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“Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be yours."  A paraphrase puts it,
“Give your entire attention
to what God is doing right now.”       
Matthew 6:33 

“In God’s presence are pleasures forevermore.”  Psalm 16:11

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Most of us have difficulty remembering sermons.  We can remember hymns, but usually not sermons. How many of you can remember the sermon from Sunday before last?  Now, how many of you remember a sermon I preached on July 21, 2002, six years ago, about eating a tomato sandwich?

In my 20 years as your pastor, I have now preached more than 800 sermons from this pulpit.  The major sermon most people remember is not the one about the majesty of God in the temple, not the one about the Christmas angels, not the one about why Jesus never had ulcers, not the ones about God’s call to end poverty and war.   The sermon most of you tell me you remember is the one in which I briefly described how to make and eat a tomato sandwich! 

This observation says a lot about you, a lot about me, and also something about God.  God has a great sense of humor, for sure!   God knows that I have worked many times into the middle of the night, fretting over a biblical text, carefully choosing words and phrases for a sermon that will communicate the good news of the gospel.  I have tried to keep you awake with humor and stories.  I have tried to talk about God with shouts and whispers and even songs in the middle of the sermon.  But what could it all mean when the sermon that most people remember is the one about tomato sandwiches?

What’s the connection between God and tomato sandwiches?   I have not been able to find tomatoes specifically mentioned anywhere in the Bible.  I have also not been able to locate any prayers of the saints giving thanks for tomatoes.  So what is it about tomatoes and God?

Some of us crave summer tomatoes, homegrown from the garden; and some of us don’t care for them.  Some of us may be allergic to them.  And now we’ve been hearing in the news about the possibility of salmonella affecting tomatoes.  But then we learned that our blessed tomatoes have been exonerated, set free from all charges.  So we tomato growers are now pushing ahead with tending and harvesting the big red tomatoes.

Some of us who grew up in the South survived our childhood summers by eating tomato sandwiches every day.   So, the tomato pastor asks, what could tomatoes possibly have to do with God?

We all know that God comes to us in strange and wonderful ways, through mundane, ordinary experiences.  The spiritual shows up in the material world.  So, could it be that God is nudging us to see the holy dimension in the most mundane daily activities?  Could it be that in the good ol’ summertime when the tomatoes are ripening on the vine, that God may be trying to nudge us toward a “tomato sandwich spirituality”? 

Can we allow ourselves to play with the possibility that God comes to us through tomato sandwiches?  It may be that for you God comes through avocado sandwiches or pimiento cheese sandwiches, or I even have some friends who thrive on olive sandwiches.  To each her own!   For today I respectfully ask you to suspend any unkind feelings you may have toward tomatoes, and go with me down this garden path where we pick our own homegrown tomatoes.  You may not know that there is now a song called “Homegrown Tomatoes.”   It’s a gem. In fact, it’s so bad, it’s good.   Here’s the chorus:  “Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes.  What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes?  One two things that money can’t buy – that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.” 

How can homegrown tomatoes connect us to God? When I took a sabbatical a few years ago, I talked with Brother David Steindl-Rast, a wise philosopher-theologian.  I wanted to talk with him about God and the present moment.  For a long time I’ve suspected that God comes to us when we can be fully present in the moment.   Steindl-Rast told me to start with whatever life experiences bring me vitality and aliveness.   With his German accent he said, “God comes to us in moments of aliveness.”  I told him about my “alive moments” – like singing, playing with my children, and eating tomato sandwiches.  “Start there,” he said.  “Prayer happens best where there is a sense of wonder and concentration in the present moment.”

If eating a tomato sandwich can teach us to live in the here and now, to savor the immediate experience, with thanksgiving, then that experience can connect us with the grace of God.

I want to invite us to consider the experience of eating a tomato sandwich as an experience of wonder and concentration in the present moment.  But to reach this level of tomato sandwich wonder, you have to start with the proper way to make the sandwich. Those of you who did not grow up in the South probably were never taught this recipe. Here’s how you do it.  Listen carefully.  You’ve got to have a plump, ripe, red tomato, not too many days from the vine.  It’s best to get one of those large ones that covers the palm of your hand, so that one slice will cover the entire piece of bread.  You’ve got to have two slices of white bread, not that healthy whole wheat stuff.

Take a knife and smear a glob of mayonnaise on both pieces of bread.  Cut a big, thick slice (or two!) of tomato, and place it carefully on the bottom piece of bread.  Add salt and pepper.  Carefully put the top piece of bread on the sandwich.  Take the sandwich in your hands and move over to the kitchen sink.  Lean over.  It’s gonna drip.   As I take my first bite, I close my eyes, and I’ve heard myself saying spontaneously, “Oh God!   Thank you, God.”   Then, I get lost in eating that delicious sandwich.

Tomato sandwiches, I believe, can connect us to God.  “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” the Psalmist says.   An ordinary bite from a sandwich can become an extraordinary event.  If we’re open, maybe we can increase the “tomato sandwich moments” of our lives. 

How can we turn an ordinary experience into an Event, an encounter with God’s goodness? The first thing the Bible tells us is that we don’t do it.  God does it.  God sends these experiences all the time.  We just need to show up, be available, notice, be aware, pay attention.  Be present to the moment.  

People in the Bible had these ordinary/extraordinary experiences over and over:   Moses before an ordinary bush that becomes a burning bush, the Emmaus Road disciples recognizing Jesus in the breaking of bread, Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus listening attentively, the woman at the well drawing a bucket of water.  It’s water, but it’s more than water.  Jesus says the bucket of water is a sign of the water of New Life. At the Last Supper, Jesus took a piece of crusty bread; and it became more than bread.  It became a symbol of Jesus with us.  Over and over people have found God in the present moment, during ordinary events – at the meal table, by the well, in a conversation.

All of these moments point us to one of the great spiritual principles:  Live in the present moment.   It sounds so simple, but it’s also profound.  God is to be found in the present, in the here and now.  Can we learn to get lost in what we’re doing right now, this very moment?  As the Zen master said, if it’s washing dishes, get lost in washing dishes.  If it’s walking, get lost in walking.  If it’s listening to a sermon, get lost in the listening.  If it’s eating a tomato sandwich, get lost in eating the sandwich – with mindfulness, alertness, awareness.

It’s difficult to do.  Why?  Because so often we’re thinking about something else – what happened yesterday or what will happen at lunch today.   Nostalgia or anxiety are often our constant companions.  We have one foot in the past and one foot in the future.  And we can easily miss the present moment.

If eating a tomato sandwich can teach us to live in the here and now, to savor the immediate experience, with thanksgiving, then that experience can connect us with the grace of God. 
“O taste and see that the Lord is good.”  But how many of us block that goodness – with our worries, frustrations, anxieties, compulsions, and incessant thinking – even our concern about death and grief?

Let me tell you a story that I hope will make clear what I’m saying.  There once was a man who was walking in the jungle.  As he got farther and farther into the jungle, he became somewhat disoriented and got lost.  Of course, there was always the ever-present danger of some of the more powerful and aggressive animals lurking in the jungle.  It happened that as he was walking along, trying to find his way, he began to hear the roar of a tiger.

Now he paid very close attention to how far or how close that roar sounded in his ear.  As he continued through the jungle, the sound of the tiger got closer and closer; and he knew the tiger must have caught his scent and was now on his trail.  So he began to run for his life.  The sound of the tiger got louder and louder.  He tried to run faster and faster, even frantically.

Not being careful to look where he was going, he ended up stumbling and falling over the edge of a cliff.  As he was falling down the cliff, his fingers were dragging along the side.  He managed to catch hold of a very small, precarious bush.  He held on to that bush for dear life.

As he held on, he became very concerned as he noticed some of the roots of the bush starting to feel the strain of his weight.  It was a small bush.  As he looked above him, the tiger that was chasing him was now standing over him, drooling, ready for a meal.

As it happened, he looked below him a long distance down, and he saw there another tiger waiting, with mouth wide open, drooling, ready for a meal.

There he was, caught in the middle between the tiger above him and the tiger below him, desperately hanging on to this little shrub, pulling out at the roots.

In the middle of this ordeal, right about eye level, he happened to notice a little indentation on the side of the cliff.  And inside that little space, he noticed – to his amazement – a wild strawberry growing.  Even more amazing was that the strawberry was a beautiful, juicy, red, ripe strawberry.

You know what he did?  He actually let go with one hand of the bush that his life was hanging by.  And he reached out and took that strawberry, and he ate it.  And he said, “How delicious.”*

The present moment is that precious moment when we taste the tomato sandwich over the sink, with mayonnaise and tomato dripping down our chin. 

I suspect that many of us come to worship, holding on precariously between the past and future. Both of them are roaring at us, demanding our attention, waiting to “eat us up.”  We can be eaten up by looking back at the past or fearing the future.  But if we give all our attention to these two tigers, we can miss the gift of the present moment, the delicious strawberry before our eyes.

But there is a certain “letting go” that has to happen first, letting go of our predicaments, our grudges, our jealousy, our need to control everything.  Let go of our preoccupation with the tiger above and the tiger below.  We have to let go of holding on, let go of control, in order to celebrate “how delicious” is the present moment.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God,” the Gospel of Mathew says.   Surely part of what this means is to “Seek first the present moment, where God is…”  The paraphrase is also on target: “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now” (Matthew 6:33).

“Consider the lilies of the field,” Jesus said, “how they grow.”  Notice how Jesus uses a close-up, zoom lens.  “The birds of the air…the grass of the meadow.”  These are all alive and growing right now.  They speak to us of God’s care, God’s love of variety, God’s beauty.  “Glory be to God for dappled things,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote.  God’s glory can be seen all over the natural world – flowers, trees, bushes, strawberries, tomatoes.  “Every common bush aflame with God,” as the poet wrote.  Can we allow ourselves to experience the goodness?

Before his death in 2004, my father – Tracy – (that’s the “T” in my name.)  grew fantastic tomatoes in his garden.  He loved giving them away – to everybody he knew.  He made rounds with sacks of tomatoes – to his doctor, the nurse, the mechanic, the pastor, the Sunday school teacher, and the mail carrier, and to his distant relatives.  Since his death, my brother Morris and I have done our best to continue Dad’s tradition of growing tomatoes in his South Carolina garden, and giving them away.  We don’t have his green thumb, his magic touch, but we do have the soil he tended faithfully for 35 years.  So, Tracy’s tomato garden is continuing.   On Friday, my day off, I went to South Carolina brought back a big basket of tomatoes.  You can see them here today on the offering table in the cornucopia.  At the end of the service please feel free to take a tomato, first come, first serve.

My dad would be pleased if you go home and slice that tomato and place it lovingly on some white bread with mayonnaise and salt and pepper. The present moment is so crucial.  The present moment is that precious moment when we taste the tomato sandwich over the sink, with mayonnaise and tomato dripping down our chin.   It’s the “sacrament of the present moment,” as one writer said.   In the present is the Presence – of God.

There is a Jewish proverb that says, “On Judgment Day God will hold us accountable for the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy.”

Let us pray:  God, help us to let go of regret, guilt and resentment.  Help us to leave the past behind and let go of anxiety about what will happen to us in the future.  Teach us again to trust the process of your presence unfolding in our present moment.  May we lean into your love as we taste the strawberry, the tomato sandwich, and other signs of your amazing grace.  Open our pores, our capacity to feel, our taste buds, our hearts--- that we may welcome your love and take delight in the tasty goodness of your grace, which we feel even in this present moment.  In Jesus’ name.   AMEN.

* From Fr. John Powell, “’The Inner Monk,” cassette tape, New Camaldoli Hermitage, CA.

Mel Williams, a graduate of Wake Forest University and Yale Divinity School, has served in pastorates in Raleigh, NC and Decatur, GA; and in July 1988 he became pastor of Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, NC.  Along with several other area pastors, he worked to establish the Walltown Neighborhood Ministries, a mission that seeks to address spiritual, physical, emotional, and economic needs of the people of the Walltown neighborhood.