So, I tend to like leftovers. There’s something special about the way a dish sorta matures after a day or two in the fridge. All the flavors get to know each other and the end result is, in some ways, an improvement over the original. Soups and stews and slaws are especially good about this. But even I come to a point where leftovers get tiresome. After Thanksgiving, say, when you cooked a bird that could serve 50 but only 5 showed up, just how many different ways can you come up with to serve turkey before the idea of turkey makes you bored?
One year for Christmas, someone gave me a ham, a 20-pound ham. Now, this was, of course, a very generous gift from some fancy mail-order gourmet supplier, and when I got it I was giddy with ham-infused excitement. I loved ham, and this was the biggest ham I’d ever seen. But once I broke into that ham, I got worried that it might go bad if I didn’t work her way through it fairly quickly. So, every meal, I came up with some excuse to use it. Fried ham at breakfast, ham sandwich at lunch, sliced ham for dinner.
I made ham and beans, ham sliders, ham shepherd’s pie, ham mac and cheese, ham omelets, homemade ham hot pockets, ham on white, ham on wheat, ham on rye, ham on ham. Ham ham ham ham ham. As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for me to grow tired of ham. Now, I fully realize this was a first-world problem of cuisine, but a weird thing happened as I worked through that 20 pounds of meat.
By the time I got to the end of it, I couldn’t even bring myself to make stock out of the picked-clean shank. This is really saying something because I come from a waste-nothing family of eaters. So for me to toss that bone without pulling one last meal out of it was a real sign of the trouble to come. And then the unthinkable happened. I proclaimed that I would never eat ham again.
Now, I’m sure many of us have said something like that before. And of course a month or two later, someone made a country ham steak and red eye gravy, and all bets were off. And I'm still a fan of ham.
I think there's a kind of fondness tied to leftovers beyond just the sustenance they provide. Who doesn’t love leftover fried chicken with a slice of leftover spaghetti and a side of leftover potato salad?
Or maybe there’s something evolutionary going on? Like, as long as there’s leftovers, I know I can survive another day? Leftovers remind us of the thing we loved, and to a point, when you get to the bottom of the tupperware, there’s a little sadness, like, “well, shoot, that’s the end of shrimp creole.” But of course sometimes there’s a relief, like, “thank God we finally worked our way through that over-salted salad dressing.”
I guess what I’m most interested in, though, is how just the right amount of leftovers breeds a sort of fondness for the next time that thing comes around. When I lived in Kingsport, there was a lady there who had a stunningly good recipe for rum cake. Her big not-so-secret was that you take all the liquids in the recipe and replace them with rum. She'd drop one off at the office from time to time, and I worked our way through, making sure never to operate heavy machinery after a good slice. And as I approached the end of it, my slices would get smaller and smaller, trying to stretch out that delicious cake as long as I could, knowing it’d be a while before the next cake would appear.
I think it’s because of all this that I’ve always loved the ending of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. There’s this astounding miracle where Jesus serves a massive crowd with only the things a boy can carry, and all eat their fill. That’s great. It reminds me of holiday dinners at grandma’s house, but, like, holy.
But it’s the ending that I really love. The moment where everyone’s putting on their coats and getting ready to leave and grandma wraps up a little of everything in foil and sends ‘em out into the world with a kiss on the cheek and an arm-full of food and love.
Jesus has his disciples gather up what’s left, and they fill twelve entire baskets where only a few loaves had been before. The story doesn’t say what they did with all those leftovers, but I like to imagine Jesus sent all those folks home with ‘em. It’s no accident, after all, that there’s twelve whole baskets of leftovers. That’s one basket for each of the tribes of Israel, enough to feed a nation, enough to start there and feed the world. Sent out with an armful of food and love.
And I gotta think that, while these baskets full of barley loaves and fish were enough to feed everyone, that there was still just enough to fill you up and leave you longing for the next time that bread came into your life. Maybe it's even the first time you’d really felt full and also the last time you’d ever look at bread the same way again.
And those who shared the leftovers had more than a story of cooking in the kitchen to share. They’d share the word of this miracle and the man who made it happen, too, and maybe that made the leftovers even sweeter still, buttered all over in the word of God. And as much as there was leftover, enough to feed the world, I can’t imagine anyone on that mountain or anyone that ate from its stores, I can’t imagine anyone falling into the same place as I did with that overly generous Christmas ham.
This wasn’t a meal of obligation or stubbornness or a race against time. This bread was a gift, a rare gift, a gift with a built-in longing for more of the same. Leftovers you’d never want to see the end of, and a God who spread the table where you could find them.
When we gather here and join together in this meal at this table, this story is part of what we remember. The words we say are from the Last Supper, of course, but there’s so much here, too. We give thanks, we break bread, we give to all who desire to eat with us. And we leave a little leftover every time, a little that goes into the world to feed those who couldn’t be here, a little that we take with us, a little leftover Christ to feed the whole wide world. And God knows, we long for more when we’ve fasted from it.
These are our leftovers: our scriptures, our liturgies, our theologies, and our bread. Leftovers passed down from one table to another across the millennia.
These are our leftovers. And with them,we are fed and, in turn, we feed the world.