You can view video of this sermon here.

One of the most common habits of religious people is to pray before eating. A lot of families or individuals have some kind of table blessing. Many different religious and wisdom traditions teach the practice.

Like anything, it can become rote and routine. I remember as a kid racing through our “comeLordJesusbeourguestandletthesegiftstousbeblestamen,” with the “amen” being like a starting gun for springing onto the food.

But the practice of praying before eating is, at its heart, deeply wise. It is worth slowing down and reflecting on it.

It is a fundamental sort of prayer, a prayer of gratitude for the goodness the fulfills one of our essential needs.

We need to eat. We eat daily, more than once a day, when we have enough. Praying before receiving a daily sustenance is a practice of gratitude, humility, enjoyment, awe. Gratitude, humility, enjoyment, awe: these are postures of being that open ourselves to deeper and fuller relationship with the Divine beyond ourselves.

Praying before eating specifically opens ourselves to deeper and fuller relationship with the gifts of life that flow from the Sacred Source of all life. This isn’t a kind of prayer that send us to some abstract and purified celestial realm, but rather plunges us deeper into our experiences as embodied beings, here on this earth, suffused with sensations and relationships, animated and sustained by inter-related life springing from the Sacred Source of all life.

This daily prayer invites us to slow down and feel gratitude, humility, enjoyment, and awe for our food itself.

Gratitude for the particulars of the food – its smells and textures. Gratitude for the plants that make up the meal, for veggies and grains. Gratitude for the spices, the salt. If you’re eating meat, gratitude for the life of the animal whose flesh you are taking into your flesh. Or if there’s eggs or milk or butter or cheese, gratitude for the animal who gave of its motherhood powers.

When we pray we can slow down and appreciate the entire web of life that came together into this moment of sustenance.

We can take a moment to appreciate all the work that went into bringing the food to the table, and those who did that work for us, whether we know them or not: the work of cooking the food, the work of earning the money to buy the food, the work of the grocery workers and the truck drivers and the farmers and farm workers, and often factory workers.

We can even feel gratitude for those generations who came before whose knowledge and skill and hard work has been passed down in the abilities to raise plants and animals for food, and whose ingenuity went into the recipes we use.

Then there’s gratitude, humility, enjoyment, and awe for the land itself, and the sun and the rain, the physical sources of life itself in its abundance.

Truly, as John Muir wrote:

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

When we pray before eating we realize that it is all a gift, our basic sustenance is a gift, which connects us in a whole web of relations.

Food is so strongly by its nature a gift, that even in our society where it seems like everything has become a transaction, food is a very common form of gift. We give and receive the gift of food easily and without always realizing that we’re participating in an ancient gift economy. Inviting friends over for dinner. Taking someone out to lunch. Sharing a snack. Nursing a baby. Going to the food pantry. Using a WIC card. Donating to refugee relief. Throwing a pot-luck. Preparing meals for your household.

Daily, if not weekly, we all offer and receive food as a gift. We offer and receive food as acts of love and care.

When we pray over our food, we remind ourselves that food is fundamentally a gift, food is fundamentally an act of love and care from our Creator.

How can we respond but with gratitude, and humility, and enjoyment, and awe …

As well as a desire for everyone to be able to receive the food they need, and the moral determination that in this world of such abundance, all people should be able to live free of hunger.

Food is fundamentally part of the ministries of this church, and of many houses of worship of all the world’s religion. We’re blessed here with a community garden ministry bursting with veggies for the local food pantry. And our monthly meals with our friends at Old First UCC in Philly are a way for us to share a table with folks who live with daily uncertainty about where the next meal will come from.

It is no mistake that food was fundamental to Jesus’ ministry. He was feeding this multitude and feeding that multitude. When he stepped into a boat the fish jumped in after him. He embodied the magnetic power of our Creator’s outrageously generous abundance.

Jesus was so deeply identified with the nature of God that he became food.

It is no mistake that the core ritual of our faith is to eat God’s incarnation. The Eucharist is a startling ritual, when we pause to reflect on it. It is worth pausing and reflecting on it. Just like we receive and eat and share our daily bread, so we receive and eat and digest and embody and share God on earth. God’s relationship with Creation is fundamentally a self-giving gift of outrageous generosity, given without judgment or discrimination, but with outrageous abundance. The offer is to take that grace into ourselves and have it nourish us and become knit into our very substance.

How else can we respond but with gratitude, humility, enjoyment, and awe?

Delivered Sunday, September 1, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge. You may view video of my sermons here.