For the last ten years our church has met each Sunday around a meal. There is something that happens to a community that comes together around a meal, brought together by a mutual hunger, invited by Jesus, and open to all. We have had a lot of interesting characters eat with us over the last ten years and I'd love to write about our experiences one day, but I'm sure I wouldn't be able to express the raw emotion, passion and richness that Sara Miles brings to this fascinating memoir. You can smell it and taste it.
Raised as an atheist opposed to Christianity, Sara Miles describes how she wanders into a church and takes communion, then something happens to her that is 'outrageous and terrifying'. She found that 'God, named "Christ" or "Jesus", was real, and in my mouth'. What follows is frankly a riveting, disturbing and inspiring adventure about how a lesbian atheist journalist ended up finding Jesus in the giving and receiving of food, both in the Episcopal rites of communion, and in the growth of her food pantry serving hundreds of needy people in San Francisco.
One of the major themes of the book is the inclusivity of the way she experiences communion, and in how the food pantry runs, modelled on Jesus' radical eating habits described in the gospels. I resonated with how often she finds Jesus not in the rituals of church but in the simple encounter of eating with those who you feel uncomfortable with and who are different to you. This 'radical hospitality' opens Jesus' table to all, and their food pantry is also open to all with no ID required.
I loved how she described the way in which some of the people who came for food began to volunteer to help, and in doing so found meaning and identity. People want more than food: 'they wanted, in fact, church: not the kind where you sit obediently and listen to someone tell you how to behave but the kind where you discover responsibility, purpose, meaning. They wanted a church where they could bring their sorrows, their gifts, their entire messy lives: where they could find community'. Amen to that Sara!
The food pantry looks more and more like the kind of place Jesus would have hung out - hungry, broken people from all different countries, coming together around food, those mentally ill, gang members, addicts, transsexuals and many more, finding community, love and healing in all sorts of ways. God at work in the mess and incompleteness of life.
I loved how she described a conversation that concluded with the idea that 'food and healing go together'. This is so true in my own experience, but most obviously from Jesus' meals in the gospels. Jesus offers a radically inclusive meal invitation, but amidst the trouble and controversy that ensued, healing and miracles and transformation are found.
If you like your Christianity in nice neat packages please don't read this book. But if you enjoy being challenged, don't mind the odd 'F' word and enjoy a great story well told, go for it.
Wednesday 9 July 2014
Being Christian by Rowan Williams
This short, four chapter book is a real gem, and for less than a fiver on Kindle it's a no brainer for a bit of theological summer reading by the former Archbishop of Canterbury. The four chapters cover some of the basics of the Christian life: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist and Prayer. The chapter on baptism is superb - Williams writes in such an accessible way yet with real depth and is very quotable. At one point it seemed as though I was going to highlight the entire chapter on my Kindle. Here are just two of the quotes I loved:
"Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied".
" and the gathering of baptised people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world".
On the Bible: "this is what God wants you to hear. He wants you to hear law and poetry and history. He wants you to hear the polemic and the visions".
On Eucharist: "in Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that he wants our company". "The meals that Jesus shares in his ministry are the way in which he begins to re-create a community, to lay the foundations for rethinking what the words 'the people of God' mean". (I love that quote!)
In the Eucharist chapter there is line after line of beautiful prose about the richness of communion, its dependence on the resurrection to have any real meaning, and the sacramental nature of the world. "It is to see everything in some sense sacramentally. If Jesus gives thanks over bread and wine, if Jesus makes that connection between the furthest place away from God, which is suffering and death, and if in his person he fuses those things together, then wherever we are some connection between us and God is possible. All places, all people, all things have about them an unexpected sacramental depth".
If that quote doesn't make you buy the book I don't know what will! The link he makes between communion and our responsibility for the environment is stunning, as well as how he describes communion as an invitation into community and love for others. He makes clear that communion is for those who are wrong rather than right, hungry rather than full, human not divine, and it is "the way in which the whole of the Gospel story is played out in our midst".
I'll stop the review here before I quote the entire book, but I think you get the idea that I'm recommending it to you. Whether you're a new Christian looking for something to help you think deeper about the basics of the Christian life, or you're a mature Christian looking for a fresh take on these four topics, it's well worth a read.
"Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied".
" and the gathering of baptised people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world".
On the Bible: "this is what God wants you to hear. He wants you to hear law and poetry and history. He wants you to hear the polemic and the visions".
On Eucharist: "in Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that he wants our company". "The meals that Jesus shares in his ministry are the way in which he begins to re-create a community, to lay the foundations for rethinking what the words 'the people of God' mean". (I love that quote!)
In the Eucharist chapter there is line after line of beautiful prose about the richness of communion, its dependence on the resurrection to have any real meaning, and the sacramental nature of the world. "It is to see everything in some sense sacramentally. If Jesus gives thanks over bread and wine, if Jesus makes that connection between the furthest place away from God, which is suffering and death, and if in his person he fuses those things together, then wherever we are some connection between us and God is possible. All places, all people, all things have about them an unexpected sacramental depth".
If that quote doesn't make you buy the book I don't know what will! The link he makes between communion and our responsibility for the environment is stunning, as well as how he describes communion as an invitation into community and love for others. He makes clear that communion is for those who are wrong rather than right, hungry rather than full, human not divine, and it is "the way in which the whole of the Gospel story is played out in our midst".
I'll stop the review here before I quote the entire book, but I think you get the idea that I'm recommending it to you. Whether you're a new Christian looking for something to help you think deeper about the basics of the Christian life, or you're a mature Christian looking for a fresh take on these four topics, it's well worth a read.
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