HELLO!

On Sunday, October 18^th our focus will be World Food Day. Food is about the relationships that join us to the earth, fellow creatures, loved ones and guests, and ultimately God. How we eat testifies to whether we value the creatures we live with and depend upon. We acknowledge and honour God as the giver of every good gift. We also learn to correct our arrogance, boredom and ingratitude. Eating invites people to develop a deeper appreciation for where they are and who they are with. We must eat together to know God. Food plays an important role in the great story of God and God’s people in the Bible. Abraham offered hospitality to angels (who appeared as strangers). God, in spite of rebellion in the wilderness, fed the Hebrews with manna. Jesus took one boy’s picnic lunch and fed five thousand. While the disciples were on the run, after the execution of Jesus, they met a stranger and only when he broke bread with them, was he revealed to be their friend and Saviour, Jesus.

In another Gospel story Jesus “showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.” And John records Jesus cooked a grilled fish breakfast for the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Spirituality and relationships are so often connected to eating. It makes us human. We talk about “being fed” spiritually, or we call friends and make plans to eat together. Eating is human. Relationships are human. Spirituality is human. While we cannot exist without food. That’s why it’s rare to experience a social gathering without food: because we sense in some elemental way feeding our bodies feeds our souls and moves our relationships to deeper levels. We live better when we eat together.

In her memoir, “Take This Bread”, Sara Miles, relates what happened to her when she wandered into a church one day and “ate Jesus.”  She was hungering and thirsting for righteousness, she writes, and she “found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all. I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honoured.” For Miles, this conversion at the Table led her to start a ministry centered on food. She opened food pantries in northern California, feeding hundreds each week. As she describes it, her work led her to meet “thieves, millionaires, day labourers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, and bishops,” widening what she considered her community in ways both scary and exhilarating. Miles reminds us, “Belief didn't come first. Food did”. Peace, Kevin