Sermon for Sunday, February 8, 2026 || Epiphany 5A || Matthew 5:13-20
The last several sermons I’ve preached have dealt either directly or indirectly with the current issues affecting our country. I’ve talked about following Christ through truth-telling, community-building, and justice-seeking as we join others in standing against state-sponsored violence and fearmongering. While these issues are still present in the forefront of our minds, I’m not going to talk about them directly today. Rather, I’m going to talk about something foundational to our lives of faith that supports our daily following of Jesus as we work for truth, community, and justice.
Today we’re going to talk about something very simple: saying grace at dinner. This topic has been on my mind recently for three reasons. First, I’ve been aware of how much reacting we are all doing right now. We’re all playing defense against a swift-moving offense of violent action and rhetoric. Recentering ourselves through a simple practice like saying grace can help us find our footing. Second, saying grace is one of the ways to be salt and light in this world. It is a visible, though not ostentatious, participation in the presence of God. And third, last Monday my daughter literally asked me to talk about saying grace at meals, and she agreed it would be a good sermon topic.
Here is the grace we say at our house. “Thank you, God, for food and family, and keep us ever-mindful of and responsive to the needs and rights of others. Amen.”
This grace has evolved over the years as the twins have gotten older. When they were very young, we said, “Thank you, God. Amen.” Around first or second grade, we added a bit so the grace became, “Thank you, God, for food and family. Amen.” Then around fourth grade, we added the last phrase: “And keep us ever-mindful of and responsive to the needs and rights of others. Amen.” I’m going to spend the rest of this sermon talking through each of these versions of our grace.
Thank you, God. This was the original and simplest version of our meal-time grace. It consists of exactly two elements: a salutation and an expression of gratitude. We begin the grace by addressing the One who makes and sustains all things, the foundation of our being. We call this One “God,” which is a word created long ago to express the inexpressible. By applying the word “God” to our Creative Source, we are able to participate, even in our necessarily limited human way, in the Life, Love, and Spirit of the One who calls us into being.
If you think about it for a few minutes, you begin to realize just how silly it seems to cry out to the Maker of All There Is when we are simply getting ready to eat a humble meal. But if you think about it a few minutes more, nothing seems more natural than to acknowledge the Source of our sustenance when we are about to fill ourselves with nourishment. And we acknowledge this Source with two of the most beautiful words in our language: “thank you.”
No matter what we are eating, we express our gratitude to God for the meal – and by extension for all the other blessings of our lives. In our house we condense these blessings into the two words “food” and “family.” These two words stand in for much larger concepts. We give thanks for “food” as a way of thanking God for all that sustains us in our lives: physical nourishment, mental stimulation, emotional support, and spiritual depth. All the things that fall under the category “food” keep us alive. Then we give thanks to God for the things that we are alive for. “Family” stands in for all the relationships that we have, the reasons we are alive. These relationships are gifts from God, same as our sustenance, and we give thanks to God for both.
Then we pray the final phrase of our grace, a phrase that helps us understand how God calls us to live out the myriad relationships in our lives. “Keep us ever-mindful of and responsive to the needs and rights of others.” Every time we say grace, we ask God for the ability to remain aware of and attentive to those around us. It’s so easy to isolate ourselves, to put up barriers or strap on armor as a way of attempting to find security. It’s so easy to fall into self-centered navel-gazing, where the goodness of self-care mutates into the toxicity of narcissism. It’s so easy to check out from caring about the injustices facing the world, especially if you are insulated from the most dire effects of those injustices. So we pray in our grace for God’s help to keep us mindful and responsive to others.
And specifically, we pray to be mindful and responsive both to their needs and to their rights. We recognize in these two words the fundamental ingredients that allow people to thrive (that’s “needs”) AND equitable access to those ingredients (that’s “rights”). We follow Jesus when we help others fulfill their needs – especially those who do not have enough resources to thrive. We also follow Jesus when we promote the human rights of other people – especially those whose rights have been or are currently being trampled. This is another way to speak about the dual call to charity and justice that I talked about two weeks ago.
We conclude our grace with the word that ends our prayers: “Amen.” This is an ancient word that comes to us all the way from Jesus’ own language. It means: “So be it” or “So say we all.” This word is the period at the end of the prayer or perhaps the exclamation point. We let go our circle of hands and start eating (or in our case, keep eating, as our grace tends to happen in the middle of dinner).
We say this prayer every day at our house: “Thank you, God, for food and family, and keep us ever-mindful of and responsive to the needs and rights of others. Amen.” This prayer of mealtime grace connects us to the foundation of our being, centers us in gratitude, expresses our thanks for sustenance and relationships, and acknowledges our place in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation. Even this humble spiritual practice of daily prayer at mealtimes can help sustain us through these precarious days. We will share a version of a mealtime prayer later in this service as we pray before Holy Communion. I invite you to contemplate your own mealtime grace. Think about how its words connect you to one another and to God. If you don’t have a practice of saying grace at mealtimes, I encourage you to borrow my family’s prayer or write your own. The dailiness of the prayer is the important part, as we take a moment each day to give thanks to God and to pray for the strength to continue participating in God’s mission.
Where the Wind... 