Easter 3

You’re on the way home from the office, tired and stressed. You’re hungry, but you know that the refrigerator at home is as empty as your stomach.

So you stop at the grocery store or the Kwikee-Mart. You pull up, run inside and grab some fresh panini, a three-cheese pesto and double espressos, and take off for home.

You’re part of a swelling demographic group of Americans who dislike fast food, but don’t have time to cook up an elaborate home meal. You’ve discovered the joy of not cooking and are snapping up what the food industry calls HMRs, Home-Meal Replacements, a growing multi-billion dollar a year phenomenon.

Grocery stores are morphing into takeout catering services where you can pick up chicken cordon bleu or Chinese sweet and sour pork. And if you don’t want to go to the store yourself, you just call it in with uber eats or door dash.

Cooking in the kitchen nowadays is a hobby, not a duty. We love eating at home; we just want someone else to do the cooking. That’s what HMRs are all about.

When and how did all of this get started? Back in 1879, Heinz produced the first bottle of catsup and marketed it with an ad that said: “For the blessed relief of mother and other women of the household.” In 1953, just a year before the first Golden Arches went up, a Swanson food dietician named Betty Cronin created the ‘TV dinner.’ This was at a time when meals took on average two hours to prepare. TV dinners hit the shelves with the promise of providing relief to mothers “burdened with baby-boom offspring.” What once took two hours, now has been “shrink-wrapped to a tidy 15 minutes.”

Some of us are old enough to remember those heady days.  I, for one, loved Swanson TV dinners, with fond memories of fried chicken, Salisbury steak, and apple cobbler.

You think you want to spend two hours getting supper ready? I don’t think so! We don’t want to take time for dinner, but there’s a lot we miss when we skip supper. What do you think the disciples walking the Emmaus road were thinking about that late afternoon? They were discussing the phenomenal events of the past few days in Jerusalem, but when Jesus was about to leave them, there is no doubt that dinner was on their minds, and they wanted Jesus to share it with them.

It was when they were eating with Jesus that these disciples realized who they were snacking with.

Jesus didn’t appear to these two at the empty tomb, or in the temple, or on a mountain peak, but at a spiritual gas station, a refueling place: a home-cooked meal. He came as a companion, which literally means “with bread.” Jesus is someone who comes to us with bread, with a home-meal replacement.

Meals are important. Jesus still visits us at mealtime, often through the friends, family and strangers we entertain there.

Christ is found in our companions, the ones we eat bread with, and the dinner table is the Lord’s everyday cathedral. It is in the saying of table blessings and the breaking of bread with one another that a meal with Jesus is celebrated, and his resurrected presence is experienced.

We don’t know for sure where the biblical Emmaus was located, so we can say that Emmaus is anywhere that Christian people gather for table fellowship. Emmaus can be here, or there, or anywhere, because Jesus will travel wherever his followers are going, and will appear wherever they break bread.

What do you really miss when you skip supper? Not just good cooking, but a great chance to encounter the resurrected Lord.

Like charity, communion begins at home. “The eat-in kitchen is a place of both nourishment and devotion,” writes Leigh Schmidt of Princeton University; “food and family are blessed together through the common ritual of table graces.”

Have you seen this little poem in someone’s kitchen, shellacked on a decorative piece of wood?

Christ is the Head of this house,

The unseen Guest at every meal,

The silent Listener in every conversation.

Like the first disciples, we can eat and drink with joy because our bridegroom is with us.

The Bible makes abundantly clear that Jesus loved to eat and drink.

• He enjoyed the wedding feast at Cana.

• He fed the 5,000 with just a few loaves and fishes.

• He ate with tax collectors and sinners and sat at table with his disciples.

• He spent some of his final hours eating with his disciples. We call it the Last Supper.

• Revelation refers not just to the marriage of the Lamb, but the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Yes, the resurrected Lord is “The unseen Guest at every meal,” offering us his peace and his guidance if we will only acknowledge his presence. The challenge for us is to slow down enough to make a connection with Christ, and with one another.

We can do this by scheduling a meal that we can consistently enjoy together, whether it is breakfast or supper.

We can do it by resisting the lure of fast food and taking the time to enjoy some slow food; food that is not prepackaged in individual servings, but comes from a common platter or bowl, and served to a group that is sitting down together.

We can do this by taking the time we need to actually eat a meal, not jam food in our mouths as we run by the table on our way to baseball practice, dance lessons, meetings and appointments. To eat and drink with joy, and feel the presence of Jesus, we can make our family meals a kind of wedding reception for the bridegroom – not fancy, but well-planned, well-served and well-paced.

It is, of course, a fact of postmodern life that schedules conflict and some meals must be skipped. Activities run through the dinner hour, family members run in different directions, and food must be wolfed down on the run.

But there is a cost to this frenetic pace, one that is often forgotten as people dash from one event to another: When we skip a meal with each other, we’re skipping a meal with Jesus. When we dash away from the table, we’re dashing away from the presence of Christ and his fellowship with our companions.

The questions that we should always be asking ourselves as we race wildly from place to place are these:

• Is this next activity more important than the nourishment that comes from breaking bread together?

• Is this event more valuable than the guidance I might receive from conversation over dinner?

• Is this schedule making me feel more at peace with myself and others?

Unless you can answer “yes” to these questions, you would do well to find a way to spend more time at the table with Jesus.

The apostle Paul says, “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).

Whatever you do … at the dinner table, on the road, at work, on the soccer field … do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus. Plan your day in such a way that Christ is always your companion, and in such a way that you can find him in the people you eat bread with.