Feeding and Being Fed

by Nathan Brasfield, Director of Youth and Outreach Ministries

I was recently confirmed at Calvary with a group that included six of our youth who participated in my confirmation class. It was a joyous day for me, and not only because it was such an important day for these six young confirmands but also because it was a celebration and affirmation of my own journey to the Episcopal Church, which, in my experience at least, has always had something to do with food.

In 2012, I saw an ad in the newspaper for a “Lenten Preaching Series and Waffle Shop” where a New Testament scholar I liked would speak. While I initially visited Calvary for the preaching, what kept me coming back was the food. As anyone who has attended knows, the festiveness of the Waffle Shop serving up unique recipes for Memphians during Lent is pure joy. Also, I began to feel that at this church I could be fully received as I was, even at the communion table. And so, for a few years after that, I came to Calvary on most Sunday mornings for just that reason.

In 2015, I was welcomed and befriended by a particular group of folks during a personally transformative experience at the Wild Goose Festival in the mountains of North Carolina. I had unexpectedly come out as gay at the festival during a Q&A session, and as I met people afterward, four people, in particular, came to form a special community that would encourage me and give me space to be who I was. All four were Episcopalians.

Two of these Episcopalians I had known of before I had even thought about going to the festival. One is Sara Miles, who wrote what had become my single favorite book. In Take This Bread, Sara chronicles how, as an atheist, she wanders into a Eucharist service at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, motivated by nothing more than her journalistic curiosity. As she receives communion, she finds in the bread and wine—to her astonishment—the “impossible reality” (p. 16) of the God she didn’t believe in. Later, as a response to how she had been fed from the communion table, Sara starts a food pantry that freely gives away produce from inside the church and around the communion table itself as an extension of the Eucharist. Ultimately, this one food pantry ends up spawning about a dozen others in the poorest parts of the city. 

The other Episcopalian who became part of this community that I so needed at that time in my life, and who I also knew of from Sara’s book, is the Rev. Paul Fromberg, the rector at St. Gregory’s. (Paul will also be the first speaker of the Lenten Preaching Series this coming year). He and the larger congregation at St. Gregory’s would continue to be an inspirational presence in my life as I journeyed toward coming out in my everyday life at home, since not long after that first Wild Goose Festival, I started visiting St. Gregory’s on occasional trips to San Francisco. It was such a meaningful experience for me to share in communion from the very same table that was so meaningful for Sara because her story and her insights about her encounter with the divine through food had so deeply nourished me in my church work in those days, much of which had to do with responding to the needs of those who hunger in various ways.

One of the main lessons that Sara aims to teach with her story is that despite the inherent ritualistic symbolism of eating a communion wafer and taking a sip of wine from a chalice as we do nearly every time we gather in worship, this act still involves the eating of actual food. As the church’s central sacrament, the way we eat at the Eucharist should shape all of our eating—including how we feed others. “Eucharistic eating” is what some theologians have called this. It is a way of feeding and being fed that replicates what we receive and what we share at the communion table where everyone is welcome, where everyone is an equal recipient of grace, and where the actual bread and wine of the meal matter as much as the body and blood of Christ.

This way of feeding and being fed inevitably leads to relating to God and neighbor differently, and the ways we relate to God and neighbor are intimately intertwined. Sara continues to discover this as she sets out to launch the food pantry while learning to deal with a growing awareness of the divine all around her. “If I wanted to see God,” she writes, “I could feed people” (93). 

We have a big opportunity at Calvary to practice this way of feeding and being fed. At the annual Emmanuel Meal on December 16 at noon this year, we are planning for 400 of our downtown neighbors to come to us for a Christmas meal. The word “Emmanuel” means “God with us,” and it is an act of faith and faithfulness to trust and respond that God is with us during the meal. The Emmanuel Meal and all of its costs depend entirely on donations, and there are many spots to sign up to volunteer.

“To feed others,” Sara concludes, “means acknowledging our own hunger and at the same time acknowledging the amazing abundance we’re fed with by God” (116). And, as she states, the Christianity she discovered and came to embody was not one of mere belief but of action. So, with us preparing for the Emmanuel Meal and for all other ways that we may feed and be fed, it is all the more appropriate for us to consider the question that Sara poses to the reader after one of her chapters: “Now that you’ve taken the bread, what are you going to do?” (97)