SPAM

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

March 29, 2020

5 Lent A

          When my siblings and I cleaned out our father’s house after his death, one of the surprising things we found in his pantry was a supply of SPAM. If you have never heard of spam-the edible kind, not what winds up in our inboxes- you are lucky.  SPAM was invented during WWII as a way to make rationed meat stretch further. SPAM stood for Special Processed American Meat.  That’s pretty much what SPAM tastes like, too.  If you google SPAM today, you will find that the company that makes the product says the word stands for Sizzle Pork and Mmmmm.  I have my doubts.

          Why would this man, who enjoyed good whiskey and fine cuts of beef, have multiple cans of SPAM in his pantry?

          Dad was born in 1933, so he was raised during the Great Depression and WWII.  He had lots of stories about rationing, black outs, creative meals, and the fear of being bombed since they lived in Queens, a borough of New York City.  He also had stories about the normalcy of life during that time-being a cub scout, playing with his friends, tormenting his older brother, getting in trouble, and taking the train to the Worlds Fair in Queens in 1939 and 1940.  The stories were a combination of hardship and normalcy and included references to SPAM among other creative culinary concoctions.

          I have been thinking a lot about those stories this week as we have lived into our new, if temporary, reality and wondered what our new normal might be.  I think we reach back for stories we know and experiences people have had in generations past to ground us in the present and give us hope.  We look for the ways they survived those challenges, thinking that, if we do the same, things will turn out okay for us, too. 

          The Hebrew people were no different.  Over and over again, when the people found themselves in a disastrous situation, whether in exile in Babylon, or trying to rebuild in Jerusalem, or in countless other  horrendous situations in post-Biblical times, the people remembered all that God had done for them in the past.  Primarily and fundamentally, they remembered the way God led them out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and into the Promised Land.  In the psalm this morning, we hear the cry of despair “Out of the depths, have I called to you, O Lord; Lord hear my voice.”  The despair of the psalmist moves to hope as the psalmist remembers what God has done for the people: “O Israel, wait for the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy.”  How does the psalmist know this?  Because the psalmist knows that God has shown great mercy in the past and trusts that God will do likewise in the present.

          I find myself doing the same thing this morning.  I hear the story of Ezekiel and the dry bones.  I see all of the metaphorical dry bones around us as we cope with a virus we can only control by staying home and I want God to come in a put us back together just the way God put the bones of Israel back together.  Right now.  I hear the story of Lazarus where Jesus says “Lazarus, come out!” And Lazarus, dead and in the tomb for four days, comes out!  Okay, Jesus, we are waiting.  Can you not do for us what you did for Lazarus?  I confess to no small measure of impatience here.

          One of my favorite passages of Scripture, which will no doubt show up in a daily reflection before long, is from Isaiah 43.  The chapter begins with another favorite passage of mine “Do not fear for I have redeemed you.  I have called you by name, you are mine.”  But later in the chapter, God says “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth.  Do you not perceive it?” 

          Why would God tell us not to remember the former things, when our faith is rooted in the stories of those former things, whether the escape of the Hebrew people, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, or the centuries of stories in between?

          I think God is telling us not to hold onto those stories as if those are the only ways God acted and acts in human history.  God is always doing something new.  Stories about the ways God acted in the past, whether bringing back together the dry bones of Israel, or calling a dead Lazarus from the tomb, give us comfort because they promise us that God will act again.  The stories call us to watch for the amazing and sometimes mind blowing ways God is acting now and to tell those stories, so that future generations will have our stories along with the stories of scripture to bring them hope and comfort that God will act in their lives.  Those stories call us to allow God to act through us with God’s creativity and mercy so we can be part of the way God brings hope into the present.  The stories of Scripture do not call us to sit back and wait for God to do again what God did in the past, but to actively watch for the unique way God will act now.

          I think my dad kept SPAM in the pantry because that food reminded him of a hard time, a globally hard time, when people banded together and got through with a combination of grit, humor, and determination.  He was not a religious man, but in the lonely years after my mother died, perhaps those cans of SPAM connected him to a former challenging time that his family and the world eventually came through.  As people of faith, we have the stories of scripture and the stories of our own lives as God’s promise to us that God is acting in new ways to bring life abundant into this challenging and frightening time.

                                                                   Amen.