“Life at the Table: Whatever Happened to Family Meals?”
Exodus 13:3-10; Acts 2:41-47
Brian R. Keepers
Fellowship Reformed Church
September 16, 2007
Begin with clip from movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Freeze frame on Steve Martin’s face, hair disheveled, face plastered with egg from the mess of breakfast, looking down in exasperation.
That face says it all, doesn’t it? Exasperation. Exhaustion. Overwhelmed. Do you know this face? Sure, the clip we just saw from the movie Cheaper by the Dozen is a bit over-the-top for comical effect. The scary thing is that it may not be much over-the-top when it comes to the frazzled activity of our own families. We may not have twelve mouths to feed (Thank you, God!), but it can feel chaotic enough trying to manage our busy lives where everyone is flying around in different directions. When does is slow down? At what point do we finally get to catch our breath before we collapse?
In his book Making Room for Life, Randy Frazee puts it this way:
“Simply put, many of us have squeezed living out of life. We don’t have the time to soak in life and deep friendships. We’re always running around trying to get to the next event. This presents at least two major problems. First, our busy lives stimulate a toxic disease called crowded loneliness. But there’s an even deeper problem. In our original design we were created with a connection requirement. If this requirement is not met, we will die.”
We were never intended to live lonely, isolated lives. God created us for community--with what Randy Frazee calls a connection requirement. Our souls hunger and thirst for connection. Connection with God. Connection with others. But our busyness and hurried pace keep us feeling disconnected. Even with all the people we come into contact with, and all the activities we’re involved in, we feel isolated and lonely. Crowded loneliness.
A recent Gallop poll reveals that Americans are among the loneliest and most isolated people in the whole world. So what do we do about it? Can we do anything about it? Or do we just keep going along with the status quo even though it is killing us and killing our relationships? If we’ve been created by God with a connection requirement, how can we go about getting that requirement met so that we can live—and I mean really live?
This is where food comes in. I am suggesting, and I believe the Bible supports this, that the ordinary act of eating together is a powerful means by which we can connect with God and each other more deeply. We need to recover a theology of the table for everyday life. It is at the table, when we receive and share the gift of food, that we are reminded of how much we need each other, and even more importantly, how much we need God.
I want to focus this morning on family meals. I believe that among the most significant things you can do as a family to connect with each other is to make the time to eat together. We’ve all heard the cliché that “the family that prays together stays together.” But maybe it’s more accurate to say “the family that eats together stays together.”
But before we jump into this, I need to say a couple things. While many of us have fond memories of family meals, and the notion of “family” itself is positive for us, I realize that there are others of us for whom “family” conjures up negative feelings. Family meals were not, or are not now, times of pleasant connection but instead times of tension and conflict and pain. If that is true for you, my hope is that God will redeem the notion of family for you throughout this series. I pray that God will begin to lead you down the path of healing and help you imagine a new way of “being family” that is more reflective of what God has always intended.
I am also aware of how often our culture, and the culture of West Michigan in particular, focuses so much on the nuclear family it can forget that there are those of us who are single and may not have family around. Even coming to church can feel lonely and like you’re an outsider. The Bible teaches us that, in Christ, the boundaries of family are now extended beyond the nuclear family so that we, together as a congregation, are members of God’s family--brothers and sisters in Christ. If you’re thinking, “Oh great, another “family” sermon that is irrelevant to me,” don’t tune me out. This sermon is for all of us. A lot of what we will talk about this morning is applicable to experiencing deeper connection with brothers and sisters in Christ and not just the nuclear family.
So let’s talk about eating together as families. There was a time, and many of you who are part of older generations can remember this, when family meals were a staple of society. A given. I grew up in a small rural town that still had a town “whistle” that would blow at 6:00 p.m. to announce to everyone it was time to go home and have supper.
But not any more. Times have changed. In her excellent book The Surprising Power of Family Meals, Miriam Weinstein makes this sober observation:
“’Family time’ is no longer privileged by society. The world around us is saying, Hey, if you want to count on having regular time together, sorry—you’re on your own. We’ll give you a couple holidays a year, but anything more than that, and you’re bucking the trend. As recently as a generation ago in our culture, family time was sacred time, untouchable. Now we suffer from what social scientists call a ‘time famine.” (p. 20).
How true, isn’t it? We do suffer from a time famine. “There’s just not enough time!” we protest. I mean really, with the pressures of work and evenings crammed with kids’ activities, we just don’t have time to sit down and eat together! It’s more convenient to go through the “drive thru” and eat in the minivan!
In the 1980’s, a mentality for parenting emerged that is still pervasive today. Here’s how it goes. The specialists were saying, “The best thing you can do for your children is get them involved in extracurricular activities. It will be beneficial for them in numerous ways. It will get them off the streets and take care of their idle time. It will build their self-esteem and confidence and make them happier.”
And so we feel the pressure to get our children involved in all sorts of extracurricular activities like baseball and soccer and tumbling and music lessons as early as possible. This way they can learn the skills they need at an early age and all along the way we can have the opportunity to give them trophies and awards even if their team doesn’t win at the end of the year because this model of parenting is all about “building the self-esteem of your child.”
And…if we can give them these experiences at a young age, and they can get really good at it, there’s a better chance that when they get to high school, by that point they’ll have been at it long enough they’ll get a starting position on the team. It’s not just sports that we do this with, but let’s face it, sports is one of the biggest idolatries in our culture.
We buy this line of thinking “hook-line-and-sinker.” And so when our lives become so hectic with kid’s activities, we tell ourselves, “This is going to be really good for them in the long run!” Or we justify, “Okay, this is too much, but it’s just for now. This is just the season of life. At some point, things will slow down!” But they don’t. They don’t slow down.
This model of parenting—getting kids involved in as many extracurricular activities as possible—is severely flawed. And all the latest research, coming from multiple fields of discipline, is telling us that the secret to strong, connected families and healthy, confident children is not more activities. Rather, it is less activities pulling us apart in separate directions and more time together. And most specifically, more time together around the table.
Here’s what the latest research says. Children who experience daily family meals are healthier physically. They have less problems with their weight. Why? Because when you sit around the family table, you typically don’t sit around eating Big Macs and Taco Bell burritos. You only do that in the minivan! We eat healthier when we have family meals. Not only that, but when we take time to slow down and interact with each other around the table, our eating isn’t rushed. We eat slower, which allows our brains to catch up with our stomachs to tell us we’re full so we don’t over-eat.
These studies also reveal that children who have a daily table experience with their family get better grades. They are twice as likely to get A’s in school. They are happier emotionally. They are half as likely to be highly stressed as those kids who don’t have the experience of regular family meals. And by the way, it’s stressed kids who are most likely to smoke and use drugs. These studies show that children who have a daily table experience are less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, and use drugs. Why?
There are many reasons, and if you’re interested in exploring them in greater depth, I recommend to you Miriam Weinstein’s book The Surprising Power of Family Meals. I believe at the heart of it is because most kids turn to addictive behaviors because of social pressure to belong. And they are so yearning for a sense of belonging. As Randy Frazee says, “the desire to belong is stronger than the desire to live.” If we give our children a regular experience at the family table, they find a sense of identity and belonging as part of the family. They don’t have to go searching for a place to belong elsewhere.
Last Sunday we talked about the Passover Meal—the meal that was and still is at the center of the Hebrew faith. The Passover Meal was the annual feast that the Jewish families celebrated in order to tell the story, through eating together, of how God rescued their ancestors. God “passed over” the first born of the Israelites on the night the angel of death took the lives of all Egypt’s firstborn, and then God delivered his people from Egyptian slavery to a life of freedom.
Listen to these words God gave Moses to instruct the Israelites:
“Moses said to the people, “Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, because the Lord brought you out from there by the strength of his hand; not leavened bread shall be eaten….You shall tell your child on that day, “It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.” It shall serve for you as a sign on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead, so that the teaching of the LORD may be on your lips; for with a strong hand the LORD brought you out of Egypt. You shall keep this ordinance at its proper time from year to year.” (Exodus 13:3-10; select verses).
So when they gathered at the table for the Passover, it was not just about eating. It was about conversing. Telling the story. The story-telling connected them to each other and to a larger story of salvation that was bigger than just themselves.
The Lord’s Supper is for us as Christians what the Passover Meal was and is for Jewish families. It is where we tell the story of salvation. It is where we are connected to God and each other and story that is much bigger than ourselves.
The Passover Meal made all meals for the Hebrews sacred. They remembered God in their everyday eating, as well as who they were in relation to God and what they are here for. We started off this series last Sunday with the Lord’s Supper because I want you to see how this holy supper, where we are fed by Jesus’ presence, connects with our daily eating. When we learn to see Jesus in the Eucharist, then our eyes are being trained to see Christ’s presence in all our eating. For where two are three are gathered in my name, says Jesus, I am in their midst.
I like these words by William Willimon:
“The family dinner table becomes a place of divine-human meeting. The family meal becomes a kind of sacrament. We remind ourselves that God meets us in everyday life in such ordinary ways—ordinary bread, ordinary wine, ordinary people, ordinary conversation.”
So at the table we talk. And if we’re going to connect through conversation, if we’re going to tell stories, we need time. This cannot happen by pulling through the drive-thru or eating on the run. The Latin word for banquet or feast is convivium, which says it so much better than our English equivalent. Convivium means to eat and drink “with life.” It is to share life with each other, delighting in one another’s company. Convivium is less about what’s on the table and more about who’s in the seats. If we’re going to really share life together at the table, it just can’t be rushed.
Let’s make this practical. What might this look like? Let me share with you a model offered by Randy Frazee that is very simple, and we’ve adopted it in our own family. Once the table has been set, and all the food is on the table, we pray. And we don’t ask God to bless the food—we bless God for the food! The food doesn’t need to be blessed, it is already blessed as a gift from God. Maybe this last week you even tried the table practice we gave you of praying with your eyes open and taking notice of the colors and smells of the food. We begin with a prayer of blessing because it is our way of acknowledging that this food is a gift from God.
Then we go around the table as ask each member to share their day. Everyone takes a turn. Now I’ll be the first to admit how challenging this can be, especially with a four-year-old who has a hard time sitting still! But we do it because Emma is learning how to tell her story and also listen to others tell their story. It may be mundane events that we share, but its part of the story of our day.
And here’s why this is so important: because when we take time to interact around the table, we have the privilege of watching a page turn in our child’s life. And as time unfolds, at the table, we realize that we, as parents, are characters in our children’s stories. Every single person desires to have a place at a table where they can share their story with a group of people who love them and hang on every word they say (Frazee). And this is something not only our kids hunger for. Let’s face it, as adults we hunger as well. I love hearing my daughter ask, “Dad, what did you to today?” And I love having the opportunity to share it with her. Often, we’ll end by asking something like “What was the best part of your day?” And “What was the hardest part of your day?”
Then we end with the Festival of Cleaning Up! Everyone helps! This, too, is part of what it means to eat together.
What if we, as followers of Christ, had the courage to “buck the trend?” What if, rather than just going along with the strong current of busyness and overcrowded schedules, we set out to reclaim family meals together?
Maybe a good place to start is just to schedule one meal together this next week. That will be challenging enough, I know! But if family meals really are going to strengthen our families and nurture the deeper connection we long for, the research says we need to make this a new habit, a new ritual. We must carve out time for it because we see it as that valuable! Research says that for those children who were happier and healthier because of family meals, it happened because their families ate together at least five times a week.
You may say that sounds realistic. I understand. I think the same thing myself. But what if we used the same tenacity it takes to get our kids to the baseball field and soccer field and tumbling class (which is like 5 times a week), and put that into bringing our family to the table? You don’t have to give up all activities. But it is a matter of adjusting your schedule so that extra-curricular activities fit into your life at the table and not the other way around. I believe you will feel better yourself because this is a better rhythm—a God-given rhythm. You will connect more deeply as a family. And I promise you, even if your kids resist initially, they will thank you for it later. In fact, at the end of this summer the shocking results of a poll came out that was conducted by the Associate Press and MTV, asking 1,280 young people between the ages of 13-24 “What makes you happy?” The number one answer: spending time with family. The family table is the ideal place to spend more time together as a family.
We’ve been talking mainly about the nuclear family today. But the significance of eating together goes beyond just the nuclear family—it extends to the whole body of Christ. The way that we nurture connection with each other, as brothers and sisters in Christ, is through sharing a meal and telling our stories. One of the hallmarks of the early church is that they broke bread together regularly—on a daily basis, in fact! Listen to what Luke writes in the book of Acts. This is right on the heels of Pentecost, when the early church was born:
“Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:46-47).
I would urge you, as a family, to open your circle to include others to join you for meals. And for those of us who may be single or who don’t have family around, what if you took the initiative to invite others for a meal? Aaron Clark, our new Young Life Partner, just told me this past week that after worship on Sunday, that evening he and his college roommates had dinner together and, in the midst of their own busy schedules, took the time to do life together over good food.
That’s what it’s about. Convivium. Doing life together. At what better place to do life together than at the table, where we are reminded that Jesus is the bread of life, the one who offers us what is truly the “good life.”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
