“Table Graces”
Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On November 24, 1999
Thanksgiving Eve
While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you.”
Matthew 26:26-27
In some ways, this service marks the beginning of the end of fall for me. Summer solstice and equinox to the side, I mark my seasons around the holidays, and there’s just not much of fall left after Thanksgiving. Certainly it is open season on Christmas beginning early Friday morning. So we are ending the season of fall with a wonderful feast and celebration.
For me personally, it’s been a great fall, in part because it began in such a wonderful way. My wife and I, in celebration of our twentieth wedding anniversary, went to Vermont where we stayed for two nights at a bed and breakfast. As part of the trip, we took a bike trip during the day in the beautiful leaves and colors of an iridescent day in Vermont. We stayed at a bed and breakfast that had been the studio of the famous American artist Norman Rockwell. It was actually the studio where Norman Rockwell had painted paintings. It was more like a converted barn, but it had a certain ambiance or mystique about it because we knew that Norman Rockwell had been there.
There were several of his paintings in the studio, but the one that hung right above the bed was a very famous painting that I’m sure many of you have seen. It’s a painting of a diner, and in this diner there is a grandmother who is sitting with her grandson at a table. Their heads are bowed in a very sincere and honest, a clear kind of expression of piety, asking of the blessing. And around them are the characters of the diner, a sailor and a construction worker and the chef behind the counter. In that moment they, seeing what the grandmother and her grandson are doing, have been paused in the ordinariness of their own life as they greet and recognize the sacredness of the moment that the grandmother and child are sharing. It’s a beautiful painting. It lifts up the sacred moment of the blessing.
It was a table blessing, which is of course why I read the text from Matthew this evening. Because it’s that place in the gospels where we remember that Jesus asked the blessing. The account from The Last Supper is quite clear. Jesus took bread, and after he had blessed it and given thanks for it (I think that’s the blessing) offered it to his disciples. One of the things that’s clear about Jesus Christ, if you read over his life, is that again and again he was about the practices, the regular disciplines, of living a life seeking to follow God. He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath (that looks like church-going to me). He read the scriptures and was enough of a reader of them that he was familiar with them and could quote them by memory. He asked the blessing before he engaged in a meal.
It is a small act of personal piety that in my own life has grown to be larger and larger in importance. Perhaps the most famous blessing is, “God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food.” But if you are like most families, you probably have some version of a blessing that is a particular tradition in your family. “Be present at our table, Lord. Be here and everywhere adored. Thy creatures bless and grant that we may strengthen for thy service be.”
Or this blessing from an Anglican monastery in Australia: “God of goodness, bless our food. Keep us in a cheerful mood. Bless the cook and all who serve us. From indigestion, Lord, preserve us.”
The individuality of blessings is part of the way that individuals express their own authentic piety towards God. If you have a blessing in your family system that is familiar to you and is one that you know by memory, then I’d count that to be a particular gift of the Holy Spirit to you. I remember the blessing that my father-in-law used every time he was asked to give the blessing, which was every time we ate at his table. “Come, O Lord, and be our guest. Make us thankful for these and all of your gifts. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.”
At Cedarkirk, of course, we used to sing a blessing to the tune of “Eidelweiss” until somebody threatened to sue them for using a tune that was copyrighted. (I thought that was a sad day. I sometimes still sing it there as a kind of individual act of defiance.) “Father we thank thee for the night and for the glorious morning light. For rest and food and loving care, and all that makes the world so fair.”
“Lord, some people have food and no friends; some people have friends and no food. We thank you that on this night we have both.”
I remember eating once with a group of friends, and the one who was asked to give the blessing prayed this way: “Bravo, Lord! Bravo!” And that is as sincere, I think, as some of the great blessings that come out of the Psalms.
“Evening has come, the board is spread. Thanks be to God who gives us bread.”
“For health and strength and daily food, we give you thanks, O Lord.”
I remember as a parent what a deep impression it made on me when I noticed that my children, at the family table, learned by imitation. They learned that as a family we put our hands together in a folded pattern, before they had any idea of what it was we were doing when we did that. Before they could say the words of the blessing, they knew that this motion was something that we, as a family circle, did together. At that point, I realized how effective the intentional raising of children in a Christian tradition is. What chance did they have of not coming to the faith when we so intentionally sought to impress on the tabula rossa of their minds the basic physiological patterns of piety.
“Our God is great. Our God is good, so let us thank God for our food. By God’s hands we all are fed. Please give us, Lord, our daily bread.” Is there any more universal sign of one’s Christian faith than the pattern of asking the blessing? The cross, perhaps. But certainly, in terms of words, across all of the Christian traditions, this act is common to all of us.
“Lord, we thank you for the day, for what we do and what we share. For this meal, this food we share, keep us in your loving care.”
Ed McCloud is a professor of Old Testament at Eton Theological Seminary. Dr. McCloud says, “The act of worship is critical in the Christian life because it is the way in which one reorients oneself again and again to the service of God. By coming to worship (which is what you are doing tonight, and it’s no small thing that you’re doing it on the eve of Thanksgiving), we bow not only our heads and our hands, but our entire lives,” says Dr. McCloud, “to the sovereignty of God.” As if to say, we belong, O Lord, to you. And if that’s true, then every time we ask the blessing, on perhaps a smaller scale at least timewise, if in no smallness of sincerity, we are charting our lives towards God and saying, “O Lord, we belong to you.”
Like most of you, I have gone through different times in my life when it seems awkward to me to ask the blessing in a public restaurant. I don’t mean to impute my practices or tendencies on you. God bless you as you seek to figure out how you ask your own blessings and when you ask them. But I found myself increasingly drawn to asking a blessing before every meal, no matter where I am. For myself, I find it increasingly to be a witness to my own Christian faith, and a reorientation of myself throughout the day that I belong to God. Am I willing, am I able, even to myself, to witness to this extent? To say, even quietly, before the public community, “I belong to God,” and I remember that as I turn to the meal.
“Love and peace to every heart. Come, Lord, be with us. Love and peace to every heart. Come, Lord, be with us. Love and peace to every heart. Come, Lord, be with us.”
“To those who hunger, give bread, O Lord. To those who have bread, give a hunger for justice.”
It seems increasingly significant to me that Jesus asked the blessing. It was one of the many acts of piety in his own life, where he not only publicly witnessed but where he modeled for himself and reminded himself that he belonged to God. And that he did it at the table, that he did it at that place where we remember how dependent our lives are on some regular sustenance and nurture, some regular sign that God cares for us and gives us bread. That was a sign not only of his divinity, his link with God, but his humanity. His vulnerability.
So, we stand on the eve of one of the great days for blessing all year long. I am hoping that someone will ask the blessing at your Thanksgiving feast tomorrow. “Bless this bunch as they munch at their lunch.” And I’m hoping that as the blessing is asked, you will take that opportunity in your own life to intentionally ask God to bless you and to give thanks for the blessings that are yours over the last year and that will belong to you in the future.
I’ve grown, myself, very connected to the intentionality of asking the Thanksgiving blessing. My children can attest to the fact that my Thanksgiving blessings keep getting longer and longer and longer. Perhaps that means the mashed potatoes get colder and colder and colder, but I’m going to stick with it, because it seems so right to me to take that opportunity to say to God, at the table where we are fed, “O God, we belong to you.” And this is a sign of it: We bow our heads and fold our hands.
This evening, on the eve of Thanksgiving, Jesus Christ invites us to gather around the family table. How do you know that you belong to Jesus Christ? The way you know you belong to any family – because of the family sense. Because of your knowledge of the family rituals and patterns. Because, as Robert Frost – another great person from Vermont – once said, “When you go there, it’s the kind of place where they have to take you in.” You know you’re a part of the family of Jesus Christ because here you are at the table of Jesus Christ as a part of God’s family. It is the right place to gather. It is the right place to offer up together our thanksgivings.
© John T. DeBevoise, 1999.
