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The Preacher’s Corner
By Rev. Dr. Milton Winter ‘If you don’t eat your bread, you’ll grow up skinny’ My
grandmother (Daddy’s mother) worried that I did not eat light bread.
Slices of plain white bread were always on her table. We did not have
bread with every meal at my house. This represented a clear difference
between the ways of my two grandmothers, for mother’s mother was part
of our household, and it was she who determined what was and was not on
our daily table. Grandmother Winter would
solemnly admonish me that, “If you don’t eat some bread, you’ll grow up
skinny like your father.” How I wish her prophecy had been correct! Grandmother
had lots of old fashioned things in her kitchen. There was a butter
churn (I have it now) and a couple of flatirons, once placed on the
wood stove and heated for pressing clothes. By
the time I came along, they had been relegated to doorstops, but
Grandmother used to tell me how hard it was to iron clothes by this
method. (I wish we had saved those antiques when Grandmother broke up
housekeeping.) Mother’s mother was famous for her
rolls. They appeared every Sunday, and Saturday was wonderful because
of the yeasty smell that pervaded her kitchen. She would knead her
rolls and put the dough in a bowl covered with a towel to rise. This
process had to be repeated several times, and I recall how vigorously
she used her rolling pin, flour, and a wooden board to make these
delightful confections. I do not have her recipe. There was no recipe.
Grandmother simply made her famous rolls, and that was that! One of the few places I eat homemade bread is at communion services in our church. We
do not have homemade bread every Sunday — it is the mark of a special
occasion for us. I hope it is not a sin that I enjoy the taste of the
bread, as well as its spiritual significance. John
Calvin, the ancestor of our tradition, believed that ordinary, leavened
bread ought to be used in the communion service, a symbol of God’s
provision of “daily bread,” as mentioned in The Lord’s Prayer. Other
traditions have insisted on unleavened bread, as used by Jesus and his
disciples at the Last Supper, according to the provisions for
celebrating the Passover as set forth in the Hebrew book of Exodus. Recently
I attended a communion service in an Episcopal Church, and lo and
behold, here was a loaf of homemade, leavened bread, being used for the
sacrament; and by contrast, you can find many a Presbyterian or
Methodist Church that uses the unleavened wafers. So
the old shibboleths are passing away! There was a time when variance
from received practice would have occasioned frowns, if not outright
declarations of heresy. More than my personal
preference, I am happy to see the various churches respecting each
other’s differences, and even embracing them. It is a basic lesson I learned from the ways my two grandmothers arranged their tables.
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