by Lauren F. Winner
Psalm Reading: Psalm 81
For Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013: Year C—Lectionary 22
God as farmer, and grocer, and master baker all at once: Psalm 81 shows us god feeding us, providing food for us. God baking croissants and scones and rounds of sourdough for us (which pairs nicely with Jesus’ telling us in the Gospel lection whom we should and should not invite to dinner).
The psalm here echoes the Exodus story, not only with God’s bringing the children of Israel out of Egypt, but feeding them with manna and quail. (This is not only a straightforward, happy, nurturing image, of course: God feeds people quail that they will gorge upon, and ultimately find loathsome; and God later is imaged as causing, or at least allowing, famines, the withholding of food—is God then imaged as a punishing, withholding mother?[1]) We open our mouth and God fills it. A measure of God’s faithfulness to those who are faithful to God: God feeds.
Who feeds you?
Who most recently fed you? Maybe you were fed last night, when you went to your friend’s house for dinner, or when your roommate made coq au vin. Maybe the only time you are ever fed by another person is when you pay for service at a restaurant. A few months ago, I taught a weeklong writing workshop in Collegeville, Minnesota. The schedule was designed to protect writing time: we had class in the afternoon, but we reserved all morning to write. All our food was provided: cooked dinners, continental breakfasts, and lunchtime sandwich buffets; a refrigerator stocked with participants’ favorite snacks. It was, more than anything else, having all this food provided that made the week luxurious—what a gift, a week without worrying about running to the store, cooking (or buying overpriced prepared food), cleaning up the dishes.
And yes, I hear the privilege in what I have just written, and it makes me cringe. Everything about my life with food is marked with luxury—I have never known true hunger, and I am embarrassed by my own bourgeois banging-on. Isn’t one of the lessons of the fouling, too-abundant quail precisely the warning that overabundant food can imperil us?[2] (At the same time, this is the life I am in, and in the mist of that peril, maybe the task is to simultaneously self-diagnose our privilege, and try to do penance for it, and yet still take our lessons where we find them, which is also where we find ourselves. Or perhaps that is just a pious-sounding rationalization.)
The Image of God Who Feeds
In imaging God as the one who feeds us, Scripture is giving us something very elemental (think of the centrality of feeding to psychoanalytic discourse)—something that will strike us, if we let it, at a pretty deep place.
What can I find in the image of God feeding me?
There is little I enjoy more, little I find more satisfying, than providing people I care about with a good meal. It is in some ways my most basic expression of love—and, when I am honest, it holds a kind of power. When I serve up a good meal, I feel like I am needed, like I am giving people something they both need and desire—something that nourishes them, and something they might relish.
Cheek-by-jowl with that enjoyment is the resentment I sometimes feel when I cook and am not thanked. That is petty, perhaps—dragging my mealtime preparation into a household calculus, a zero-sum-game of household work that nobody can win. My dinnertime offering turns out not to be a selfless gift but a bid for gratitude. Yet I wonder if my resentment might actually be converted into prayer, into gratitude—how often do I fail to thank God for the manna and the quail, for the finest of wheat?
Something inside me resists the idea of God as the one who provides for me. The notion of God as provider sits uncomfortably with a story I like to tell myself: that I am ultimately responsible for myself; that I must look out for myself because no one else will; and that I can be proud of all the ways I have taken care of myself over the years.
That defensive, prickly self-reliance withers a bit when I begin to receive the idea that everything that is on this table was actually provided by God. It is a withering I probably need, but it scares me.
The Hardest Question:
God fills your wide open mouth; God gives you finest wheat. What does that image provoke for you? Does it raise questions about God’s withholding food in famine? Does it uncomfortably underline your own economic privilege in a world marked by a deeply unjust food politics? Does it wash you with a calm, grateful sense of God’s provision and caretaking? Does it make you feel like a nestling to God’s mother bird? Or…?
[1] See the utterly fabulous Julianna M. Claassens, The God Who Provides: Biblical Images of Divine Nourishment (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004). 11-12, 43-62.
[2] Ibid., 11, 29-36, passim.
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
