November 3, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

Farm to Table

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 2:13–22

I was talking with a friend the other night who had just come from dinner. They had picked out a restaurant because the menu looked good online, and then when they arrived, the whole menu had changed. On one hand, it seems like a pretty small thing to complain about—it was still dinner at a nice restaurant, something a good percentage of the people who live on planet earth rarely, if ever, get to experience. On the other hand, we live in a world where regular people make a legitimate living running a restaurant, and the ones who do it well and successfully tend to meet the expectations of their customers.

Our expectations about restaurants, though, when you sit back and think about it, are really rather amazing. Within blocks of the church here, there are several restaurants whose menus are the length of a small novel and include every kind of food with every kind of ingredient from all over the world and regardless of whether or not the ingredients are in season anywhere close to Chicago. And I will be the first one to admit that when I sit down in a restaurant, place an order, and am told, “Oh, sorry, we’re all out of that,” my first reaction is not always as gracious as it should be. ”You’re out of it?” I think to myself. ”Seriously? Aren’t you running a business here? Did you not pay attention to how many people ordered it last week and get the same amount?”

This is my reaction because I participate in two systems that I’d like to tell you about tonight, and I’m going to do so by way of a Bible story. I’m telling you that right off the bat because, on my way to making a point about the Bible, I’m going to say a few things that may make you a little squeamish and that some of you may find to be rather politically charged, but stick with me. If you don’t like the point, let’s talk about it later.

The first system I participate in is the one I was describing in the restaurant story. It’s a system in which people who live in American cities operate under the assumption that all kinds of food should be available at any given time, winter, spring, summer, or fall, day or night. This system, if you’ve never looked into it, is dependent on an incredible amount of resources. At the bottom of the chain there is agriculture—corn and soybeans, grown mostly by large corporations, because in places like Indiana, where I grew up, it is now next to impossible for most families to produce at the level of volume necessary to own their own farm. A great deal of the crops go not directly into food for people but to other farms, where cows and pigs and chickens live in unbelievably abusive conditions so that they can be produced at the volume necessary to keep your local restaurant server from having to tell you “Sorry, we’re out of that” more often than they do. Also participating in this system is an incredible amount of fossil fuels for the production and transport of all of the plants and animals from the factory farm to the restaurant or supermarket of your choice and an incredible amount of human labor, mostly by people working in assembly line circumstances you and I wouldn’t care to participate in ourselves.

Although it isn’t the most obviously pleasant thing to think about at the grocery store or the dinner table, there is good reason to keep this whole system in mind: it connects us to one another and draws us beyond our own needs. I once read a great illustration of all of this that is very grounding. It is by an author named AJ Jacobs, who was trying to be more intentional about saying grace at the dinner table. Sitting down to a lunch of pita and hummus, he wrote, “I’d like to thank the farmer who grew the chickpeas for this hummus. And the workers who picked the chickpeas. And the truckers who drove them to the store. And the old Italian lady who sold the hummus to me at Zingone’s Deli. . . . Sometimes,” he wrote, “I’ll get on a roll, thanking people for a couple of minutes straight—the people who designed the packaging, and the guys who loaded the cartons onto the conveyor belt. . . . My wife has usually started to eat by now. . . . But the prayers make me feel more connected. . . . They remind me to taste the hummus. . . . Basically, they help me get outside my self-obsessed cranium” (AJ Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically, p.95).

So that’s one system—the food system—and a little illustration on what it has to do with religion. It’s about remembering parts of creation beyond ourselves. As long as we’re talking about religion, let me tell you a little about the second system, which gets us into the Bible story you heard tonight. I am what the Bible would call a “Temple Authority.” I work here at God’s house. Ritually speaking, I preside over the table where, in bread and cup, Christ’s sacrifice is remembered. Outside of this room and the worship hours of the week, a lot of other things happen here. Children, youth, and adults attend classes and are tutored. Hungry people are fed, 150 of them an hour from now in the next room over. In this building, people take music lessons and talk to therapists and ministers about their troubled marriage or their struggle with depression or their grief over the spouse they have lost. People get married here and bring their children for baptism and prepare to bury their dead.

In order to do all of these things, we ask you, the people who sit in the pews, to give us money. And we spend it primarily on all of the programs and services that are of benefit to the community, but also on the bills we pay for gas and electricity and new carpet and paint and work on the historical preservation of this beautiful building and on salaries for people like me who come here to work every day and have to be able to pay our own bills—I have to participate in my own small way in the food system I was describing before. Living in the midst of both of these systems, I pay a lot of attention to whether or not we’re doing a responsible job of putting to use the money you give to the church. I am a modern-day Temple Authority, and that is one of my responsibilities. I hope I do it well enough.

There were Temple Authorities in the Bible as well. In ancient Israel, it was incumbent upon all of the Jews to make routine trips to the temple and make sacrifices to God using animals. In order for the sacrifices to be valid, the animals had to be unblemished and approved by the Temple Authorities, and the best way to insure that was to buy the animals that were available for sale at the temple. So selling animals in the temple was an accepted practice with a good intention. Additionally, because of rules forbidding idols in acts of Jewish worship, you could not buy a sacrificial animal using coins that had the image of the emperor. You had to change Roman coins for temple coins that had no images. This exchange was made at the temple, and with good intentions.

This is the scene going on at the temple when Jesus arrives in the scene Holly read to us tonight. So, what was Jesus so angry about?

Well, apparently the Temple Authorities were not paying enough attention to the good use of the money that was brought to the temple. The animals were overpriced, and the exchange rates going from the Roman coins to the temple coins were out of balance. And all of this was mostly because the Temple Authorities had become rather comfortable in their big city temple and had forgotten where all of the resources really came from, namely, the regular folks who came to the city from the countryside to make their sacrifices. It was very much like being a modern citizen of downtown Chicago and going to a restaurant, never remembering the farmers, truck drivers, or slaughterhouse workers, the fossil fuels and distant transport costs, or the soybeans, corn, cows, pigs, and chickens that all make it possible.

A lot of people think Jesus is mad in this story because there are things other than worship going on at the temple, but the specifics of that story and what we know about history doesn’t bear that out. What Jesus seems to be so upset about is the people who had forgotten about where all the resources came from and the people who were taking more than their share.

That’s the point of overlap between the Bible story and us. The question we have to ask is, where would the same Jesus we meet in the story be overturning tables and reminding us to think about where our resources come from? Can you imagine Jesus turning over the tables at the Cheesecake Factory or knocking over the shelves at Jewel? Maybe that’s where he would be.

The real challenge in this story, though, is not to find a corporation or a system to blame but to look at the individual decisions we each face, the ones that exist beyond the blaming. The people Jesus met at the temple probably believed they were doing the right thing, and for the most part, in all likelihood, they were. The Temple Authorities were providing a place for people to make their sacrifices and practice their religion. They just lost their focus for a while. And the same is true for us. It’s easy to blame a restaurant or supermarket or farming conglomerate for a food system that seems unjust, but what’s harder is realizing that people need to eat and people need to have jobs, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with running a restaurant or a store or a farm, nor is there anything inherently wrong with eating there. But sometimes we lose our focus on the best way to do it.

This is the time of year when I, as a member of the church staff, am particularly cognizant of how the church spends the hard-earned money you give to us. I spend time in this season reminding myself not to lose my focus about how we spend it. In the same way, I hope you will spend intentional time in this season thinking about your own resources and what you consume and where it comes from. It is not always a comfortable thing to think about, but I am convinced that thinking about the people and animals and resources that contribute to the life we enjoy keeps us connected to them the way we should be. And when we are connected to one another, we are connected to the One who created us all. We are connected to God. Amen.