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)
at the refuge on saturday nights we have been spending some time in the “upper room” with Jesus in the texts of john 13-17 leading up to easter. these are some of my favorite passages of scripture. so challenging. so beautiful. as most of you know, i spend a lot of time thinking about “church”—not church as in a building and a meeting time and 3 songs on power point and a wow! sermon, but church as in the body of Christ, people on the journey, learning to practice the ways of love together. one of the things i always say is that “the church” is a place to love and be loved.
last sunday, february 8th, we had an evening of reflective stations to wrap up our series on hope. it was a beautiful evening of hope & connecting with God in all kinds of ways. several of the stations had questions about hope. here are some of the collective responses:
hope. it can mean all kinds of things for different people, but i think it mainly implies “expectation.” a possibility that maybe things could be different, that there’s more to this life than just what we see, that there’s something better ahead. many of us, for all kinds of reasons, are afraid to hope. we have seen many of our dreams dashed. jobs lost. relationships crumbled. addictions destroy. God-not-delivering-the-goods-the-way-we-had-hoped. so we hunker down our hearts and do whatever we can to protect it against believing that good is really possible—again, or maybe for the first time. we settle for loneliness. we settle for disconnectedness. we settle for going-through-the-motions. the thought of something more hurts too much. what if we make ourselves vulnerable and hurt again? what if we try and they all get dashed anyway? what if we risk and lose again? the “what if’s” mount, hope gets held at bay, and we miss out on the thing that Jesus kept pointing to over and over and over again—life now. love now. hope now.
at the refuge’s saturday evening gatherings we are walking through the 
but i want to remind everyone, remind myself, that the refuge would have been perfectly fine without this space. you see, the church is always the people, not a building. and people committed to God & each other, no matter where they gather—houses, coffee shops, golf courses, apartment buildings, weird rented spaces—are what create the church, the beautiful, diverse, wild and wonderful body of Christ. the conversations that happen during the week, the phone calls, the emails, the prayers, the tangible help & hope that gets passed on in big & small ways, the neighbors that are loved, the scriptures that are shared, the words of encouragement, the serving, the giving, the learning, the growing, the falling down & getting back up, the grace, the truth, Christ’s love made real—that’s the church. 
NOTE: this is a re-post from 
as you all know by now, i have a lot of issues with “church.” i love love love people gathered together in all kinds of ways to learn and practice loving God, our neighbors, ourselves. it’s the programs, the inauthenticity, the power b.s., the unnaturalness of it all that i can do without. i believe wholeheartedly, in every fabric of my being, that without community and deep connection with other people (whatever that may look like) we will never be able to live out the ways of Jesus and experience the fullness of relationship with God. i am fairly convinced typical church systems that feed inspiration addiction provide a false sense of spiritual maturity where learning “about” certain things becomes enough and we are never forced to actually be in meaningful intimate connection with the people we sit next to week after week. lives need to be rubbed up against other lives. that’s where the real action happens and we learn what it means to really love & be loved.
