particular manufacturer makes. Storage capacities start at twenty cubic feet and run to thirty three cubic feet, with sizes running from Large through Ultra Large to Super to Mega. We have enough storage space inside it to hold the fridge that lived in my grandparents kitchen, which could hold the dorm fridge I used for three years of my life inside it, like the world’s largest Russian nesting doll.
We have a huge, huge fridge, and so the temptation is to fill it with food. We wouldn’t want it to be empty, now, would we? It would be so sad. Poor, sad, fridge.
So we do, and it contains so much more than we need, and worse still, more than we can remember. The food we bought a week ago gets pushed to the back of the fridge, where it’s out of sight and out of mind. The food in the giant pull-out freezer? It piles up, new items on old, layer upon layer.. What lies at the very bottom of our freezer now? I don’t even know, but if that label-less packet of leathery freezerburned mystery meat turns out to be mammoth chunks, I wouldn’t be surprised.
And so, every rare once in a while, we’ll clear that freezer out. It’s not a pretty thing, because I hate throwing away food.
I hate it because it’s a waste, and I hate it because, well, we do a tremendous amount of that in the United States. It’s an amazing thing, actually, just how much food we manage to not use in America. This land is amazingly fertile. The amber waves of grain that sit between our purple mounted majesties upon our fruited plain produce an amazing amount, an incredible amount, so much food that it boggles the human mind. Four hundred and thirty billion pounds of food a year, when you look at the numbers, which is...um...rather a lot.
Of that, we don’t use thirty one percent. This is food that gets discarded because it doesn’t meet certain specifications for appearance, or that goes bad on store shelves. This is food that we buy but stash away until after it’s gone bad. That’s 133 billion pounds of food, every single year. A recent study calculated that out to one hundred and forty one trillion calories, the equivalent of one thousand two hundred calories per American per day going to waste. Enough goes to waste, in other words, to feed three hundred million people breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day.
It’s a little crazier, but it’s even crazier that we don’t notice. But we don’t, because most of us are not hungry.
It’s easy to miss those things, when you’re in a comfortable place, and that’s why Isaiah preached as he did to those folks he encountered in Jerusalem.
From chapter 25 in the Book of Isaiah today we hear a story of new things. It’s a lovely little story about a meal, and the end of suffering. It’s the promise that tears will be wiped away, and that God will make everything alright for the people of Israel. What we have not heard is chapter that came right before it, because that’s a bit harder on our ears.
Chapter 25 of Isaiah comes across nice and easy, but it’s part of that 8th century prophet’s many oracles against the people of Israel. Speaking from the comfort of royal Jerusalem, where he was well regarded by all and had the willing ear of the king, it would have been easy for Isaiah to just tell folks what they could see from the world immediately around them.
Jerusalem, after all, was a place that was prospering. It was the center of power in Judah, and in every age and every time power draws wealth to itself. The city was doing well, was comfortable, was at ease. There were other prophets, I’m sure, who proclaimed to the the people at that time that all was well, that everything was going swimmingly, and that all anyone needed to do was just keep on keeping on.
That was not the message Isaiah bore. In the verses before we roll into chapter 25, we hear that God’s annoyance with the selfish indulgence of the world.
And to those Jerusalemites, a clear message: this is not a feast just intended for those who prosper now. God’s care extends particularly and pointedly to the poor and the struggling, and to the denizens of Judah’s capital, Isaiah says: you can’t ignore this.
Following this comes a Psalm, a song of praise that fills the 25th chapter. In this, Isaiah proclaims that with the collapse of the life we had known, something truly new and more gracious and more promising will arise. All will not forever be wreck and ruin.
At the heart of that vision lies, as is so often the case with Isaiah, a meal. What he brings to the table is the vision of a feast, a table overbrimming with good things. It’s not just intended for his few chosen, or for those who are wealthy and powerful. It’s intended for all peoples, and all nations.
That, as Isaiah speaks it into the ear of the powerful denizens of Jerusalem, is the vision of God’s presence on earth, the work that God engages in as the Reign of God is shaped.
And that, in so far as we Jesus folk claim to be moved and engaged by the Spirit of God at work in us, is kinda sorta our job too. Let me say that again: if we want to claim God is at work in us, we have to be working towards God’s goals in this world.
So, sure, we often encounter God as abundance. But our task, as we engage with the great groaning table of our sweet little planet’s productivity, is not to devour all for ourselves or to be oblivious to our impact.
It’s to be aware, aware of how our actions and our choices echo out across creation, and how those choices impact the world around us as they pile up by the thousands and the tens of thousands.
Here, we’ve been placed in a world that has all that we might need, that creates and produces everything that we human beings might ever need. And yet the
What can we do? It all has to do with our attention. We have to pay attention, in our homes, in our communities, and in our culture.
We can attend to ourselves, to the way we approach the food that pours out of our culture’s cornucopia in such a relentless flood of calories. So much of justice comes from just paying attention, and allowing ourselves to move and act in ways that reflect our attentiveness not just to our own lives, but to the impacts that life has on others.
We can make a point of growing our own food.
Now, you’d think that’d be exactly the opposite thing we should do. Wait, don’t we have waaaay too much already? There is plenty, vastly more than we need. This is true.
But the primary issue here is inattention. It’s losing sight of the reality that creates what we consume. If we don’t see waste as waste, don’t make the connection, we’re not going to notice it in our own actions. When you’ve tilled the soil, worked the earth to bring up those tomatoes and beans and zucchini, you feel it when the fruit of your labors goes unused. And that increased awareness means you feel it more when you see other food go to waste.
In our communities, we can attend to the needs of the hungry, making a point of personally engaging ourselves with those who need help to connect them with the abundance of creation. Here in Poolesville, that happens through WUMCO, and in the region, through the Lord’s Table. It’s a vital part of what we do here, a way we stand as the servants of our Maker to make that promised feast real.
And you can be aware of broader efforts to lessen waste, and to connect the abundance of creation to the needs of God’s children. How? Well, through the magic of the interwebs, that’s how. On our Facebook page right now are links to what the Presbyterian church is doing to educate and alleviate hunger, and a link to a wonderful “gleaning” organization called the Society of St. Andrew.
Paying attention matters.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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