Dear friends in Christ,
It will come as no surprise that one of my new obsessions is a punchy little show on PBS called Broken Bread. The host is food truck icon and LA celebrity chef Roy Choi, who takes you deep into his hometown of Los Angeles to neighborhoods like Watts and Compton: place names that are synonymous with inequality and poverty. There he explores the intersections of food and race, sustainability, the environment, and identity.
What I love about this show (besides the focus on food) is the way Choi sometimes sounds like a prophet and a pastor, righteous yet humble, zealous but clear-eyed. This is a smart show that walks a fine line between telling stories and preaching. What sets it apart from other shows is the way Roy Choi tells stories of places and people on the margins—refusing to let Watts and Compton be known only as a byword, as plot points in the story of America’s struggle with racism, violence, and inequality. He goes to the margins and helps us see and notice how much fullness, life, goodness, and humanity are there. “You have to go to the margins,” he says. “You have to care and invest with those that no one else wants to work with.”
His stories are not all about triumph, either. The heroes of his stories are often like the heroes of our biblical narrative: people who have seen much sorrow, whose lives are riddled with mistakes and tragedy and struggle. Social entrepreneurship fails more than it succeeds. The planet is irreversibly damaged by global warming. In his clear-eyed telling, we celebrate the lives saved, but we do not pretend that lives haven’t been lost.
In each story, food is the medium through which lives are being transformed and beloved community is being created. In this way, Choi is celebrating the way food becomes sacramental. As the show’s title Broken Bread implies, Roy believes in food as a means toward restoration and reconciliation. In the opening credits to each show you hear him say:
I want this show to be about the power of us as humans to come together again. Let’s not make assumptions. Let’s not make stereotypes. And from there we can talk about these things and maybe understand each other. Whether your beliefs differ from mine—we’re breaking bread!
This fall, our Formation Commission will host a series of discussions where we’ll see and notice how Eucharist shows up in popular culture. It happens all of the time, from shows like this one to movies like Babette’s Feast and Tortilla Soup, and so many other ways. Eucharist is our sacrament of thanksgiving, a place where we see and notice the grace of God poured out through earthy stuff like bread and wine. And it’s a place where all our stories, especially the stories of broken people and broken places, stories from the margins, are brought together and reconciled at a common table.
Broken Bread is encouraging me to take special care, to see and notice the stories I might otherwise pass by—stories that require showing up at First Nations Kitchen and Hallie Q. Brown, and maybe even at coffee hour, where a loaf of bread, a bowl of soup, or a cup of coffee and a cookie become the meeting ground of precious stories and honest sharing.
I hope you will join me in seeing and noticing where Eucharist is showing up in popular culture, on the margins, and in your own lives.
I will see you in worship!
Faithfully,
Jered
Originally published in the September/October 2019 Evangelist.
