Readings: 2 Timothy 1: 1-14, Luke 17:5-10
We pray:
speak to us through your Word, O God that we might hear what it is that
you would have us be and do – in the power of the Spirit and in the name of
Jesus. Amen.
Have confidence, says Jesus, that when you
take the risk of faith seriously, from one small moment of planting can come
great things because you are clothed in the power of God. And to serve is, in
itself, enough.
Today I want to share the story and the
words of a person for whom this became an absolute truth, someone who, despite
their best efforts to avoid anything even remotely religious in their life, experienced
the transforming power of God - in the act of eating and drinking round the
table of Holy Communion. Her name is
Sara Miles, she lives in America and her story begins in her words:
“One early, cloudy morning when I was
forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of
wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens
of millions [of Americans] –except up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly
secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its
fundamentalist crusades. This was my
first communion. It changed everything.”[1]
In her book “Take This Bread” Sara
describes her early life and her family background – all grandparents were
active preachers, evangelists, missionaries – her mother carried as a baby in a
laundry hamper to Baghdad and her father born in the mountains of Burma. They were drawn, all of them, to a social
gospel of transformation through Jesus – they all of them found the transition
back into ministry in America difficult and frustrating. Sara’s parents were having none of this –
proud as they were of their parents sense of justice and care, they were
determinedly secular, deeply uneasy of many of religion’s perceived values and
cultural dogmatisms and aggressively anti faith of any kind.
The adult Sara stepped out into the world
of the 70’s and 80s – an activist, journalist, chef, she was involved in wars,
revolutions, the rights of the poor and marginalised – she was in there boots
and all. She was bi-sexual, spending time in relationships with both men and
women, became a mother – and she sat beside friends dying of aids, hearing some
in the church saying this was just reward for indulging in the perversity of homosexuality. Throughout this time, these experiences, food
had always been important to her – that sense of hospitality around the table,
of sharing food with the needy out the back door of the seedy restaurant, of
creating bonds and sharing experience with other people, of understanding the
world really.
And so in that moment of eating a simple
piece of bread – wheat and yeast and water – she found all her life experiences
coming together in a profoundly meaningful way where she recognised her hunger
was not just for food, not just for justice and peace, but for something
bigger. Continuing with her words: “
Holy communion knocked me upside down and forced me to deal with the impossible
reality of God...... Faith for me didn’t
provide a set of easy answers or certainties: it raised more questions than I was
ever comfortable with. The bits of my
past – family, work, war, love – came apart as I stumbled into church, then
reassembled, through the works communion inspired me to do, into a new life
centred on feeding strangers: food and bodies, transformed. I wound up ...in something hungrier and
wilder than I had ever expected; the suffering, fractious, and unboundaried
body of Christ.”[2]
And what happened was this: Sara turned
that bread of communion into tons of groceries, piled up at the church to be
given away, establishing food pantries all over the neighbourhood, food for the
poor, elderly, sick, the helpless and hopeless and marginalised – helping not
just to feed them but to help them belong at the table. From a small moment a
deeply effective and profound ministry of feeding not just herself but as many
as she could reach who were hungry.
So how could she, who had always seen any
religious practice or belief as intrinsically entangled with all that was wrong
with the world, how could she even slightly connect with this God. Yet she did – in that moment of the taking of
the bread and wine she recognised Christ as a force for connection, for
healing, for love – a force that could change our own real lives, not to
mention the world, for the better. And this is how she puts it:
“..this is my belief: that at the heart of
Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us. As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could
speak even to me: not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild mannered
liberal Christianity, or the blustering hellfire of the religious right. 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 make 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. It offers food without
exception to the worthy and the unworthy, the screwed up and the pious, and
then commands everyone to do the same. ...and it insists that by opening
ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we
will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are
one body: God’s.”[3]
Faith, for Sara, wasn’t and isn’t about
proving the rightness, the existence of God, or even establishing the doctrine of
God – it was about living within the reality of the table where all are welcome
and acting that out in her life.
And so as we come to the table today, along
with people throughout the world, up and down the country and across all
denominational boundaries in this city may we know it as more than a familiar
ritual, more than a place of safe homecoming, more than a place where Christ
says ‘well done you good and faithful
servant’. May it also be a place to
which we bring our offerings, in the real expectation of sharing them with those hungry for food and
for life, a place where we encounter Christ and are at peace with each other,
where we welcome the stranger into our family and from where we go, transformed,
to offer hospitality to all those who have need of it. Amen
Margaret Garland
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