last week karl facilitated a conversation around the upper room table at our weekend gathering about bread.  Jesus said ‘i am the bread of life. whoever comes to me will never be hungry again. whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” john 6:51.    i missed part of the conversation, but got to catch up a bit on this thought when i finished reading “take this bread” by sara miles this past weekend (one advantage of being layed up with extreme back pain: lots of time to read!)  what a great story about what can happen when an atheist walks into a church, takes communion, and enters into the wild and crazy journey of following Christ.   an open table.  food for the hungry.  tasting and seeing God in unexplainable ways.  creating a food pantry where hundreds come every week to get food, break bread together, and practice what radically inclusive community can look like.  there were so many powerful images in the book that resonated with me related to community, “church”, and what it means to be the body of Christ here on earth corporately, individually.

with easter week upon us it was exactly the reminder i needed of the power of Jesus’ body & blood to transform. and for us, the “church”–his body here on earth–to touch and heal, too.   there were so many great lines in the book, too many to mention, but here are a few highlights:

“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.”  (prologue, xv)

“all of it pointed to a force stronger than the anxious formulas of religion:  a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions–eating, drinking, walking–and stayed with them, through fear, even past death.  that love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others.” (p. 93)

“you can’t be a Christian by yourself”  (p. 119)

“but faith working through love:  that could mean plugging away with other people, acting in small ways without the comfort of a big vision or even a lot of realistic hope.  it could look more like prayer:  opening yourself to uncertainty, accepting your lack of control.  it meant taking on concrete tasks in the middle of confusion, without stopping to argue who was the truest believer.” (p. 162)

“i remember what a sad, drunken visitor to the pantry had told me once.  ‘thank God,’ he said earnestly, ‘thank God for Jesus.  because, you know, he was here like us, so he knows how hard it is to be a person. he must have a sense of humor about us.” (p. 172)

“this is where i found my faith:  a faith expressed in a wild conceit that a helpless, low-caste baby could be God. that ugly, contaminated and unimportant people embody holiness.  that my own neediness and misfitting, not my goodness or piety, were what God intended to use.” (p. 222)

“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 discovery responsibility, purpose, meaning.  they wanted a church where they could bring their sorrows, their gifts, their entire messy lives:  where they could find community.”  (p. 214)

which ones resonate with you?

i’ll end with this, a prayer sara miles wrote for her community that is the desire of my heart for our little refuge community, that we’d be bread….

“O God of abundance, you feed us every day.

rise in us now, make us into your bread.

that we may share your gifts with a hungry world,

and join in love with all people, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (p. 163)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 5:51 pm and is filed under body of Christ, community, kathy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.