Theology for Breakfast: Kitchen Reverential

My kitchen was my church during COVID; the Feb-Apr '21 issue of Forward Day by Day suggests how a healthy church should be like a kitchen.

Church is like a kitchen, writes Ellis Reyes Montes for a devotion in March. In the kitchen, his family makes meals, decisions, and stories that contain generations of memory. He writes that, in church,

We gather to remember the stories of faith: of Jesus, of the faithful figures in the Bible, of our congregation. We also gather to share communion, a spiritual meal that has been provided to us through tradition, prayer, and blessing. (Forward Day by Day March 7, 2021)

During COVID, the kitchen was where I taught my seventh grade classes and met both my Education for Ministry cohort and church Vestry. On Sundays, when Atlanta's Episcopal churches were closed, the laptop livestreamed services on the kitchen counter while I cleaned house. I paused to respond "Amen" and "also with you." While the priest prepared the bread and wine, I prepared my lunch. Now I still read Forward Day by Day at my kitchen table every morning with coffee, Bible, and prayer book, with Brandy curled up at my feet.

Articles that struck me reading Forward this past spring concerned worship that I can do alone in my kitchen; other articles in the same issue of Forward remind me why collective worship matters. Pieces for February were by Julie Bowers, special ed teacher in Tucson. Montes wrote for March from his experiences as musician, writer, and lifelong Episcopalian in Houston. Fr. Scott Gunn, Executive Director of Forward, wrote pieces for April.

Alone in the Kitchen "Trust is like a muscle" that can be strengthened with exercise, writes Bowers. Elsewhere she quotes novelist-theologian Frederick Buechner's observation that you shall love the Lord with all your heart eventually becomes "less a command than a promise." I hope so.

Montes, a gardener, sees more than I've seen in Psalm 72.6, "God is like rain." Rain does more good than watering plants, as by "[turning] debris into fertilizer, signaling the seeds to germinate, and encouraging fungi to help with the growing process." Humid air nourishes the plants under the eaves of a roof. "Even when we build barriers," Montes concludes, "God breaks them down and showers us with blessings."

Gunn points out that Satan can't wedge himself between Jesus and God because Jesus had armed himself with Scripture, as I do every day at the kitchen table.

With the Church Gunn hears people say they don't need "organized religion" because they can "find God in a sunset." Why isn't that good enough? Gunn's first answer is that Jesus and his followers do spend a great deal of time going to the synagogue. Gunn admits that he sometimes doesn't feel like going, but "I never regret going to church." I agree. Just this past weekend, the weather forecast gave me good reason to skip church, but I re-arranged my plans to attend anyway. It did me good, and I did a few other people good by being there. Gunn's bottom line is, "We Christians need each other, and we need to hear the message proclaimed."

Montes admits feeling vulnerable at church, being young, Latino, and gay. But he notes how Jesus doesn't dwell on points of difference when he speaks with the woman at the well -- female, foreigner, adulterer. Church should be like that, Montes writes. With his kitchen analogy, he concludes, "At its core, the house of God is where we strengthen our faith."

About being with others in the kitchen, Frederick Buechner wrote

I sometimes think that all the major dramas of my life have taken place in kitchens, and maybe that's because in kitchens there's always something else to fall back on if the going gets tough, like cooking or eating or doing the dishes. And maybe that's the real drama after all -- just keeping yourself alive day after day and cleaning up afterwards. (Buechner. The Book of Bebb. New York: Atheneum, 1984. P. 363.)

Gunn shares a couple of stories about dramas in church. He regrets a vicious letter he once wrote to a church leader:

I wrote ...thinking I was bearing light, holding up some imagined standard. In fact, I was still in darkness. Thanks be to God that Jesus loves us even when we're jerks. And thanks be to God that the leader to whom I wrote was in the light and ready to share it. (April 13, 2021)

In another church, Gunn became aware after a few months had passed that one of the parishioners had once committed "a fairly horrible crime." Asked about how the church accepted this person, another parishioner echoed Jesus in Luke 5.32, asking Gunn who could need church more than they do?

Bowers remembers a mother whose grown son died of a drug overdose. For the funeral, the mother displayed photos of her son in the narthex of the church where attendees would see them on the way into the service: "sweet, swaddled infant, beaming toddler on daddy's shoulders, joyful sports team member, proud high school graduate" (Feb. 2, 2021). Like photos stuck on the kitchen refrigerator, these memories reminded everyone that her son's story was more than its sad ending.

I'm reminded of funerals that started or ended with gatherings in the kitchen. A funeral for my young student Chris ended in his parents' kitchen with trays of food for guests who celebrated the young man's memory. Then I remember when my cousin had succumbed to AIDS, how we all waited with Aunt Blanche in the kitchen while the cars lined up for the drive to the cemetery. All dressed up in black, coffee and snacks on hand, my cousins, their children, and two grandmothers stood or sat watching The Price is Right. The millionaire grandmother yelled at the screen, "I could get that twenty percent cheaper!" We all laughed; then it was time, and the tears started.

Do kitchens show up in Scripture? Mama's boy Jacob mixes stew in the kitchen while his brother Esau outdoors works up an appetite; a poor widow makes miraculous bread for the prophet Elijah; Martha is in the kitchen complaining while Mary attends to Jesus in the next room; the apostles holed in an upper room broil some fish for the resurrected Jesus. That's not a lot of kitchen in scripture, but the idea of church as a place of nourishment, shared activity, and learning to work through the dramas -- that's something to remember.

[Read more about theologian Frederick Buechner's fantastic, insightful, inspiring, and funny novels about the Reverend Leo Bebb in my blogpost Comedy, Fairy Tale, Tragedy: My Favorite Fiction (01/2010)]

[See my page Theology for Breakfast for several years' reflections on outstanding ideas in Forward Day by Day.]