Beloved St. John’s community,
Most of you know about our five values: sacredness, belonging, nourishment, creativity, and transformation. Given the heart-wrenching images of starving people in Gaza these days, and the sobering knowledge that one in five households in Minnesota experience food insecurity, the topic of nourishment is one that has both metaphorical and literal importance for us. This is why St. John’s focuses so much on feeding ministries like First Nations Kitchen and Casa Maria, and on Good Courage Farm’s regenerative food ministry.
Sara Miles is an Episcopal deacon who became a Christian unexpectedly upon receiving communion at an Episcopal Church in San Francisco, and ended up starting a food shelf in that church that served its food quite literally from the Eucharist table. Here is what she shares in her book Take This Bread:
“One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans—except that up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything…”
“Food and bodies had always been wrapped in meaning for me: They were my way of understanding the world. But it would take decades to have these accumulated experiences make sense in a narrative, much less one I’d call Christian. It took actually eating a piece of bread—a simple chunk of wheat and yeast and water—to pull those layers of meaning together: to make food both absolutely itself and a sign pointing to something bigger. It turned out that the prerequisite for conversion wasn’t knowing how to behave in a church, or having a religious vocabulary or an a priori “belief” in an abstract set of propositions: It was hunger, the same hunger I’d always carried…”
“It may seem crazy, at this point in history, to assert that any religion—much less Christianity, the religion of our contemporary empire, of the powerful and intolerant—can be a force for connection, for healing, for love. It may seem deluded to assert that people can still be fed with this ordinary yet mystical bread, so besmirched and exhausted and poisoned by centuries of religious practice, in ways that will change our own real lives, not to mention the world, for the better. But this is my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us. As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me: not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering, blaming hellfire of the religious right. What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn’t promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God’s.”
I invite all of us at St. John’s to take courage from the exponentially increasing gift of Christ’s self-offering at the Eucharist; the benevolence of Mother Earth sharing her abundance with all; and our own vocation as Christians to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned–for what we do to the least of these, Jesus says, we do to him.
In Christ’s love,
Lisa
Miles, Sara. Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
