An Epiphany Vision: Local Food, Local Faith

January 10, 1016

Isaiah 60:1; Matthew 2:1-12 

Myers Park Baptist Church 

Charlotte, NC  

 

Christians are expected to be messengers of change in bringing justice, peace, reconciliation and development.

—Abune Paulos Gebre Yohannis

The local food movement, as it has been called, has become all the rage in these parts, especially among affluent consumers. It’s a bit ironic, if you think about it: In the two-thirds world, the only food that is available to the overwhelming majority of people is local food. So local food is a surprising new common denominator between Charlotte’s affluent urbanites and suburbanites and impoverished villagers in India and Ecuador and Ethiopia, for example.

The dominant alternative to local food is mind-boggling in its scope. Consider this: “In 1993, a Swedish researcher calculated that the ingredients of a typical Swedish breakfast—apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar—traveled a distance equal to the circumference of the Earth before reaching the Scandinavian table. In 2005, a researcher in Iowa found that the milk, sugar, and strawberries that go into a carton of strawberry yogurt collectively journeyed 2,211 miles (3,558 kilometers) just to get to the processing plant”_{(http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6064)}. Global industrial agriculture moves tons of food across oceans and continents to retail stores and restaurants the world over.

But here’s the thing: Before it became industrialized and globalized, agriculture and the food it produced was a decidedly local phenomenon. And so was the Christian faith. In the first century of the Christian faith, churches were local congregations. There were no synods, presbyteries, conferences, associations, conventions, or denominations. There were only local congregations. But if you fast-forward to the twenty-first century, the dominant model of the church in many peoples’ thinking is not the local congregation but the multinational corporation. Multinational corporations pay constant attention to global business metrics. For example, global same-store sales—that would be baptisms and new members—and year-to-date global revenues compared to the previous year—that would tithes and offerings—and the number of new offices and retail outlets opened in the last year—that would be church planting and new church starts. Baptisms and new members and tithes and offerings and church planting and new church starts are all good things; I am a proponent of every one of them. But it’s all too easy for global aspirations to seduce local congregations into chasing the metrics and the branding and the marketing and the organizational structure and the lust for competitive advantage that characterize the multinational corporation. To which I would like to say this morning, local food, local faith. Local food, local faith.  

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I am a recovering globalist. “Hi! My name is Jeff, and I’m a globalist.” It’s early evening, and I’m tired after a long and stressful day at work. It’s cold and windy. I left home for the office in the dark this morning, and I’m getting home in the dark. I hurry into the most convenient grocery store on my way to grab the last few items Bev and I need to put supper together, and there they are. They stop me in my tracks. Bright red, plump, and enticing, topped with delicate green leaves: fresh strawberries in the dead of winter. A hint of May, a whiff of spring. My resistance is down; I am weak; and I whisper to myself that perennial lie: “Just this once,” I say. And just like that, I fall off the local food wagon back into the addictive pleasures of global industrial agriculture.

I’m a recovering theological globalist also. He wore a long, gilded robe. When he walked, he moved with a slow, serene gait that made it look as though he was gliding. He was a mysterious and exotic figure on an otherwise staid Presbyterian campus. When I greeted him as we passed on the sidewalk or in the library, he didn’t ignore me, exactly; but his response always gave me the impression that although the two of us were fellow doctoral candidates, we were somehow far from equals. It was only later that I learned how very true that was. He was born in 1935. He entered a monastery in 1941. He was ordained as a priest in 1957. From 1967 to 1973, he engaged in theological studies in Princeton, NJ. In 1973, he was called home to Ethiopia to become a Bishop. From 1976 to 1982, he was imprisoned by the communist government in Addis Ababa. When our paths crossed in the mid-80s, he was an Archbishop in exile. In 1992, he left Princeton to return home again, this time as His Holiness, Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, an African communion that claims a lineage older than Rome, Canterbury, and Geneva and celebrates its roots in the biblical account of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon in 1 Kings 10 and the Philip the evangelist’s encounter with an Ethiopian “official in charge of all the treasury of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8). We were fellow doctoral students, and we were far from equals.

You might say that Abune Paulos Gebre Yohannis sponsored my ongoing recovery from visions of pasteurization and homogenization and commoditization and monopolization of the globalization of the church. The church’s season of Epiphany is often used as a platform for promoting a global vision of the church. But in the interest of the recovery of us all, one day at a time, one grocery store visit at a time, one Sunday School lesson at a time, one biblical text at a time, this morning I’m promoting local food, local faith.

In the gospel lesson for Epiphany, Matthew 2:1-12, mysterious and exotic visitors arrive to offer gifts to “a child who has been born King of the Jews. For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” It is a fascinating little study in the theological etiquette and biases of English-speaking translators that Matthew 2:1 is the only verse in the Bible where the Greek word μάγοι, μάγος in the singular, is translated other than “magician” or “sorcerer,” a practitioner of the occult. Long before the apostles and evangelists, long before the bishops and priests and monks and ascetics, long before the framers of orthodoxy in Rome and Canterbury and Geneva and Nashville, gifts were offered to Jesus by the predecessors of Harry Potter and his friends at Hogwarts. Perhaps we should sing, “We three wizards of Orient are.” They are mysterious, and they are exotic, these visitors. They glide into Matthew’s gospel from parts unknown, and they glide back out into the stuff of which legends are made.

In the 300s, John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople—now Istanbul, wrote that the magi came from Babylonia, Persia, and Yemen. An early Armenian tradition said that one was from Persia; one was from India; and one was from Arabia. Local traditions about these visitors and their origins and their gifts and their names and their descendants grew up in Syria and Armenia and Persia and Ethiopia and Afghanistan and Pakistan and India and China. The Epiphany story reminds us that whenever we think about the church or pray about the church or preach about the church, we must always remember the extraordinary and unsettling variety of origins and gifts and names and customs of life and work and worship of those who in diverse times and places and ways have responded to the Epiphany vision of a “light for revelation to the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32), to the Epiphany call to “Arise, shine, for your light has come” (Isaiah 60:1), and the Epiphany model of following the star that leads to Christ. Local Food. Local Faith.

Because of where we live, you and I sometimes make the mistake of thinking of variety in the church as Baptist and Methodist and Presbyterian and Lutheran and Episcopalian and American Methodist Episcopal and Roman Catholic and Pentecostal and non-denominational. We are like kids in an ice-cream shop so struck by the colors and textures in front of us that it never occurs to us to think that there is also trifle. And crème brûlée. And cannoli. And baklava. And Tavuk Göğsü. Tavuk Göğsü is a Turkish dessert that became wildly popular in western Europe in the Middle Ages. It’s made from minced chicken breasts, sweetened rice, milk, sugar, and flour and sprinkled with cinnamon and almonds. As Polonius said in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There are more desserts in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Act I.v.167-168). That’s not exactly what Polonius said, but it’s close. It’s one of those paraphrases, you know, like the Living Bible or Eugene Peterson’s The Message. The Christian life and faith in which we share includes many flavors and textures, many ways of life and work and worship, some of which are mysterious and exotic to us but in which their practitioners—just as we do—offer their gifts and their homage in response to the Epiphany vision of a “light for revelation to the Gentiles,” to the Epiphany call to “Arise, shine, for your light has come,” and to the Epiphany model of following the star that leads to Christ.

Just how expansive and variegated this Epiphany vision, call, and model might be was expressed in 1997 by a prominent Charlotte native when he said: “I think that everybody that loves Christ or knows Christ—whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re members of the Body of Christ. . . . Whether they come from the Muslim world, or the Buddhist world, or the Christian world, or the non-believing world, they are members of the Body of Christ because they’ve been called by God. They may not even know the name of Jesus, but they know in their heart that they need something that they don’t have, and they turn to the only light they have.” That’s Billy Graham on what I’m calling local faith: “they turn to the only light they have.” We all turn to the only light we have. Graham’s heart-felt understanding of the human condition and his heart-felt understanding of the nature of God as revealed in Jesus Christ led him to an Epiphany vision and an Epiphany call and an Epiphany model that is expansive enough even to include those foreign astrologers, “we three wizards of Orient are,” who followed the light they had to become members of the Body of Christ.And that is how a Muslim woman standing silently in a crowd can be more Christ-like than the jeering, taunting Christians by whom she is surrounded.

Now, just in case your theological tastes are more catholic and dogmatic than evangelical and heart-felt, you might put more stock in these words from the Vatican II document Lumen gentium, “Light of the Nations” or “The Dogmatic Constitution of the Church”: “Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience” (II.16)

(http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html). In other words, the “light they have,” as Billy Graham put it, is sufficient to lead them into the circle of those whom Abune Paulos Gebre Yohannis characterized as “messengers of change in bringing justice, peace, reconciliation and development” (http://www.africamission-mafr.org/cisa19.htm). That’s a message of recovery for us all, a vision and a call and a model for justice in every place for every person, for peace in every community in every nation, for reconciliation in every relationship, and for development—the cultivation in every location of faith and of learning, of education and self-determination and economic opportunity—in the wide world, local and global, of God’s creation.

That’s local food, local faith. Bon apétit, my friends. Bon apétit. 

Copyrighted © 2016 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jrogers3@gardner-webb.edu.