Divine Creation to Beastly Commodity (Leviticus 25:8-13; Matthew 6:24-34; Epiphany 4 (series); February 2, 2014)

Divine Creation to Beastly Commodity

Leviticus 25:8-13
Matthew 6:24-34
Epiphany 4 (series)
February 2, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Edith is a widow in Potrerillos, having been married to a physician.  She has raised their daughter Chantal who hopes to go to medical school.

Edith owns a pupusería, a diner that serves pupusas, the traditional Salvadoran thick corn tortilla stuffed with beans and cheese or pork and topped with pickled shredded cabbage called curtido, and a tomato-based red sauce called simply enough salsa roja.  Her pupusería does a brisk business during the noon and evening meal times. 

Their home is typical for Potrerillos: cinder block construction with open spaces between the walls and the ceramic tile roof.  The house is surrounded by an iron fence with a lockable gate.  In the yard chickens roam freely, hens laying their eggs in all sorts of places.  Their dog, Brandí, named for Brandon Schmidt, keeps careful watch over it all, warning stray dogs to stay away, and carrying on conversations at night with his friends on the other side of the village.

I’ve stayed at Edith and Chantal’s home during both of my visits.  In spite of the extra work that running the pupusería requires, Edith is an attentive host.  She has served me many different dishes, yes, including pupusas, but I have to say that breakfast is my favorite meal.  Most often it is fried plantains, some soft cheese, heavily sugared coffee, seasonal fruit, sometimes eggs, and, of course, beans and corn tortillas.  Salvadoran tortillas are not thin like the Mexican tortillas that we know.  They more resemble a medium-sized pancake, but made from corn flour and quite dense.

The pairing of frijoles and tortillas, of corn and beans, is a combination that is thousands of years old.  As long ago as 6700 bce corn was being cultivated in the hills around Potrerillos.  The people there discovered that corn needed to be treated with crushed limestone and paired with beans.  Treating corn with an alkali, like lime, releases the vitamin niacin.  Pairing corn with beans supplies all the amino acids that people need.  Growing corn with beans keeps the soil from being depleted.

To this day corn and beans are cultivated in the hills around Potrerillos just as they were over eight thousand years ago.  They are planted by hand in every little corner that is even close to flat.  They are harvested by hand as well.  Planting and harvesting are a part of the rhythm of the common life of Potrerillos, shared by the whole community.  Corn and beans are the result of the carefully tended richness of God’s good earth and people’s hard work.  They are a blessing to the people of Potrerillos as they have been for thousands of years.

To me tortillas and beans are not just a pretty tasty way to start the day; they are a sacrament of the long tradition that protects the relationship of people and land.  So imagine my shock when one morning I was greeted by a box of cornflakes. 

Of course, I know how it got there.  Processed breakfast cereal is American food.  It was intended to make me feel at home.  It was gesture of hospitality.  I did my best to receive it as precisely that.

But inside, in my gut, I felt as though I had been sucker punched.  It got even worse when I picked up the box and looked at the list of ingredients.  There, listed first, was the ingredient, “maíz desgerminado,” de-germed corn, corn with the most nutritious part of the kernel removed and sold for some more profitable purpose.  What was left was corn stripped to empty calories.

There in the land of the Nahautl, in the place where corn was a gift from the gods, empty carbohydrates masquerading as food had made their appearance.

Food, a product of the shared work of human beings and God; food, needed to sustain human life; food, needed to foster the shared life of families and friends and whole communities eating at a common table; food had become a commodity. 

When food becomes a commodity, it is reduced to being a mere thing.  It is stripped of its social value, stripped of its connection to a community, and stripped of its nutritional value as well.  Our system turns food into a commodity so that it can be joined to other commodities, shipped, bought, sold, traded, invested in, profited from, and in all other ways treated like a mere thing.  The corn that is traded on the Chicago Board of Trade has no connection to any community.  It no longer bears the love of those who worked to produce it, nor the hopes of a community for themselves and their children.

Any time that we see something of sacred worth being reduced to the status of a commodity, we can be sure that the beast has been at work. 

This was the reason for the Law of Jubilee that we heard in our first reading this morning.  In ancient Israel, land was never to be reduced to a commodity.  This determination grew out of their remembered experience in Egypt.  There, we are told at the end of Genesis, a famine had reduced the people of Egypt to such poverty that they sold their land to Pharaoh and sold themselves into slavery so that they could have the food that Pharaoh had stockpiled.  The beast in its Egyptian form would not be satisfied with food or even with money; it wanted to own the very land itself and even the people of the land.

Israel’s God gave Israel the Law of Jubilee to keep this from happening.  The land that God gave to the covenant people was distributed among the tribes, clans and families of Israel.  Each family had land to tend and to grow food.  Of course, merely sharing out the land would not guarantee that individual families or even whole tribes would not fall into misfortune from drought or insects or even from bad financial judgment.  Inequalities would arise from time to time.  People might be forced to turn their land into money to meet some emergency.  They might even have to sell themselves into slavery. 

The Law of Jubilee prevented those misfortunes from having a permanent effect.  Every fifty years any family that had lost its land would be able to return to it once again.  Any person who had been sold into slavery would be released and able to return to their family and its land.  Neither land nor human beings were ever to be treated as commodities to be bought and sold, subdivided or combined, invested in or permanently owned.  They had had enough of that beastly life in Egypt.  The Law of Jubilee was one of Israel’s ways of resisting the beast, of resisting “evil, in justice, and oppression,” so that life would not become beastly in their new home.

But what way of resisting the beast is open to us for whom food is in danger of becoming a mere collection of nutrients, eaten in haste in the twelve minutes our family has when our schedules overlap before the next activity begins, or worse yet eaten in the car?  How can we resist the evil that takes God’s good gifts and turns them into commodities?  How can the freedom and power God has given us in baptism take concrete form in the real world of corn and hungry bodies?

In a few minutes we will have a meal.  True, it is only a very basic sort of meal of bread to eat (and not much of it at that) and the juice of grapes to drink (not much of that either, and it’s not even wine).  These things have come to us as commodities.   The bread was made of wheat that was milled and processed and maybe bleached and fortified.  It is indistinguishable from other wheat that was made into other loaves of bread.  The grape juice was picked as grapes by underpaid workers.  The grapes were bought and sold, washed, crushed, pasteurized to keep anything natural from happening, bottled, and shipped.  The bread and wine are God’s good gifts, given for our sustenance and joy, reduced to commodities.  We can eat and drink them thoughtlessly if we choose.

But there is a mystery here.  For these commodities are to become for us the body of Christ.  In the beast’s eyes they are nothing more than another way to make a profit.  But here at this table they become something else.  They become food once again.  Someone planted the wheat in prepared ground.  Someone prayed for the snow and the warmth and the rains to come at the right times.  Someone watched anxiously over the newly-sprouted grain, unable to do anything for it but worry.  Someone harvested the ripened grain.  Someone worked at the mill that turned the wheat into flour.  Someone watched over the processes that turned it into dough, set it to rise, baked it, and packaged it.

Someone tended the grape vines, pruning them back, tying them to the trellises.  Someone worried about whether there was enough rain or too much, enough heat or too much.  Someone labored in the hot sun to pick the grapes.  The grapes may have become juice in a factory, but someone oversaw the process, tending to the machines that made it happen.  Someone drove the truck that delivered the bottled grape juice.  Someone stocked the shelf in the grocery store.

In short, even if we do not know their names, even if the beast has done its best to strip the traces of any human relationship to these things, that does not mean that they just appeared without human labor.  We can remember, even if the beast bids us forget, the love and hope and anxiety that we have placed on this table. 

Here these commodities become food once again, the product of God and human beings working together.  And since they will become food once again, they will do what food does—what a bag of something passed through a car window and wolfed down in twelve minutes can never do—they will create and sustain a community. 

The sacraments—and this one in particular—are among the ways that we have to exercise the freedom and power of resistance.  The beast may try to turn every good gift into a commodity, but not these, not here and not now, not at this table.  In this assembly, gathered in Jesus’ name, these commodities become good gifts once more.  This world will not be reduced to a mere thing, because here we remember that the world is our home and it is to be cherished.  People will not be reduced to objects or functions to serve the beast.  Invited to this table, we remember that we are God’s children.  We are human and we are family.  Not entries on some spread sheet showing profits and losses, we are destined for community.  Here is “the freedom and power to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”Offered to us without price, they are ours to accept.  At this table the world is reborn as God’s creation and we are reborn with it.

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