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You folks may be familiar with the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s shelter ministry down in Toronto known as Evangel Hall. They’ve a really amazing ministry there providing medical and dental care, temporary housing even for special needs people, clothing, help with job searching, bathing facilities, a chaplain, and that’s just getting started. Evangel Hall also serves meals every day of the week, but for Sunday dinner they like to provide churches with the opportunity to come and serve. This is a wonderful thing.
My last church was close enough to Toronto to go down a couple of times a year to serve the Sunday dinner. It was a big effort for my church for we averaged only in the upper twenties on a Sunday. We had to bring enough food for close to a hundred people and ourselves. We had to get there in plenty of time to prepare the meal in their kitchen with enough volunteers to cook, serve, and clean up afterwards. We were small and mighty and we did it joyfully and efficiently. Once we had done it a couple of times everybody knew what they each had to do and we did it and it never became a labour of love but was always a joy. I even brought along a couple of musician friends to provide a little hillbilly indigestion to accompany the meal. When everybody was served, we served ourselves and sat and ate with the people and made friends. After dinner, we took whoever wanted to go down to the chapel and had a little informal church service that was a really beautiful moment in time.
I don’t want to say these meals were a miracle of loaves and fishes. It was just a group of relatively well-off white-people pulling together $400-500 and donating a Sunday afternoon and evening to provide a meal to some folks who otherwise wouldn’t have had a meal on Sunday. The real miracle, the real gift was the sharing of lives; the building of relationships in what I would call a wilderness place, getting to hear the stories of people who for so many reasons just aren’t able to do life the way “society” expects them to do it. I’m sure Jesus would say, “To such as these belongs the Kingdom of God.”
Now, if I may, let me share another meal experience I’ve had as a minister that for me was not so uplifting. It was a thing called a Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. There was an element in the ministerial association in the community where my last church was who thought it would be good to let the mayor and other local government officials know that the local churches were praying for them. Good idea, but…you know, I would have whole-heartedly supported the event if it had just been a thing where the Ministerial invited the Mayor and the Councillors for breakfast in the fellowship hall of one of our churches and we shared a meal and then prayed for them, but that’s not how those Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast things work. Let me bring you up to speed.
It was a well-catered event for which everybody had to pay, I think it was about $35 a person. You got a little break on the deal if you could get enough people from your church to fill a whole table, about eight. Of course, there was some status associated with being able to do that. It’s been a while, but I think the venue wound up being either a big meeting area in the town offices or one of the local banquet halls. The local business community was also invited as if this were a Chamber of Commerce event. They were also given a reduced price if they could bring enough employees to fill a table. Posters went up all over town. There was a motivational type of speaker and a brief prayer at the end.
Being a frugal Presbyterian with some Mennonite in my background, I had a hard time seeing the purpose in the event. The people who attended, the mayor included, were already involved in local churches so it wasn’t outreach. It wasn’t even a fundraiser for a special need in the community. The caterers got the money. There wasn’t much socializing afterwards. Everybody had to get to work. I questioned why we were having this breakfast. Knowing the theological tradition from which the idea of the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast arose down in the States, at best it seems they hope that they can build a type of relationship between the Ministerial and town council that was enjoyed by Billy Graham and American Presidents. But…, and I don’t want to sound cynical but I guess I am…, I am suspicious that these breakfasts are just a way of letting local politicians know there is a Christian voting block they need to consider next time they run for office. Anyway, a good time was had by all, but the next year when the Ministerial decided to organize another one of those things, I just stopped participating in the Ministerial. It just didn’t feel right.
These two meals show two different ways the church can be in the world. We can serve others unconditionally or we can court power. In his Gospel, Mark presents us with these two options. First, we have Jesus miraculously serving a meal of abundance to the crowds of people who followed him everywhere because he was bringing hope and healing to them. He also told of the feast that King Herod threw for his cronies where his young stepdaughter danced so seductively well that he promised to give her anything she wanted. Her mother put her up to asking for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. She found his prophetic voice concerning her having two husbands a bit too challenging. Thus, the church can be a “meal”, so to speak, that brings in the Kingdom of God or it can be a “meal” that courts power and kills its prophetic voice.
The Ministry at Evangel Hall is a “meal” like Jesus’ Feast of Loaves and Fishes. Presbyterians all over Canada give what amounts to a loaf or a fish to Presbyterians Sharing and it’s funnelled through to Evangel Hall to where it becomes a feast of abundance of sustenance for people in some really challenging situations and their lives are changed. The people who come to Evangel Hall if they keep coming back and take full advantage of what’s offered there, they will get a taste of salvation now in the Kingdom of God that manifests wherever Jesus is.
This is World Communion Sunday. Churches all over the world are sharing this meal that speaks loudly of who we are as the church of Jesus Christ and what our mission is in the world. This bread is his body given for us. This juice is his blood shed for the forgiveness or our sin. This meal demonstrates the way of unconditional love, wasteful, sacrificial unconditional love. This meal says he is with us and by the presence of the Holy Spirit he is indeed here with us. It’s a little meal that doesn’t solve the world’s problems or sate our hunger in the present. It points to the future when Jesus will return and put out the “feast” – put the world to rights. It’s a little bit of nourishment to our bodies that shows us how we, the Body of Christ, are to be in the world. We are not to court power. That will take away our prophetic voice. We are to share this “meal” little by little, through little acts of wasteful, sacrificial unconditional love give whenever, wherever, however we can as Jesus leads us through the voice of the Holy Spirit so that Jesus may be seen and felt as his kingdom becomes visible through these small, tangible, life changing ways until he comes. Amen.
