COMPETITIVE COOKING

The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel

July 30, 2006

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, UCC

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

Scripture: John 6:1-14

After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”

Sermon:

“So…how was the family reunion?” I asked, inquiring about a gathering that I had missed. I recalled previous versions, year after year, multiple families stuffed into too few houses around a lake.

“You don’t mind sleeping in the living room on the couch, do you?” they ask me each year. How do you respond to that question without losing?

On one hand, you can be honest. “As a matter of fact, I would not in a million years choose to spend a week’s vacation on the living room couch surrounded by all the children’s wet bathing suits and the dirty paper plates of four generations.” Or you could say what I say, “Not at all,” and then the following year, “We won’t be able to make it.”

Still, having missed it this summer, of course now I miss it, found myself sad, and wondering what happened without us there. And so my relative summed it up for me in one phrase that said it all. “You know how it is; there was that usual tension around the competitive cooking.”

And I knew exactly what she meant – competitive cooking at the family reunion. Tell me you haven’t seen this movie before: Nine families with all their different dynamics, trying to coordinate meals for a very large group with very different eating habits. The kids want hot dogs, the adults don’t. Except for one adult, who does want a hot dog, and two kids who are vegetarian, and one person on the Atkins^® diet, and wants bacon with everything, and another who can’t have salt.

How do you feed everyone, or perhaps more importantly –a logistical and practical question– who is in charge? In this particular extended family, there are not many sous chefs, not many cooks willing to play the role of the humble chopper, the mild-mannered kitchen assistant, or even the humble table-setter. Rather, there are lots of what I will call alpha cooks with strong ideas about how things should go.

Now, let me be up front here. While I can cook, I am not an alpha cook. I cannot pretend to compete in the kitchen, unless the event is a quiz on how microwaves work. No stranger to the frozen food aisle myself, I don’t think there’s a dish I actually cook that requires more than half an hour’s cooking time, which pretty much means everything is boiled – and nothing I make would be called a masterpiece.

So in this reunion crowd, I am that rare table-setter, onion-chopper, and the first person willing to volunteer to go the White Hen Pantry^© for a missing ingredient – but there I am, one soldier amidst a battalion of generals. So I watch in trepidation as the many head chefs of the family reunion criticize the size of the sliced onions, gasp that someone turned the soup on high instead of simmer, shake their heads in disapproval at any one who would not like pimento cheese, and glare angrily that salt has been added to a communal dish that didn’t need it. Competitive cooking.

To me it’s a sport like wrestling, something I cannot compete in myself, but which I observe with a mixture of fascination and horror. In this setting, I am no alpha cook, and I know my place. Like the lame wolf in the pack, I put my head down low and slink around the kitchen trying to look subservient, in the hopes that I will not get bitten.

I have learned that in this pack, for my own survival, I must identify the true alpha cook, and take orders from her, but that means offending her challengers. Did I get the bread sliced correctly? It depends upon who you ask, for I have received four different sets of instructions from four different matriarchs who want to be in charge. Always, I am left with the same question. Why? Who would want to be in charge of feeding all these people? Who would want to be head chef here? Not just at family reunions, but everywhere these days – the ubiquitous television shows that feature people competing to be top chef, humiliated in the process, aspiring to be the humiliator of other would-be chefs one day. “Hell’s Kitchen.” Again, I wonder why? When did cooking, which began as the ultimate act of love, the gift of survival from one to another, become a contest, a blood sport, a battleground?

That day two thousand years ago, on the Sea of Galilee, there were thousands of hungry people. They had been following Jesus around, wandering, but now they were hungry. Hunger is a dangerous state. People get irritable, angry, cranky. There were probably children there. And if you listened to the reading, nobody wanted to be alpha chef that day.

Jesus had been speaking inspirationally for hours, but now the stomachs were grumbling, and the mouths were grumbling too. Human beings are weak. We can have only so many deep thoughts on an empty stomach, and then we lose it. They were probably thinking, “If this religious movement is so great, where’s lunch?”

This wasn’t the first time a little food went a long way. Back in the Old Testament, there’s a reading from 2^nd Kings, where a man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha was that man of God, that pastor if you will, and it was customary for people to bring their first fruits, a portion of their food to the religious community, in the same way today we make a pledge of a portion of our income, to the church. The idea is that we offer the first fruits, a percentage of what we have we give away each month. Not the leftovers, but the first fruits. The spiritual notion, from the Old Testament to the New, is that if we begin our spending with a gift of generosity, generosity will follow. Gifts will be multiplied.

So when this man delivered the twenty loaves of barley, Elisha said, “Don’t just leave it here with me in temple. Give it to the people and let them eat.” But his servant said, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” Those little loaves would barely feed them. But Elijah repeated, “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord, They shall eat and have some left.” He set it before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the Lord.

So many thousands of years later, a crowd of people gathered around Jesus. They would mostly have been Jewish, or at least familiar with the scriptures, so they might have remembered that story about Elisha. They might have remembered the teaching: that by being generous, and making a gift that seems like it won’t be enough to go around, you give God the opportunity to take that small thing, and make it bigger. By being generous in the face of scarcity, you open the door for God to be abundant. You put twenty little bread rolls out there, and a hundred people can eat. Or put another way, you get a call that there’s a project between our conference and the church in Angola, but where on earth do you begin? Well, after a few go to see, they realize that there are no Bibles, and that pastors are walking from town to town to copy the weeks’ scriptures, and so here across the world, a ministry team forms at our church, and next thing you know, we’re buying Bibles in Glen Ellyn for the church in Angola, which leads to more conversation, and now we’re buying beds, and then this summer, a woman from the Angolan church came to Illinois and our church members hosted her, until she returned. By now, the ministry team in our church has secured funds to send a representative to assess other needs the next time there is a trip. Who knows what will be next. It started for many of you when you stopped at a table at coffee hour and bought a Bible from someone you had never met.

You give a thousand dollars to a scholarship fund for a person who had the courage to enter school, which can lead to a degree, which leads to a lifetime of learning and service – all this from a gift that in the beginning seemed like a drop in the bucket. You make a pledge to fix the roof of the church, or plant a garden, or repair a piano, and you are part of the spiritual formation of thousands of young people you have not yet met. A week on a mission trip opens the door for God to provoke your holy imagination to see opportunities for service back at home. When we put our first fruits out there, in the face of scarcity, it is amazing how God can turn it into abundance.

It’s really the opposite of competitive cooking, isn’t it? In competitive cooking, we have various people who want to be in charge, but they are viewing the situation through the lens of scarcity – there won’t be enough; someone will add too much salt; if we don’t do it the way I do it at home the recipe will be ruined, and I will be disgraced in front of the other alpha cooks. And somehow, in the midst of all this, we can lose sight of why we do it, the hungry children coming in from a day at the lake, who don’t really care what they eat as long as it’s served up with a big helping of love.

We’re told in John, chapter six, that when Jesus went to the Sea of Galilee, a large crowd kept following him because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples, ready to take a break from it all, perhaps to have a bite to eat himself. Then he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, and they were hungry, so he turned to Philip and said, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”

The Bible tells us, in case we miss it, “He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.” But Philip panicked – ‘there’s no way we can feed all these people.’ In this case, there were no alpha chefs among the disciples yet, just people willing to explain why it would never work. “Listen,” Peter said, seeing it all through the lens of scarcity, “There are so many people here, that six months wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get even a tiny bite.”

Andrew chimed in, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”

So Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. Does that ring a bell? It was in the same way later, on Maundy Thursday, the night before his death, Jesus broke bread, and after giving thanks, shared it.

This occasion was a happier time, and somehow, as Jesus passed the fish around as well, people got all they wanted. Perhaps they passed their own fish around, not just that boy’s. Perhaps there were more barley loaves out there than they had known. Surely that boy wasn’t the only person there among the five thousand who had thought to travel with a snack. But he was the first one willing to bring his first fruits. That boy was willing, in the face of scarcity, to hand over his first fruits so that Jesus could draw out the abundance. And as the people shared, and God multiplied, a meager meal became a feast. Isn’t that the way we’re supposed to live in this world of competitive cooking? While the world pits one chef against another, and egos clash along the way, God keeps placing these stories in front of us, from the Old Testament to the New, as if to say, nobody on this earth gets to be the head chef – because I am.

You people provide the ingredients. You’re called to work in the kitchen, to work together alongside one another. For in the end, it’s not about the chef. It’s about the people being fed. And that’s why, when you look back and remember your favorite meals, it’s seldom about the menu, is it? When you remember your most precious times around a table, the food is the backdrop, and what you remember is the sharing – the dish that was passed around the table, from one set of hands to another, the conversations that took place among friends, the sense of being loved and paid attention to, and that sense of having one’s deepest most elemental human need met. That sense that you were being fed.

From loaves to fishes, to sweet potatoes, to foie gras, to, dare I say it, a frozen pizza, it’s all about loving one another enough to want to see each other filled up. And that, of course, is what God wants for each one of us. So there’s this odd little story about Jesus and the disciples taking a break from weightier matters, and turning to the concrete task of putting a little weight on the bones of their followers. As if to say, out there, where cooking has become a contest, in here, for this hour in church, try to imagine a different reality, where we live our lives as though we expect life to be abundant.

And because we expect that, we live that out, sharing extravagantly. We can choose to live according to much richer vision of the world, where instead of looking at the bread in terms of how little there is, we see it all as part of a feast.

I once knew a woman who was a magnificent entertainer. There was something about a meal at her house that topped everything. It wasn’t the cooking, by the way. Sometimes that was absolutely delicious, but other times, the gravy was likely to have burned on the stove top, or the meal came out an hour late. But there was something about being at that table that pointed you toward abundance. You knew you were special, that someone had set the table for you, put on the festive music, and even if the food was strange, you knew you had been well-served.

One night, she came out more than an hour late with a magnificent roasted duck. It was a new recipe for her, we had waited a long time for the meal, but now it appeared. It was hard to find the duck on the plate, for in her enthusiasm for her project she had gone heavy on the garnish; it was like a parsley explosion of culinary enthusiasm, and product of a long day’s work, cheerfully given. But then, somehow, the combination of all the greenery, and the grease of the duck and a fold in the carpet just underneath her high-heeled shoes, all came together in the perfect storm. And as she tripped, the duck she had spent the day preparing went flying across the room, and landed on where once it had had tail feathers, skidded across the floor only to stop at the doormat in the front hall, a trail of grease and parsley garnish in its sad wake. The hostess had a moment where tears welled up, and there was a collective gasp among the guests. Then it was as if a new spirit came upon her, and she pulled her shoulders back, marched over to the duck on the doormat, stooped down and picked it up, as she announced to the group, “Let me just throw this away in the kitchen, and I’ll be back in just a minute with the other duck.”

A few minutes later, she made another grand entrance, this time avoiding the crease in the carpet, and this time with a duck even more heavily disguised in garnish, to cover the bruises, for of course, as we all knew, there was no other duck. This was it. The holy spirit of hospitality was such that without a word, it was as if we had all swapped the world’s meager vision of perfect competitive cooks and the scarcity of a ruined duck, for the Holy Spirit vision of enough for everybody and a world of abundance. And by all agreeing to see the moment through those eyes, we ate well that night, feasting less on the damaged duck than on the grace that was served to both an embarrassed hostess and to her hungry guests.

For really, when you share a meal, or a home, or a church, or on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, it’s not really about what you get to eat, is it? The joy comes from the sharing. In the end, it’s the sharing that really fills us up.

Amen.