Powerful Bread for a Stranger
Sometimes things just don’t fit in our neat theological categories. I found the following in a sermon by Brett Younger of the McAfee School of theology, Atlanta, Georgia.
“Sarah Miles is a former atheist who is director of the food pantry at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. She calls it the ‘Church of the One True Sack of Groceries.’ As a journalist she covered the 1980’s wars in Central America up close where people were dying and later became an editor for the investigative magazine Mother Jones. It was after that that she found herself walking into St. Gregory’s Church.
‘I was just curious. I’m a reporter. I’m curious. I like to poke my nose in places, and I walked into this building thinking, Huh, wonder what’s going on in there? I had wandered into a church that offers communion to everyone, including strangers. (A most unlutheran practice, though for those of us who served in large churches it probably happens more often than some people in the LCMS might condone.) A woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine. I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me. So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening. I got out of church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me, and came back the next week because I was hungry, and kept coming back and kept coming back to take that bread. I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith turned out not to be believing in a doctrine or knowing how to behave in a church, or being the right kind of person, or being raised correctly, or repeating the rituals. The requirement for faith seemed to be hunger. It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.’”
I was just looking at I Corinthians 10-11. While not discarding the need to discern the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, in 12:4, Paul writes of the varieties of gifts that come from the one Spirit. Any time we deal with the Holy Spirit we have to take into account that like the wind, the Spirit blows where it wills, even blowing where Pieper’s Dogmatics may not want it to blow. Of course the Spirit always wills to bring people into contact with Jesus. We have Jesus word on that. We also have Jesus word that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed, perhaps even if they don’t realize it.
The Holy Spirit used the bread Sarah Miles ate to lead her to know that “The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God.’” (Psalm 14:1) On the Gospel side the Spirit invited her, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” It is as Mary sang, “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”
May the Spirit help us be hungry next Sunday when we take bread in which our powerful Lord is present.
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