Working and Eating

Text: 2 Thessalonians 3:6–13

This sermon preached by Katie Wilson, vicar this year at Faith

I would like to begin by thanking Pastor Stein and the community of Faith for the opportunity to stand before you all and share with you from my heart. The honor and the privilege of standing here, today, is an honor and privilege that I never expected to have; I am deeply grateful.

Today I would like to speak about food, and community, and what it means to work and to eat.

I am a new face here at Faith Lutheran, and I have come to stand here in church because of the work I do with Faith Kitchen. Twice a month, beneath the very floor beams on which your feet currently rest, the basement of this building is transformed into a hub of energy and exchange. Food that would have been thrown away has been reclaimed, processed, and redistributed by a fantastic entity that deserves our great respect: the Greater Boston Food Bank. Hundreds of pounds of food come to us: frozen fish, canned fruits, dry goods, meat, pasta, ice cream. This food is overflow or overstock from the FDA, from the co-op, from grocery stores. It was unneeded or unwanted in the eyes of its previous owners and thus was designated as a donation.

Our work in Faith Kitchen begins with this food: we defrost fillets of fish and slice pungent onions, we boil rice and simmer soup, sometimes we peel and chop individual potatoes like precious jewels before they are boiled and drained and mashed by hand—sometimes we open a cardboard box and mix flakes of dehydrated potato product with enough hot water to reconstitute it, to make it food. Sometimes the minestrone is made from scratch with garden grown greens floating in a savory broth coaxed from onions, garlic, tomatoes, oil, and time spent simmering slowly on the stove—sometimes my job is to open one prepackaged box after another and pour the standardized contents into a pot to heat. In either case, whether we are cooking from scratch or embracing convenient shortcuts, cooking is an alchemical process. When we are in the kitchen our business is the transformation of raw material into caloric value that not only satiates hunger and fulfills nutritional needs, but also satisfies the human need for love, attention, care and a place within community.

So now we are getting into the real business of Faith Kitchen. While food is the bedrock of this program it is the people participating that make it what it is. I am not speaking only of those who come week after week to volunteer their time and energy cooking and cleaning and serving, though they of course are essential. At every meal the doors of Faith Kitchen are metaphorically thrown wide open and all are welcome to join us and eat. All are invited to the table. It is reasonable to assume that our demographics reflect a portion of the local homeless population, the disadvantaged and the underserved. Many guests do have homes and jobs, however, and yet are living on a budget that is getting tighter and tighter—so tight they cannot afford the nutrition they and their families need, despite their work and effort. Ever increasing numbers of people who never expected to find themselves hungry may find themselves short this month, and might find respite in a free hot meal. But there is no doorman at the entryway to Faith Kitchen checking off a list of qualifications. There is no judgment, no requirement to be there. All are welcome. All are welcome.

What then do we do with a passage such as the one we read today in Thessalonians, a passage that states “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat”? Reading this passage literally we hear a voice of unequivocal judgment: those living in idleness, those busybodies, and those unwilling to work should not eat. Reflecting on this passage, however, I am called to ask of myself, and of us: What does it mean to work? And what does it mean to eat?

I can say that my work at Faith Kitchen is to cook and to clean, to order food, plan menus, set up tables, even lead the community in prayer. In the other aspects of my life my work is to read, to attend lectures, to write intelligent papers that may or may not have any relevance to my daily life. Perhaps you are a teacher, an accountant, a waste disposal expert. Perhaps you are a musician, a mother or father, the director of an organization, a gardener, or a sales clerk. What I would like to suggest is that however you earn your living, whatever work you do, there is another strain of work that we are constantly presented with. Each and every one of us is presented with the opportunity to do this work every day of our lives. No matter how much or how little money we make, no matter how prestigious or not our title or description or lack thereof may be, I suggest that each day we are faced with the work of bringing attention, and integrity, into every one of our mundane and individual interactions.

What does it mean to work? The work that I am speaking of is paying attention to the attention that we are giving to the task at hand, to the person in front of us, to the prayer being spoken in our hearts. Paying attention to how we pay attention helps us uncover the motives underneath the actions that we take—we may find, for example, that we are peeling potatoes with resentment for being stuck with the dinner shift or with envy for the person making chocolate cake and licking batter off the spoon. Pay attention to how you listen in your next conversation with a family member, close friend, or co-worker: to what extent are you able to purely listen? What does it mean to listen without injecting your own judgment even silently, to listen without interruption, without planning the next thing that you want to say, without waiting until it is your own turn to talk? Pay attention to this.

It is not attention alone that is the work, however. I am often extremely aware that I am making a fool of myself or acting with my own self-interest at heart. Cultivating awareness of intentions and actions is a crucial practice but it is an empty practice if we are not also cultivating integrity and compassion to match this attentive awareness.

What I am most interested in is the way that every minute interaction, every mundane chore and event and relationship, every choice made and word spoken is what constantly creates the world and the community that we inhabit. The means that we employ to bring about our ends are, in fact, constantly creating further means and ends. We are constantly engendering the world around us, and that creation is enacted for better or worse based on each interaction we have. Our work is to make the world around us a better and more beautiful place, and I believe that we do so every time we bring our full attention and full integrity into a relationship, an interaction, a project, a meal, or even a brief and fleeting moment of prayer. This is what it means to work.

But what does it mean to eat? When we eat we are feeding our body fuel, we are giving it the calories it needs to physiologically propel ourselves through the world. But eating is also nourishment, and nourishment happens on many levels. Our hearts and souls and minds must be at rest to enjoy a good meal. The company will hopefully be good or the silence pure and sweet. Pausing for a moment of prayer before beginning helps us to appreciate the food, to take it in more mindfully and gratefully. Pausing for prayer in this way is a means of bringing intention, and attention, to the act of eating, and is a way to acknowledge that the act of consuming food is far more significant than simply loading up on calories as a means to an end. In a communal space, such as the bustling and boisterous basement of Faith Lutheran on meal nights, this act of communal prayer acts as much to unite the community as it does to quiet and center the individual mind. When we pray together, even in silence, and then eat together, we are sending the message to ourselves and to each other: we are in this together. We are not alone. Knowing this is nourishment. Sharing this is nourishment.

When we eat we are nourished by the gifts the earth has heaped upon us. Our attention to the food and our intentions to nourish the community indeed do transform donations that were once considered waste into vital nourishment for many people. But more importantly, it is the intention and integrity of the individuals at Faith Kitchen—volunteers and guests alike—that transform the space from a basement into a community. This community is what enables us to eat, to truly eat, to be truly nourished.

When Thessalonians states that “those who do not work should not eat,” I do not believe this is a condemnation of those guests that we so happily open our doors to each month, and invite in for a free meal. Rather, I would ask if it is possible to be nourished without doing the work of showing up in presence and attention. If one is not able to work—to be present and compassionate with others, to bring attention and integrity to their most mundane actions—is it even possible to be nourished by mundane meals or by the community that surrounds us?

The passage we read from Thessalonians closes with the words: “now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.” Likewise I would like to exhort all of us to do this work, quietly and constantly, in each relationship and friendship and task at hand. Lest I sound too much like a “preacher in a pulpit” I would also like to say that these are goals that I aspire towards and to which I constantly fail. Our work is not to be perfect, but to remember the kind of person we would like to be, the kind of world we would like to live in, and to help create it. Each interaction, each meal, each moment, presents us with the opportunity to do this work, and thus to eat, and to be nourished. May we all work. May we all eat. And may we “not be weary in doing what is right,” little by little, step by step, word by word, and meal by meal.