Funerals and Food ~ Part One

The April-May 2017 issue of Liturgy focuses on Liturgy and Food Culture, guest-edited by Jennifer Ayres. Benjamin Stewart writes about the relationship between the funeral liturgy and the liturgy of the funeral meal, recounting scriptural references to food imagery in its connection with death and life and urging our churches to encourage meals as vital to the funeral remembrance. 

Christian funerals in North America have long been associated with food. A number of practices have been relatively widespread: food carried to the bereaved by fellow members of a congregation; the funeral communion rite; a post-funeral meal; and food traditions at the grave, including food offerings for the dead and yearly meal-sharing among the living. While its symbolism is complex and multivalent, food has proclaimed the power of life in the face of death, including through the sharing of food across the boundary of death. 

 Today, however, many of the food practices associated with Christian funerals are disappearing in dominant North American cultures. What is lost as these food practices wane? Especially given the trends toward delayed memorial services, declining communal participation in returning the dead to the earth, and replacing bodies with images on screens as the chief representation of the deceased, does the disappearance of long-standing food practices at death contribute to a larger trend in which communal, ritual engagement with embodied, earthly, mortality is receding, replaced by the ethereal and the virtual? . . . 

Prof. Stewart links food with faith in many ways throughout his essay beginning with the references in scripture to food as a metaphor.

Food may help us in the face of death to taste and see the goodness of God, and to know it as the land of the living. . . . 

 In the Gospel of John, Jesus describes his death as a single food grain dying in the earth to bear much more food. . . John represents Jesus’ death as that of a lamb slaughtered for the Passover meal: the first sighting of the earthly Jesus is announced by John the Baptist, “Behold the lamb of God.” 

 Jesus’ death in John occurs at the time of the slaughter of the lambs, and a branch of hyssop—used to sprinkle the blood of sacrificial lambs—is used to offer Jesus a drink of wine as he dies.  

 Paul reminded the community at Corinth that their eating and drinking is ongoing engagement with death: “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Paul suggests that trying to separate the Christian meal from the suffering and death of the body leads not to suffering-free life but rather, in a mystical reversal, to illness and death. 

 The understanding of Christians as themselves “body of Christ” extended to striking images of food offerings in some accounts of martyrdom. Ignatius of Antioch described himself as “God’s wheat … ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread of Christ.” Polycarp, burned to death in a martyrdom remembered in Eucharistic terms, was said in his death to have the golden appearance of baking bread. 

 With the study of ancient Christian catacomb art. . . it was commonly taught that Christians pragmatically used the catacombs as a hiding place to carry out secret Eucharistic gatherings during persecutions. . . . While, as we will see below, the practice sometimes drew stern rebukes from church authorities, eating food among the tombs seems to have left lasting influences on Christian practice. 

Further remarks about this important window into Christian witness will be offered on March 24. Check back!

Benjamin M. Stewart is the Gordon A. Braatz associate professor of worship and director of advanced studies at the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago.

Benjamin M. Stewart, “Food and Funerals: Why Meals Matter for Christian Mortality and How We Might Respond Gustatorily to Changing Death Practices,” Liturgy 32, no. 2 (2017): 52-61.

Time for the Table of Our Common Pleasure

Rebecca F. Spurrier contributed to the issue of Liturgy 31, no. 3, on “The Lord’s Table in a Changing World” by describing Holy Family, a church in which she served as an intern. She was advised to enter into the lives of the congregation – which was made up of people with mental illnesses and other disabilities – by “loitering with intent” to learn the rhythms of the community’s members.

In a many-layered essay, Spurrier makes challenging observations about the importance of a church home for people whose way of entering into that community may not seem at all familiar to many.

The majority of Holy Family congregants are unemployed and, therefore, have time to spend with one another throughout the week. In addition to Sunday and Wednesday services, congregants gather for arts, gardening, yoga, bingo, health clinics, and socializing on Tuesdays and Thursdays as part of Friendship Circle programs. At the center of a weeklong liturgy is the remembrance and anticipation of shared meals. Many of those who come to Holy Family eat together six or seven times a week. 

When I describe writing about this parish for those outside the congregation, a congregant declares to me: “Tell people we’re good people. We love the Lord, and we eat all the time. Three times a day!” Outside of mealtimes, congregants recall the tastes of breakfast foods, discuss the lunch menu, conjure up meals eaten together at group homes, or remember childhood meals. 

When I ask. . . members why they come to the church, they often talk about “something to do.” The irony to newcomers from outside of a group home system is that some of those who come to do something apparently do nothing. They sit side by side with other silent community members. They listen to others sing, watch others play bingo, and wait eagerly for meals to be given. They work with time in a different way than those of us who mark time through a series of accomplishments. . . . 

Spurrier especially invites us to imagine the communion meal as a vehicle through which God, in sensate ways, becomes tangible goodness. It is a call to open our hearts to a new way of seeing the foretaste of the feast to come and the time it takes to savor it.

Even within a congregation like Holy Family––which expressly desires mental difference to be at the heart of its Eucharistic celebrations––there is a danger of . . . [wanting to] transform those who gather rather than inviting the experiences of disability to transform theological symbols and body practices. It is, for example, possible for wealthier members, volunteers, and visitors to serve meals and celebrate communion with those whose lives are different from their own and yet regard these persons as objects of pity, charity, or sentimentality. It is more difficult to envision all congregants as theological subjects whose own imagination and forms of gathering bespeak and enact God’s dream for the world. What might it mean, then, to pay attention to Holy Family not as a symbol of a future feast but as an experience of what it feels like to gather difference at a common table?. . . . 

If I imagine a time when everyone at Holy Family has access to the means to live, it begins with those who gather scattering out into one another’s lives across the divisions of ability, wealth, race, and security, to share the desires and aesthetics of many common tables. . . . As those who gather are sent into the world “to love and to serve” in a city where some congregants’ lives are of very little public worth, the pleasures of being fed well in a home of one’s own must be distributed; everyone who has access to a communion table also deserves access to what they need for the life anticipated by that table.

Rebecca F. Spurrier is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Rebecca F. Spurrier, “Disabling Eschatology: Time for the Table of Our Common Pleasure,” Liturgy 31, no. 3 (2016), 28-36.