First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Exodus 12 and Romans 13

“If a House is Too Small”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

September 7, 2008

I baked my first loaf of bread to impress a girl. It is fair to say I didn’t know what I was doing in terms of courting affection. Yet looking back all I really remember was: the bread was fantastic. It was like a revelation to me. There was just something awe inspiring watching the way the batter comes together as dough, the way the dough rises into a loaf, and then the way the risen loaf bakes unto bread. The girl was pretty, but what I really fell in love with was cooking.

Armed with a Sunset Book on Bread Making I tried everything. I made sweet breads and Jewish bread and rye bread and on and on. This was great for me in my first years of college. I thought college was going to be some sort of intellectual quest and well it wasn’t. It was more about being consistent and persistent than being profound or poetic. As luck would have it just when this occurred bread appeared. And baking bread is a kind of mystical, earthy, satisfying time to think, to ponder. It was a perfect fit.

I would spend my evenings making bread, reading between the risings and the baking. Most of the day was a distraction until I could make the next recipe. And, lucky yet again, when I had exhausted just about every type of bread I stumbled upon the cheesecake. It was a movie that provided the inspiration. I can’t even remember which movie it was, but at the very end a character makes cheesecakes and I could just see myself sitting in the kitchen being portrayed on screen and just thought, “alright.” So I started making cheesecakes. That was a good choice.

It turns out that baking bread and making cheesecakes is a sure fire way to have people come and talk to you. My mother’s beauty parlor was just a few yards from our kitchen so the smell of fresh bread or the “citrusy” emergence of a cheesecake was a kind of invitation that brought so many lovely people to come and chat. I think I learned more from my mother’s ladies as they ate monkey bread or a piece of Kilimanjaro cheesecake than I did from those early professors.

It was this insight, though, that brought a great temptation. Essentially, college was just not as exhilarating or as alive as I had hoped. College wasn’t but as soon as I added milk and butter and yeast with a little sugar and salt to sifted flour life happened. So the temptation, the voice, said, “go to culinary school.” You enjoy this- and I had already started to branch out a bit and sift the cupboards for pots and pans and ingredients, why not? Is this not the very way Larry Darrow explored what was important in life?

It was close, but it didn’t happen. And I have to say, sometimes the temptations resisted are worth their weight in gold. This was a great road not taken. For it would have come clear to me in ways that would have been very painful that while I love to cook, it’s a solitary thing for me. Being in a kitchen is a place of solitude.

Having a number of friends who are chefs, now I know that being a chef is more of a team sport; its not like tennis or golf. They are one cook amongst many all working together. And, that, unfortunately, is not what I love about cooking and food.

A little wine, a little Sinatra, a Wustoff knife, a clove of garlic, a heavy wooden cutting board is a happy place. The sound of the chopped garlic hitting the olive oil just a bit more than warm and then add a few shallots and the world is spinning in greased grooves. Pounding a piece of pork until its almost veal-like and then frying it just enough that it continues to cook as it leaves the pan can soothe just about any problem, any injustice.

In May of this year I made an anti-pasta carbonara with petit peas and pepper bacon. It was tasty. It was tasty, but when it was coupled with a good pinot noir, it was a kind of euphoria. I love this part of cooking, this strange mix or convolution of life that makes all things joyful for just a moment. And when you look at its parts it shouldn’t add up to something sublime, when you think it is just a can of early peas it shouldn’t be so lovely, and when you consider that it is there for just a glance, a heartbeat it shouldn’t linger in my mind as it does. But it does.

I know it is because I enjoy this so much that I am mindful of food in literature and movies. Watch any movie, read any novel and at some point the author, the director will let the story drift around a table filled with food. The Grapes of Wrath for me isn’t about the emergence of unions on the West Coast following the depression so much as it is a kind of moving feast of drop biscuits and salt pork; Steinbeck’s stories of the Salinas Valley are as much a social commentary as they are a kind of list of his favorite foods and friends with whom he shared beer and wine. And perhaps some of the greatest movies are great simply because they are about food. Almost all great movies have a defining moment with food.

I could go on and on about the food in film and literature. But the place it really and truly surprised me and inspired me was not in film or in novels but the Bible. Literally you can’t go much farther than a chapter or two without food being mentioned, let alone being the focus. And nowhere is this more the case than the Exodus. The big stories are all about food. The Passover, a meal, manna, water from the rock, and the constant derision of Moses when the people grumbled was that all they wanted were the flesh pots of Egypt. It was about food.

The Garden of Eden comes down to forbidden fruit; Noah endures the ark and has a fabled faith wandering the earth proclaiming God’s judgment only to find the whole endeavor wrecked on a vineyard. Cain and Abel may just be a story of different diets. And when food is not a focus, it’s in the background, or it’s the context. Yet, nowhere is this more intriguing, more real and yet illusive than the Passover. It’s a meal, but it’s a metaphor about life and salvation; it’s a kind of beginning but also a kind of sustaining; its not really a great meal per se, but the attention to what shall be served and cooked and how it will be prepared is amazing given the factors surrounding it.

If you read some really elaborate recipes the Passover looks like a kind of warm and serve meal. But when you put it into context, the complexity, the details emerge. This is the last plague, the death of the first-born male. The Israelites were instructed to butcher a lamb and put some of its blood on their door posts and lentils so the avenging angel would not take their sons. This is, by the way, not a common part of most dishes in trendy cookbooks today.

It was one line though that really stood out: if the house is too small. Basically if a house only has a few people the idea of eating an entire lamb might sound farfetched or just plain impossible. So as God is preparing to bring a kind of unthinkable judgment upon the Egyptians he is giving dining directions to the Israelites based upon their house size. If the house is too small have them share with a neighbor. You can just see someone saying, a whole lamb! I can’t, we can’t. Alright, alright, share with a neighbor.

When you put this kind of attention, thoughtfulness, next to the impending doom of the final plague it just seems too much. Why would God being making dinner plans for one group while preparing to bring death to others? It is a troubling thought. This has really troubled, bothered and intrigued the Jewish commentators. For us this meal is a kind of forerunner for the communion meal; it is a kind of early model to be remembered but no longer used. Yet for Judaism, most of life is seen through this meal- the Seder. So the seeming contradiction is big and can’t be ignored.

When you spend time with the Passover story you step into a strange tension. It’s as if there are two pictures of God that are radically different, but in the same frame, on the same canvas. One picture is the God who loves us and cares for us. The meal is a kind of symbol about how their life would be marked with wandering and yet God would care for them along the way. They were to eat the meal with their shoes on (ready to go), but they were instructed to save nothing (as if the provision for each day would given anew).

That is one picture. The other picture is of God preparing to wipe out a whole lot of Egyptians. Granted they were a people whose greed and callousness and violence was sizable, yet they were about to be broken by a vengeance so bitter, so complete it seems unimaginable. The Egyptians were not going to be beat in battle; their warriors were not going to lose on the field and the people left to suffer. The Angel of death was just going to pass over the land and slay all first-born males from adults to infants and even the livestock.

That is a really different image from the God who is fusing over the way to cook lamb and who is invited to each house. It would be one thing if centuries later the Israelites conjured a meal to commemorate the flight from Egypt, a meal was made to say thanks, or to remember the power of God. But what Scripture has is not an afterthought, but God in the middle of both.

The easy answer here is that God is mysterious and who are we to try to discern the way God does things. It’s fair to say we believe God is a good multi-tasker. And it could be said that the coincidence is just that. It is God making a way of freedom for one people and at the same time, bringing wrath to another. We may not be able to bring such things together, but God can.

I know from cooking a fair amount of food that some things don’t always go with other things; that they are seen together doesn’t mean you need to put them in the same pot. Maybe they aren’t to be blended just because they are in the same story just like some foods should not go together just because they are in the same fridge. Maybe.

Or maybe, maybe this is not really a question of who God is, but a really clear picture of who we are. We are people who cannot seem to be free, to find freedom and liberty, without violence. Freedom comes with a cost and the currency is always blood. For some reason that is who we are. We try to forget this, live as if it can be other-that freedom can come with reason and law and committees, but then the bullets start to fly. And yet, and yet, this is not the only picture of us.

We are also this peace seeking, hungry for what is good creature. I don’t believe God made provision for the houses that were too small because he was worried about wasting too many Egyptian lambs; I believe he made provision for the smaller houses because it was who we are: we are this frugal, this concerned about food not being wasted; we are people who would unwittingly put ourselves in jeopardy because we didn’t want to waste so much food. Maybe what is so fascinating about the Passover is not the contrasting pictures of God, but the contrasting pictures of us.

Somehow working with us, saving us is about violence. Bringing salvation to the world is not a peaceful affair. Christ was not voted most likely to atone and then made the new Roman emperor in a bloodless coup. He was put to a violent death. And from this violence, from his sacrifice seems to come our salvation. And yet what does he do when seeks to make this clear, to instruct his disciples on the eve of his arrest? He makes them a simple meal. Did he do this because it was dinnertime or because if you want to make clear what life means to us, you feed us?

I truly do not want to pretend that I have navigated the Seder. Too many centuries of Rabbis have sailed these waters; I am just a deckhand on their ships. But it does seem to make sense. This is not about God so much as it is about what God is getting into if our salvation is going to happen. It is going to be violent and there will be food. It will require sacrifice, but it can’t just be about the fight; it has to be about life being good and blessed at the same time.

I am not sure why but the greatest comfort I take from this passage is that houses that are too small were directed to share a lamb. It just seems to be a very lovely act, a very kind thing to say. Maybe that’s enough to take from the Passover that in the midst of the violence necessary for freedom the simple needs of people were met. God, who is powerful, is ever patient enough to be kind. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe. Amen.