Today's texts tie together food and God. God is all about feeding whatever our hungers are. Or as Sara Miles put it in her book Take This Bread, “There's a hunger beyond food that's expressed in food, and that's why feeding is always a kind of miracle.”
The texts were:
Isaiah 55:1-5 (How can anybody not love a text that starts "Ho"?)
As usual, what follows are the script notes from which the sermon was delivered. If a recording is available I will link it here.
Dana:
This is such a strange season – for all of us. I'm so grateful that we are finding safe and creative ways to gather and continue in fellowship and service – church workdays and graduation parties, book discussion and prayer time, doorstep cookie drop-offs and these regular WebEx worship services.
I confess, though, that one of the things I am missing most are our Peace Covenant potlucks. I miss having time to sit around a table with you all without an agenda, talking about who made which dish and how our lives are going. The standing monthly meal together is one of my favorite parts of our fellowship: it makes it easy to invite people into our community, it creates an obvious way to connect with our community partners – like EAPC and the ESL class a couple of summers ago - , and it is built in time to just...be together. We nourish our bodies and our relationships at those monthly potlucks.
Those Peace Covenant potlucks are more than just people hanging out together, though: I believe that they are tiny little glimpses of what life in God's Kingdom looks like. Everybody is welcome. Everybody eats. No one bothers to check to see if you brought something to share or not, and even when the pickings are slim (sometimes, so slim that an envoy is sent to Harris Teeter during worship for a cheese tray to supplement the seventeen pies), we still leave the meal nourished.
Eating together is a sign of God's plan for the world. All throughout scripture, God's provision is explained as a meal; a feast; a banquet. When the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness, God rains down manna from on high. Isaiah proclaims that God's people are the ones who “share their bread with the hungry.” When Elijah is on a prophetic journey and at his wits end, a poor widow cooks the last of her flour into a cake for him and saves both their lives, along with the widow's son's. Elisha, following in his mentor's steps, multiplies the oil of another widow and feeds one hundred people. Ezekiel says that one of God's promises is that “...the trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase. They shall be secure on their soil … when I break the bars of their yoke, and save them from the hands of those who enslaved them … I will provide for them a splendid vegetation so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land … ” (Ezekiel 34:27-29). The Psalmist sings of God who satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things, a song that Jesus' own mother echoes, singing about the God who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away.
God loves a good feast. Feeding and being fed; eating together; sharing a meal; bonding over food is a deeply important part of what it means to be witnesses to God's reign in the world.
So, I'm missing our monthly potlucks – those little monthly opportunities to participate in the reign of God's grace and mercy and provision here and now.
I think God loves a good potluck, but I also know – especially in these days – that God is not bound to the boxes of human habit that we try to keep Her in. We might not be able to participate in Peace Covenant potlucks right now, but that doesn't mean that we can't partake in God's holy banquet.
In fact, a few of us have been participating in the feast right down the road at the Park Town Food Hub during these pandemic months. And if the story of the Food Hub isn't one of loaves and fishes, well, I don't know what is. Sharon Schulze is with us this morning, and I'll just invite her to tell that story herself.
Sharon:
When I started seminary two days after my 50th birthday in 2013 I was very clear that my call was not to parish ministry. I had a lot of reasons why but those reasons weren’t actually what was going on. I did not know what the call WAS – but I knew it wasn’t traditional parish ministry.
The last great hope of the denomination folks was the year-long internship I would do from 2017-2018. You will do your internship and THEN you will understand that being a parish pastor is the BEST THING EVER!
Instead I learned that the ELCA has something called mission developers.
So when the bishop visited a few weeks later I told him I knew what I was going to do – I was going to be a mission developer. He did not miss a beat but asked “what mission will you develop?” I knew at some rudimentary level but I didn’t say it. I didn’t want anybody else to tell me I wasn’t hearing what I was pretty sure God was saying.
Several years later I found out that Aja Purnell-Mitchell, my partner at the hub and the person who started the food pantry work that would be the seed of the Parktown Food Hub, was having a vision of a community gathering place where people could have their needs met – food, housing information, whatever needs they might have.
When Lisa and I met Aja for the first time we expected to ask her a lot of questions. What actually happened is that she described her current activities and we sat with mouths open. Then we squeezed into my little red Ford Ranger (not the room Blue Thunder I have now!) and drove over to what is now the hub space. Aja walked in and said “Oh yes, this is it. This will work for the hub.”
And that’s the day the Parktown Food Hub was actually born.
There had been talk of moving Parkwood UMC to a more community-oriented group and call it Parktown to indicate that the reach is beyond the Parkwood community into all of South Durham.
Lisa had secured $2500 from her employer, RTI International, to upfit the space bringing the first employer in RTP back into the first neighborhood in RTP, to start something new for what is now one of (if not THE) youngest and wealthiest regions in North Carolina.
Local stores kept giving us things (like all the paint) so in the end the original funds were essentially more than doubled.
It was as if a little bit of seed money was growing something much bigger and the entire community was getting excited.
Dana:
One of the striking parts of this passage about Jesus is that he's headed out to a deserted place because he's tired. But he sees the crowds following him and, Matthew tells us, “had compassion for them, and cured the sick.” After all the healing, the disciples say “Jesus, tell the crowd to leave so they can go get some food! It's late! But Jesus says “They don't need to leave; YOU give them something to eat.” The disciples are sort of baffled by Jesus' command, but – unsurprisingly – Jesus turns out to be right. Sharon, does that line from Jesus “YOU give them something to eat!” resonate with your work at the Hub?
Sharon:
Thursday before last you might remember the tremendous thunderstorm that came right over this area. We had just received three trucks of food. We had so much because the food bank had extra. All that food had come to us without cost. We didn’t even have to pick it up! They brought it to us and put it wherever we pointed. It wouldn’t all fit under our big porch roof so we had set up a tent over three pallets of produce. It was a great big free abundance.
But in the storm, water gathered on the tent and it didn’t just fall over, the aluminum legs snapped. The boxes were getting soaked.
As I sat inside and watched the tent break, watched the food get baptized in a ferocious storm, and I thought… now what? It was so easy to think in terms of scarcity: we don’t have space, we can’t even keep the vegetables dry, we don’t have the people, this is all just too much… but really the only thing that was scarce at that moment was generosity.
The largest number of families we had served before was 120… but that day 141 families came. The line routinely winds around the mosque parking lot in two rows, but that day there were three rows. The 141 families probably included about 600 people (you know, including men and children, since mostly it is women who come to pick up the food).
I cannot even imagine feeding 5000 people (plus women and children). I CANNOT IMAGINE. 600 people about did me in. But God was telling us “YOU need to give this food away to all these people who have come out in the rain.”
But that wasn’t the end, either. Our vision board had urged us to feed anyone who was in line by 6 pm. I was still wearing my scarcity hat and I didn’t want to. I wanted to FINISH at 6 pm so we could start the hours of cleaning up the mess that remained.
So I was what I thought was ‘generous’ and at 5:45 I went over and stood behind the last car in line. A few minutes later a car drove up and I said “I’m sorry – no mas, no mas, come back next week.” The women smiled and drove away and I looked across the street and saw that there were still eggs and produce, cold foods, and potatoes, there was still so much left.
And I was convicted.
Despite feeding at least 141 families I was racked with guilt that it wasn’t 142. I ended up telling two families “ok, but I need you to take extra” but even now, I feel ashamed that I told that car to leave – that I couldn’t be generous.
The last two families got containers of eggs that had 1-2 cracked eggs, leftover produce and cold items. It was an unusual mix of stuff, but there was a lot of it! It was kind of like those 12 baskets.
They received a bounty because there was so much left and because my conviction made me want to be more generous. Because somehow we did not give in to scarcity and in a rumbling stumbling bumbling way managed to end on a note of generosity.
Dana:
Another part of this scripture that really hits home is that “everyone ate and were filled, and there were LEFTOVERS.” I love that everybody gets to eat – that Jesus didn't take names or ask for identification or require proof that people needed food – somehow, in the process of sharing and eating, everyone was filled. I think that kind of universal invitation is part of the Food Hub's ministry, too, right, Sharon?
Sharon:
It is a core principle of the Parktown Food Hub that we will never require people do “demonstrate need.” Although we do have to collect a small amount of information for the federal program that has been providing some of the food that is keeping us going now, we do not believe that it is our place to judge whether a family “is really in need.”
This is not to say that some families have greater need than others, but we feel totally inadequate to judge what that need is. If a family comes to the Parktown Food Hub then we assume they have some need that they believe food will help meet.
It’s hard sometimes because some people are VERY FRUSTRATING. For example, one family came on a Thursday but all of the non-perishables from Monday were still in their trunk. Another group brings a Suburban that is so full of tires and junk that it’s hard to find space for the three portions of food that they receive. In spite of situations like that, we have decided to just assume that every carrot, every onion, every package of chicken is somehow meeting a need. That Jesus is somehow saying “YOU are the one who can meet that need.”
And there are all kinds of needs: a young woman whose father died of COVID and was crying as she waited in line. Another woman brings me small amounts of donations – often strange things! – and then stays to talk for half an hour. We have children who QUIVER with excitement to be helping and adults who spend hours talking and sharing with one another as they pack boxes and wait for people to show up for their Monday appointments. Especially now during COVID-time, we seem to be meeting all sorts of needs.
One thing I hadn’t yet figured out was how to bring the cohort of volunteers together with the cohort of people who come to get food.
But then Pastor Dana facilitated a conversation between Darla Kay and I which resulted in a physically-distanced Story Circle with ten people from all the different groups that come to the hub… including Mega, our very brave Parkwood neighborhood Black Lives Matter protester.
Darla Kay had said “we must have at least 10 people” so I invited 12 people, hand-picked to bring together people from all of the hub constituencies. On the day of the event, 10 people had arrived and I was SO RELIEVED. And then Mega’s partner walked up and said she was here, but she didn’t know why, and would I please explain why Mega wanted her to attend?
She joined one of the groups (thanks to Darla Kay’s very warm and gracious welcome of her and her two children) and ended up saying “I’m wasn’t sure how much I wanted to share but I’m just going to go for it and share the whole story.”
It was as if God was saying “you need 10? I’ll send you 11. Because that’s how I roll. When you are walking with me you will be showered with abundance.”
The Story Circles were a huge hit and we intend to continue them – I hope some of you will attend. But it is just another part of the unfolding of the vision that was planting in Aja and I in October 2018. That Parkwood UMC, especially Pastor Anita and Lisa and Bob, bought into and helped multiply the resources made available in the summer of 2019. The vision that had us in the right place to support McDougald Terrace residents and that now has us placed as a significant support for families who are being battered by the effects of COVID.
You might think I am here to tell a story of what we did, and I will ALWAYS be delighted to tell that story… but ultimately that’s not why I’m here. This is a story of how God kept planting seed, watering the seed (sometimes with a thunderstorm!) and leading the people who need to be together to the place where their needs and gifts would intersect.
God is planting seeds for you, too. You might want to come join our group at the hub and that would be awesome! We love growing our community and caring for the existing community. But maybe your thing is somewhere else, doing something else. Then go do that. Just follow the abundance of passion and people and care.
Dana:
Specific opportunities:
* Food Hub!
* Food Bank
* DCIA supply drive
* Help welcome Kiera & Will
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