When I was a kid, I loved going “up on the mountain” with my Dad. We would hop in the truck on a Saturday or go as a family on Sunday afternoon and visit my dad’s side of the family who lived way, way out in the back roads of West Virginia. The drive was beautiful. You could see fields of cows, rocks, trees, and all sorts of mountain streams that either came alive in the spring or froze solid in the winter. We would drive until we reached the little town of Maysville, unincorporated, the place where some of my cousins would catch crawfish in the streams behind the in-town house, but even past that, we would drive up by Don Hesse’s farm where there were ponds stocked full of bluegill. We would drive until the road turned to dust and rock, then go another mile or so before reaching my Aunt Ruth’s trailer.

Her trailer was the last stop before you had to open the gate to drive again past the few rugged hunting cabins to get to Stony River Dam, the place where my dad spent his summers growing up. But I liked just getting to the trailer, and how a trailer got up on that mountain, I really don’t know. But anyway, Aunt Ruth was always glad to see us. She told me stories about when my dad was my age and had visited her and my Uncle Fred for the summers, and she always, always wanted us to eat. Some of my best childhood food memories come from her house.

What she served was mountain food, mostly natural, always special, made the old, old fashioned way. Her cupboards were always full of homemade pickles and apple butter. She served us salty country ham and for dessert there were always three or four types of pie with the crust made from scratch. The coconut cream pie was my Dad’s absolute favorite, but she often encouraged us to have more than one piece. And if that weren’t enough, after lunch you could go and pick the best plums ever off the tree in her front yard. It was good then to take a walk around the woods or on the dirt road, because we had to stay long enough for the food to settle and the desire for a long nap to wear off.

One of the few things I can remember about her place was the plaque that she had hanging right by her tiny kitchen. It was the prayer that probably many of us learned as children because it’s an easy to remember table grace, “God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for this food. By his hand we all are fed. Give us, Lord, our daily bread.”

When you don’t have all that much, food is something to be thankful for. There was always a sense there that my aunt was blessing us with her food. That’s what she could do for us. It was a much harder visit for my mother and my sister whose food allergies and particular tastes made it difficult to accept the gifts they were being offered. I must say that for them, there wasn’t an easy way to say “no thanks.” But for me and my Dad, we would eat up, take seconds, and go home so full that it made it hard to stop at our favorite ice cream stand on the way home.

I chose the 104th Psalm as my preaching text for this Sunday because I’ve always thought of it as a great Earth Day reading. It is one of my favorite prayers about the majesty of creation and the inspired awe of us human creatures. However, reading and studying Psalm 104 through this time, I was struck by how it could be the expanded version of the “God is great, God is good” table prayer. I hadn’t noticed this connection before. God is clothed with honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment. God is the one who sets the earth on its foundations, covers it with the depth of the oceans, raises up the mountains, and waters the whole planet with rivers and streams. “God is great.” And for that alone, it is one of my favorite psalms. But then this prayer turns to a subject that I had somehow forgotten – God is our provider, still. God causes grass to grow for the cattle and gives drink to every wild animal through all the various watersheds. God gives us food – fruits and vegetables, bread, and oil, and wine. So by his hand we all are fed. Yes – it’s true.

In our culture, it’s almost impossible to figure out where the food comes from – unless you give an answer like Kroger’s or McDonald’s. In watching the trailer for a recent documentary called Food, Inc., I was disheartened to discover just how rapidly changes have been made in the food industry in order to get things from farm to table with the goal of items being faster and cheaper to produce, not better for us or better tasting. More changes have taken place in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000 years. Regardless of where you stand in the current food debates or how you choose to eat personally, one thing is noticeable to me from a spiritual perspective, saying “thanks” to God for our food and really meaning it is not all that common a practice anymore. Perhaps it’s difficult to say thanks when ordering at the drive through or walking through the aisles at Kroger. But how can we recover the practice of realizing that God is still our provider in this strange new world in which we live? We may plant a few tomato plants this year and get a little closer to nature, but even as much as we know about what plants need to survive, only God can give them the ability to grow and feed us.

Now I suspect that some of you are way ahead of me and say table grace more often than we do at home. For the most part, I confess, my family says grace before meals pretty much only when we have company. But I would say that the time we share around our family meals is sacred to me. Our best family discussions happen around dinner. We start our day – early – with a pot of coffee and a bite of breakfast before shuffling the kids off to school and day care. Meals with friends are some of the things we look forward to the most. God is in the midst of those very basic moments of our lives, but we fail to acknowledge just how beautiful those life moments are. And we also forget to say “thank you.”

Whether it’s found in the eloquence of Psalm 104 or in a table blessing on a kitchen knick-knack, I’m glad to be reminded God is blessing us with not only the things that we need, but oftentimes with the simple pleasures, like a good meal, that can make us happy. We get what feeds us from the ground, from the bounty that only this earth can provide for us – well at least as far as we know now. It may be a simple truth, but it’s one to celebrate.

God is great – O Lord, how manifold are your works!

God is good – When you send forth your spirit they are created; and you renew the face of the ground. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live.

Let us thank God for our food – for the plants that come from the earth, for the wine that gladdens the heart, for the oil that makes the face shine, for he bread that strengthens the human heart.

By God’s hand we all are fed – physically, emotionally, spiritually, God is our provider.

Give us, Lord, our daily bread – this prayer, echoed by Jesus in how he taught his disciples to pray, says that there is food enough for everyone to eat – today. Can we realize this dream in our lifetimes?

Amen.