Code Lunches

Week of Monday August 23, 2004

           Lectionary Readings
           Jeremiah 2:4–13
           Psalm 81:1, 10–16
           Proverbs 25:6–7
           Hebrews 13:1–8, 15–16
           Luke 14:1, 7–14

           When former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski wanted to celebrate his wife Karen Mayo's 40th birthday, he resorted to a time-honored way: food. Kozlowski and his finance chief Mark Swartz face 30 years in prison for allegedly defrauding Tyco of $600 million. During his trial jurors were shown his many excesses, including a $6,000 shower curtain, but what really symbolized Kozlowski's extravagance was his party for his wife and 75 guests on the island of Sardinia. A video recorded toga clad Roman models, guests in loin cloths, a full-size ice replica of Michelangelo's David that spewed vodka from his privates into crystal glasses, a birthday cake in the shape of a woman's body with sparklers protruding from her breasts, gladiators, chariots, and Jimmy Buffett fairly well wasting away in Margaritaville. The prosecution claims the party is an example of how Kozlowski pillaged company money for private greed; Kozlowski claims business was done.

           Either way, the $2 million birthday bash at the Hotel Cala di Volpe elucidates the Gospel reading for this week (Luke 14:1, 7–14). There, Jesus comments on a dinner party He attended, and He draws the most unlikely of lessons, that food can be a metaphor for power.

           Kozlowski is not alone. In a review of the book Feast: A History of Grand Eating (2003) by Roy Strong, Ingrid Rowland notes how food has often been "the all-sufficient metaphor for power." Dinners, banquets, parties and all the many venues for food, she observes, have been a showcase for "gluttonous display ...conspicuous consumption ...rites and rituals ...obsequious flattery...and even sadism ...Monarchs from King Belshazzar to Louis XIV have used the public consumption and distribution of food to dramatize their power, flaunting their mastery of trade routes by eating delicacies from the remote ends of the earth, reveling in the refinement of their taste, or simply indulging the jolliest of the seven deadly sins."1

           At the other end of the social spectrum, our own experiences also remind us how food is sometimes a metaphor for power. In her own, inimitable style, Anne Lamott writes about the daily rite of passage we all endured —the school lunch. Remember? School lunches, she writes, "only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. [But] it was really about opening our insides in front of everyone...The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like some people, were Okay, and some weren't. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple...If [c]ode lunches were about that intense desire for one thing in life to be Okay, or even just to appear to be Okay, when all around you and at home and inside you things were so chaotic and painful, then it mattered that it not look like Jughead had wrapped your sandwich. A code lunch suggested that someone in your family was paying attention, even if in your heart you knew your parents were screwing up right and left."2 From school lunches in the cafeteria, full of longing and anxiety, to power lunches at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, full of deal-making and wealth-making, food is a metaphor for power. That is what Jesus says.

           Food plays a conspicuous role in the story of redemption. Jews celebrate liberation from Egypt with the Passover meal. In the Gospels there is the wedding party at Cana of Galilee, the Last Supper, the Lord's Supper, and the Great Supper as a metaphor for eternal life in heaven. There are stories about feeding the multitudes, eating with dirty utensils, food production and farming, arguments about fasting, and the poor begging crumbs from the rich. The Gospel for this week is only one of several stories that Jesus told about food to warn us of power.

           Sometimes Jesus ate with the fringe crowd, so much so that his detractors disparaged him as a glutton and a drunkard (Luke 7:34). But he also ate with the religiously scrupulous, and that is where the Gospel for this week finds Him. He was eating dinner with a prominent Pharisee when he noticed something about the guests and something about the hosts.

           The guests at the party clamored for "places of honor" at the table. To insinuate ourselves into places of importance, to wheedle a prestigious invitation, is what we are inclined to do. It is entirely human. When I was in Oxford I regularly attended the beautiful service called Evensong. On my first night at Magdalen College Chapel (founded in 1448) I learned my lesson: do not, under any circumstances, try to sit in the back row reserved for the professors. These are prestigious seats for important people, and never mind that the church was otherwise empty except for the boys choir and a few tourists like me. Whether it is sitting in the sky box at the football game or at court side at the basketball game, we confuse social location with personal identity. Just as school children long to demonstrate through their bag lunch that they are somehow Okay, adults want to demonstrate by their social location at a table that they are not only Okay but important and powerful. Jesus warned the guests, be careful where you sit; it might reveal more about yourself than you would normally care to know.

           Then Jesus turned from the guests to the hosts, and observed what we might call the law of reciprocity. When you throw a dinner party you tend to invite those whom you most enjoy, those whose presence in your house might flatter you. As a matter of fact, said Jesus, there is a decent chance these people will reciprocate and invite you to their party, which is exactly what you hope. But to the hosts Jesus turned the tables. He replaced those whom we normally would most likely invite, "your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors" (Luke 14:12), with those whom we would least likely invite, "the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind" (Luke 14:13). Jesus warned the hosts, be careful about your invitation list.

           Jesus warned both guests and hosts, "Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Luke 14:11). Commenting on this passage, William Willimon, former professor and dean of the chapel at Duke University for almost thirty years, observed, "there is a warning here about the advent of a kingdom where those who are full, and content, and on top get dislodged. And you, who have come to the university to 'get ahead,' to get the ticket that is required for the acquisition of power, as this world defines power, need to listen."3

           As He so often does, Jesus tells us that the ways of His kingdom are different from, if not the opposite of, the kingdoms of this world. I was reminded of this parable and this truth when I was in Uganda this summer. In a village outside of Tororo, I was feted by a duo who between the two of them lived the life of all four people that Jesus mentioned. They were both poor, one was blind, and the other lame and crippled. They sang to us songs of appreciation, complete with our names, and threw the best party with the best food they had. In this instance, as is also the case in the Gospels, food was a metaphor not of power, envy, and social posturing, but of joyful celebration of the God who exalts the humble and humbles the exalted.

[1] Ingrid Rowland, "The Lost Art of Eating," New York Review of Books (July 15, 2004), p. 30.
[2] Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird (New York: Anchor, 1994), pp. 33–38.
[3] William Willimon, Duke University Chapel Sermon Archive, August 30, 1998. See www.chapel.duke.edu/chapel/worship/sunday/viewsermon.aspx?id=50.