Hebrews 13.1-8,15,16, Luke 14.1,7-14
Sunday 28 August 2016: The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
Weston Bampfylde 'Together at Ten'
(Ad lib) Confessional: Are you a fan of The Great British Bake Off?
If so, you’re not alone. The first episode of the new series last week was watched by 47.5% of all television viewers; at its peak the audience was 11.2 million - which was more than at the most-watched moments of the Rio Olympics, which peaked at 11.1 million viewers. [1]
So what’s so appealing about Bake Off? Well, I’ve heard people say it’s because the show is sweet - it makes you feel good. The two judges are like a twinkly-eyed uncle and a generous grandma, who treat the contestants well, the contestants all nice down-to-earth people themselves. It’s a show that seems to celebrate the best – rather than bring out the worst – in people.
Maybe we like it because it feels very ‘British’. It takes Victoria Sponges very seriously indeed, but the hosts are generally kind to the contestants, who are a varied and interesting cross-section of what we could call Middle England, respectable everyday professional types whose interest in baking is often inspired by their mother or grandmother. The Bake Off action takes place in a giant tent like we’re all spectators at one of those country fairs we all know and love. And it’s just a little bit seaside-postcard salty, thanks to the cheeky commentary provided by Mel and Sue the presenters, with their innuendos about ‘soggy bottoms’ and ‘nice buns’. [2]
So you can comfortably watch Bake Off and feel cosily affirmed in your Britishness, which, through cake, celebrates the best of our values like fairness, kindness and tolerance. Through appreciating a good pastry we gently reaffirm our patriotism, our sense of belonging to good old Blighty consolidates around a luscious lemon drizzle.
Now poor old church minister Lee Banfield was the first to leave the show last week after Paul Hollywood said one of his cakes was too dry. He’s been judged and found wanting, he’s been expelled before the first soufflé has had the chance to rise. He’s been told he doesn’t belong in The Great British Bake Off any more and I wonder how he now feels coming back down to earth and - like me - finding that this week’s set bible readings, which we are given to preach on, are all about food preparation and hospitality.
Now, have you noticed that on those cooking shows there are usually guests lingering in the background; while Nigella licks her fingers in the kitchen people hover in a reception room over wine and nibbles, and when she emerges with a sizzling platter her guests politely gather to ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ at the culinary creation she is offering them. As they take their seats you see that they are exactly the sorts of people you’d expect to be gathered in Nigella’s house, well-dressed, well-heeled, youthful metropolitan types. They clearly belong together and their shared meal affirms their belonging.
This is how it is with meals, usually. You invite the people you know and like and who are more often than not very like you yourself. Or who are aspiring to be like you. Or who you are aspiring to be like. I’m not saying this judgementally - I’m saying that it’s human nature to entertain that way.
Which is what makes Jesus such a terrible guest. Luke’s gospel especially might be called the ‘foody' gospel because it’s full of Jesus eating around tables with others. But it’s surprising he got invited in the first place - and would be even more surprising if he ever got invited back - because he broke the rules of etiquette in every single direction.
Look at him misbehaving, in Luke 14. First he tells the guests off for competing for the best seats at the table. And then he harangues his host for only inviting his friends, family and well-off neighbours. The guests, Jesus says, should take the least desirable seats first so that they can enjoy the experience of being invited higher up the table later on; the hosts, he says, should be out inviting the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, anyone who can’t repay them, anyone who they definitely aren’t aspiring to be like.
Sometimes, of course, Jesus would turn up at the homes of people who had invited him for a meal, respectable citizens, bringing with him a rag-tag collection of street people, tax collectors and other sinners, to eat alongside the respectable hosts, the religious leaders and their peers. Other times Jesus would go and eat with the downtrodden, outcast ones, cast out but no longer downcast because they had a guest of honour sharing their modest but genuinely-presented fare; so what if their lemon drizzle may have been a bit dry, it didn’t matter to Jesus, it was his being there that counted, to his hosts, and to him. [3]
What is interesting about all this is that rather than being forcibly expelled by the hosts and guests whose hospitality and table manners he’d challenged, Jesus seems to pull it off. Why? Perhaps because those he targeted were open enough to the idea that if you do dinner differently the surprise you get might be a good one. If you sit with people who can’t repay you, you’re into a different set of obligations - ones which might just take you somewhere valuable; if you take time out with people who you aren’t aspiring to be like, you’re into a positively challenging new set of social desires.
Most meals I’ve ever shared, I’ve shared with people I know well, like and / or would like to be like. And they’ve been enjoyable in a soggy-bottomed sort of way, they’ve each time reasserted who I am and set me on my way belonging.
But I’m now recalling those odd occasions where I’ve eaten outside my comfort zone. And realised how formative those rare times have been.
I can remember as a teenager for a few years volunteering to take part in hosting a Christmas Day meal in our church hall for people who would otherwise be on their own. Thinking back now I’m not sure how good company we spotty, giggly teens were to those predominantly elderly, bereaved folks we sat with, but they seemed to enjoy our company, and that affirmed us.
Whilst working one summer at a Christian conference centre I ate each day with the guests, and I will never forget the week when we catered for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement on their annual retreat; never forget the mealtime when I found myself, deeply embarrassedly, having to sort-of inversely ‘come out’ to them as straight - the only non-gay at the table. Doing that gave me an intense insight as to what it must feel like for them having to ‘come out’ as gay to their often hostile church fellowships, and equally having to ‘come out’ as Christian to their LGBT friends, hostile, as they can be, to Christianity. These people I ate with shared how they feared explusion from both these fellowships, how they felt doubly marginalised by the two communities which meant the most to them. What an education in empathy that was, for me.
For three years in inner-city Liverpool I was one who took part most days in an open table, hosted by two church friends who had decided to stay in the city after graduating, and simply to try to live out the Christian life as faithfully as possible where they were. So their house became a hostel for random students, occasional travellers, people out-of-favour at home; and their meal table each night was open to all comers, with stews and pasta bakes expanded to accommodate the numbers gathered, with a brief bible reading to start us off and with lots of rich conversation along the way. Their hospitality brought together young professionals with addicted teens, school dropouts with university lecturers, happy-clappy church musicians with manic depressives (thinking about it, sometimes those last two categories applied to one and the same person). It was a keenly formative time.
Oh, and the international evening I once organised in a parish which was generally regarded as being predominantly white British, and where the BNP were at the time heavily promoting their hostile doctrines, but which actually contained many people whose family histories connected them throughout the world - and so we invited people to bring to the church hall some nice hot grub from their home culture, their family favourite - and not only did we have a great time going from table to table sampling everything from West African Fufu through Hungarian goulash to Scots haggis, tatties and neeps, we had the pleasure of listening and learning and growing closer to each other as we shared food stories, made connections around family tales.
I’m reminded of the Hairy Bikers’ series Mums Know Best where they travelled the UK unearthing so-called ‘family classics’ - and around a table at the end of each programme they would bring together, for instance, an Italian mum with a meatball dish, an East Anglian farmer with her grandma's chocolate mousse; and a mum from southern India remembering her dad in cooking, and sharing his vadas with sambhar and his chicken curry. And I’m minded also of the wonderful International Evenings we enjoy here in Weston Bampfylde, connecting us so wonderfully well to the wider world beyond. [4]
Now for those who like a bit of hard theology, here’s today’s portion, from Benjamin Myers’ Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams. It relates to what happens to us when, rather than engaging with those we easily identify with, we engage with a social ‘other’:
Authentic social exchange occurs wherever different persons mediate meaning to one another. Just think of the way understanding emerges from conversation: in a good conversation, something new appears which is not reducible to any of the individual speakers. Truth is that new thing that springs into being when different selves engage in the hard work of sustaining their differences. Openness to truth, therefore, is an experience of dispossession. We must give up our desire to possess the truth, in order to receive it and share it freely with others. [5]
Well, that’s brilliant stuff if you like that sort of thing, as I do, but it takes us a long way from Mary Berry and her drop scones. Let’s go back a bit to say simply this: that the Christian faith is not a complicated thing to perform; the writer of Hebrews 13 puts it very plainly and it’s as simple to follow as a kids’ cupcake recipe.
When it comes to hospitality and the way we live towards the ‘other’ Jesus is presenting us with what Bake Off would describe as The Technical Challenge. Now in Bake Off The Technical Challenge is the toughest task. Paul or Mary give the bakers a very basic recipe, but often with important details missing, and the bakers have to innovate and improvise to create something positive out of something unusual they may find themselves uncomfortable with.
This is a challenge because most of the time our ideas about hospitality are based around our Signature Bake, our tried and tested recipe we share with family and friends, but Jesus demands we cultivate a culture of catering for the ‘other’. Which is easy to say but a real challenge to achieve.
Now our Culture Wars are often fought around food. Think of how we Brits have traditionally talked down the French in terms of their cuisine, the cruel cliche of garlic and frog’s legs. Today in France culture wars are being fought on the beaches, around the wearing of certain kinds of beachwear; and in light of this, and our topic today, it is interesting to reflect on how in the UK the best-remembered Bake Off winner by far was Nadiya Hussain, the British-Bangladeshi who famously wore her hijab throughout the series and whose popularity with audiences has undoubtedly shifted stereotypes about the Muslim community and promoted acceptance about cultural diversity. [6]
So, in light of Jesus’ teachings about hospitality Hebrews tells us, ‘Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. … Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God’.
What can we do in response to that?
Well, there’s Church Action on Poverty’s Partner Churches programme, wherein some churches in better-off areas are partnering with churches in poor parts of dioceses to arrange exchange visits where parishioners meet, eat together, and learn about each other’s lives. Churches in poor neighbourhoods listen to their communities and work together for change. Churches in more affluent areas listen and provide support, and everyone learns from one another. The aim is to work to close the gap between rich and poor. [7]
There’s Frome’s Community Fridge, a simple response to the issue of food waste - that the average UK household throws away £470 worth of food every year, while at the same time 4 million people in the UK are living in food poverty. At Frome’s Community Fridge you can drop off good but unwanted food, and anyone can help themselves to what is on the shelf. [8]
There’s the simple act of inviting around neighbours who are new to the area, at the same time as also those who are usually alone and those who come from the streets we usually avoid, to eat together with us - in our church, or hall, or home.
There’s … whatever you can think of - and whatever you do think of, you must think of it as something we can do creatively together, not struggle at alone.
All of this begins here - at this table, where Jesus modelled hospitality and left that model with us to use in perpetuity. As religions are sadly prone to do, over the years we have taken Jesus’ open offer of unrestricted access to his table and fenced it off in rules and regulations and doctrinal schisms and cultural attitudes and tongue-tying liturgies which keep people away. We’ve tended to ignore Luke 14 and Hebrews 13 as models for our social behaviour, disbelieving the blessings which they bring.
We’ve silenced old St John Chrysostom who once said, ‘If you do not find Christ in the beggar at the church door, neither will you find him in the chalice’. And we’ve diminished the sharing of the peace to a reluctant gesture intruding into our individual piety, where what it should be is a deeply-felt acknowledgement of the ‘other’, a way of saying, you and I are here by the grace of God, I value you as a fellow-human in the love of God, I may differ from you in some ways but I will not use that difference to harm you, if there is any trouble between us I will do all I can to heal it, I celebrate our fellowship here in this place and will carry it outdoors.
The one sad thing about Bake Off is that it is a competition, based on judgment and expulsion. There is a diminishing number each week of those deemed suitable to belong.
The joyous thing about communion is that it is a table open to all, a tangible sign in food and wine of a slowly-growing kingdom of unconditional welcome and inclusion.
Notes
[1] Great British Bake Off: More than 10 million tune in to first episode, BBC News, 25 August 2016.
[2] Ffion Lindsay, The winning recipe: Why is The Great British Bake Off so popular?, 7 October 2015; The 28 best British Bake Off innuendoes, Telegraph, 30 July 2015.
[3] Jeremy Sweets, Meals in Luke’s Gospel, blog, July 24, 2011.
[4] The Hairy Bikers: Mums Know Best. Family Classics. Series 2 Episode 8 of 8. BBC, 28 May 2011.
[5] Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (Critical Introduction). Thanks to Robert Gallagher for that reference.
[6] Gabriel Samuels, Muslim woman told to remove hijab by police on French beach before being racially abused. Independent, 24 August 2016; Wikipedia: Nadiya Hussain.
[7] Church Action on Poverty Partner Church programme.
[8] EdventureFrome: Community Fridge Frome.
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