Originally published in the May/June 2018 Evangelist.
Dear Friends in Christ,
It is something of an inside joke in our home that Erin can remember where we were for every birthday and anniversary, and I can remember what we ate. There isn’t a morsel of food, a meal or snack, that I cannot, given some time and a few clues, remember and recount. For me, food, like smells or sounds or music for others, connects me to memory. There was the restaurant on the shores of Phuket, in Thailand that only served “the catch of the day”, fried or grilled whole, and paired with either red, green, or massaman curry. We ate there every night during our stay and I can remember each fish, each curry, and each preparation. There was the breakfast of fresh venison steak and instant oatmeal and wild blueberries served by my father and cooked over a small fire of juniper branches, when we were stranded on a mountaintop after a particularly bountiful deer hunt. The discovery of a new restaurant or the introduction of a new food to one of my boys – seeing their delight and pleasure in something I have known and loved – I can remember each of these as clear as day.
For some, food is merely sustenance. For me, it is almost always an experience and an event. So it was that when I had the chance to prepare an application for a grant to go on sabbatical, I knew that food would be at the center. So it is that I also wanted food to be at the center of the sabbatical experience for our whole faith community. As the sabbatical team wrote in that application, we are a busy people, intent on doing, working, fixing, and shaping the world in which we live… we “crave time, but often don’t take it, to sit across the table from one another to break bread and share our stories, discovering the tapestries of people’s lives and faith. Consequently we struggle to identify and articulate how our story fits into the narrative of God’s hospitality and the wider story of where we’ve come from and where we’re going.”
The Spring-Summer mailer, arriving in June, will contain opportunities to sign up for dinner parties being hosted over the summer, books to read that tie into the themes of the sabbatical, and I hope you will participate. More than this, I hope you will consider ways that you can break bread spontaneously outside the events and opportunities created for you. Introduce yourself to someone new over cookies at coffee hour. Invite a new member to lunch. Arrange a coffee or beer with someone you’ve been wanting to get to know better. Ask questions that move you past the superficial:
What keeps you coming to church when so many people don’t go?
What keeps you up at night?
What are you hungry for in your life?
What breaks your heart?
What gives you hope?
The theme of the sabbatical is “Companions in Transformation: Meals, Stories, and Our Future” and invites both you and me into our own process of considering our stories and doing so in the context of shared hospitality. As the word “companion” implies, we believe transformation happens when we break bread (pan) with (com) one another. Parker Palmer notes in his class on healing political divides, we cannot solve problems by talking about others who are not in the room. We can only change the global by being transformed on a very local level, on a personal level. And personal transformation happens in relationship, over stories and meals.
Priest and writer Robert Farrar Capon describes this reality in his book The Supper of the Lamb: A culinary reflection, using humor and anecdote to describe the recipes and necessary accoutrement for an ideal dinner party. Capon describes such a meal of lavish hospitality, formality and informality, attire and menu items as echoing the great apocalyptic “supper of the lamb” – a meal set at the end of all things when God has gathered all to his banquet table. Capon describes the incarnation of Christ as having assumed all things human – meaning that God now loves like we do, enjoys the fleshly realities of food and feast and storytelling as we do. So it is at the last, when all things are reconciled, God in Jesus will lift us too in our fleshly realities, to be like Him. All that is created and incarnate will not be lost or dissolute. Capon writes:
We can, you see, take it with us. It will be precisely because we love Jerusalem enough to bear it in our bones that its textures will ascend when we rise; it will be because our eyes have relished the earth that the color of its countries will compel our hearts forever. The bread and the pastry, the cheeses, the wine, and the songs go into the Supper of the Lamb because we do: it is our love that brings the City home.
There is nothing lost in this great feast. It is a feast that echoes the Eucharist, a place where we find our earthly loves lifted up and all our selves reconciled and united in Christ. So, companion with others here at St. John’s. Break bread together. Share stories of loss and love. Find your life united with his. Be transformed.
I’ll see you in worship, for a little longer. I am praying that you and I will have a true sabbath – a time of rest, restoration, renewal, and that when we come together again, we will have such stories to tell one another, that we will see where God is calling us together next, in mission and in ministry.
Faithfully,
Jered+
