What Feeds Us
Rev. Ron Robinson,
Unitarian Universalist Church of Bartlesville, Sunday, July 19
Reading:
If we will have the wisdom to
survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing,
enriching it...
If we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or
heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
Fields and gardens rich in the
windows.
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
And over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows,
Stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
In the voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground.
They will take nothing from the
ground they will not return
Whatever he grief at parting.
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
- Wendell Berry
Sermon:
Today we will be off
for the annual church camp east of Tulsa called the Southwest UU Summer
Institute. I first heard about it at a person’s house for a newcomers party
when I started attending my first UU church in 1977 in Oklahoma City. Except
for one or two years, I have been going to SWUUSI ever since. This year’s theme
is Food and Justice and Faith, something dear to our hearts in our church, or
missional community, in far north Tulsa. My wife Bonnie will be doing a
workshop on planting a garden and harvesting community; I will be doing a
workshop on church as a garden, as a meal, as a store, and as a shelter. This
sermon grows out of preparing for the workshop.
First, a few facts,
then a few parables, or miracle stories, on what really feeds us.
In 2009, the University of Oklahoma did a nutrition study
with us that found in our area of far north Tulsa 60 percent can't afford
healthy food even if there was access to it; 55 percent worry about the amount
of food they have; 29 percent skip meals. In 2013 we did another study with OU
of those who came to our free cornerstore pantry. It showed that 52.6 percent
of those who come to us have high food insecurity; and 42.1 percent have very
high food insecurity, experiencing hunger symptoms when surveyed; 68.4 percent
of households have at least one member with a nutrition-related chronic
disease; 53 percent suffer depression and admit it; 47 percent with anxiety; 53
percent have high blood pressure; 32 percent high cholesterol; 47 percent
obese. 63 percent have under $10,000 annual household income, meaning they are
part of the couple hundred thousand Oklahomans who are too poor for Obamacare
because our state didn’t expand Medicaid.
Getting people food then is just a small part of what is
needed, but for many it is what is needed right at that moment they come; it
takes a little bit of the hunger and anxiety edge off that makes it just a
little bit easier to make better daily life choices and responses, to move, if
just for a little while, from deep to light survival mode. In our zipcode that
dies 14 years sooner than those on the other side of town, the matter of food
is a matter of physical and mental health, and from those, a matter of civic health,
the ability to participate in society, which itself feeds back to better
overall physical and mental health.
Food is part of the social determinants of health that along
with genetics accounts for 80 percent of that life expectancy, and yet as a society
we only spend 20 percent of health dollars on those social determinants, like
food projects and neighborhood environments, which contribute to 80 percent of
health outcomes. Our zipcode has the worst health care access of any zipcode in
Tulsa, but as important as that is to life expectancy, and we need better
access, we need even more the shift to resourcing the social determinants. Community matters, above all. It is why we
repeat, and repeat, that we do not aim to give out food, as much as we strive
to give out community opportunities. It is funny though that so many people
want to fund food; they believe helping us give food, which is vitally needed,
will affect those statistics; but what doesn’t get funded, and what would
really affect those statistics, is to fund community opportunities, increasing portals
of relationships.
Now for the parables and miracles.
First, The parable of the Whole Wheat Rotini. In ordering
food from the Food Bank for our free grocery store, we had a chance to order
boxes of whole wheat rotini pasta without having to pay a shared fee for them;
we thought, pretty healthy, pretty easy to cook, win win. Now, our store is
like a store by design—people shop in it for what they want; we don’t just hand
out bags of groceries (we do that a few times a year as we did this past
Thursday when we give out four or five tons in one hour, but that is an outside
event and not in the store). And week after week the rotini sat virtually
untouched. We kept upping how many bags they could to count as one item; kept
getting untouched.
So we started carefully asking how come—the first response
was often that it being whole wheat, looking brown, was just too different from
the noodles they were used to and their family wouldn’t eat it and so they didn’t
want to waste one of their precious number of allowed items for something that
wouldn’t be eaten by their family. Well, that’s why we do the store the way it
is; people’s choices empower them which creates capacity within them which
brings hope which brings change. That was a good familiar lesson to be reminded
of—how to work in relationship as an ally, and not as “a provider”. Allies “don’t
know best”. End of parable, I thought. But the good parables, like good
relationships, keep opening up more truth.
As we were asking and prompting about the Rotini, a few brave
souls opened up to us that it would do no good to take the pasta home because
they didn’t have water turned on in their home. Once we started asking about
that, more and more said the same. Choosing between electricity and food and
medicine and water, water usually was the first to go. The Rotini sitting on
the shelves then led us into a more intense water ministry; we were able to get
a lot of tornado leftover bottled water from Oklahoma City, giving out double
cases to those without water at home, and we got other donations of water in
bigger jugs, and told people to keep the jugs and come back and use our hydrant
out back of the community center, or the hydrant at our gardenpark and orchard.
This summer the water donations have dried up, the tornado water all gone, and
it is one of the most requested items. And now, thanks to a failure of being
able to give away whole wheat Rotini, we are tracking the prevalence of a lack
of water in homes, which is allowing us to get a better understanding of what
home consists of in our neighborhoods, where campers, RVs, shipping crates,
tents, cars that don’t run, abandoned houses, abandoned trailers, someone’s
garage, campsites and more are homes; and we have learned more about what it
takes for someone to be fed, which is more than food. As always, we, who live
in the neighborhoods too, are taught by our neighbors, and in return we can be
a more effective partner shining a light on realities and walking toward the
suffering. The parable also teaches me that we should have a right to at least
a base amount of water in the home for free; over a certain amount, charge; but
allow a set amount for free.
Next, the parable of the Stevia and the Strawberry.
So five summers ago we were busy at this time trying and
trying to raise the funds to buy a block of abandoned houses and trashed out
properties up on a hill in our area in order to turn it into a gardenpark and
orchard. We did it. Four years ago this summer we planted the orchard. For
three years after that we had the spiritual lesson of having, in our healthy
food desert, to pick off the fruit as it was coming on in order for the energy
of the trees to go into the roots and help establish the tree for its future
yield. It is actually a law from Leviticus that we like. And at the garden we
have planted successful herb beds full of basils, rosemary, lavender, fennel, dill,
several mints, and stevia. It is the bed that we use to show how you can eat
right from the beds, while you are working on other beds or just to feed
yourself while enjoying the park and the view of downtown Tulsa or Turley Hill
or the Bird Creek bottomland.
Stevia is a sweet tasting plant. When the neighborhood kids
come into the garden, tentatively, we always try to get them to eat straight
from the garden beds. We follow a recipe of Taste, Learn to Cook, then grow. We
learned early on that some community gardens in some places may grow out of
community first; it seems to be the original typical way, for an urban
apartment complex or neighborhood for example where people already know they
want to grow their own food for taste and health and pockebook, and have the
skills, and all they need is land and organization. But in many places, like
ours, there is no community first, the social capital is gone, and there isn’t much
experience with tasting or much knowledge about cooking, let alone growing. The
garden has to come first, we have learned, and community is one of the things
it grows; sometimes there is drought and little harvest of community; sometimes
the yield is amazing.
We get a few schools that bring their young people out to see
and help in the gardenpark; usually these are from across town and not from our
own area, and part of that is because for more than a few years more than a few
of our school buildings were closed because of education cuts. Their visits to
us are fund, a little chaotic of course, sometimes the work that gets done is
not too proportional to the time organizing and helping them, but they are
always worth it because we tell them that a little bit goes a long way in a
poverty area, but even moreso that they are now the storytellers and
ambassadors for us, and what they learn they can teach others about us and
places like ours. But there is always some heartbreak when these students
travel from across town to be with us; first, it is because for most of them it
is the first time they have been north or into north neighborhoods and not just
travelling through on a highway; the stories they tell of what people say to
them before they come north, about watching out, being scared, is sad. It is
even more heartbreaking, though, when the students run straight to the garden
bed full of the mints and stevia and start in eating them; they recognize them,
they have them in their beds at home.
Heartbreaking because the very same day we might have youth
from our neighborhood come by and not only can we not get them to try eating
out of the bed with the stevia, we sometimes can’t get them to pick and eat the
strawberries. They may not be safe or taste good because they haven’t come from
the store, from 1500 miles away. They often do not know what cucumbers are,
where pickles come from. The executive director of the Food Bank says that more
and more students are growing up without ever having experienced a sit-down
family meal around a table with food cooked at home; at school, at home, meals
come in a box. This parable teaches me that a 21st century home
economics course for all students should be required. And it has motivated us
more to create a future greenhouse at the park for teaching as well as growing
year round, and to use the park as a social place, as an outside café; feeding
people from the garden so they will see not only how the food tastes better
than anything you can buy at a store, but as gardening social activist Ron
Finley says, Growing your own food is like printing your own money. And it has
spurred us on to create five gallon buckets full of tomato and pepper plants from
the garden to get to people from our free grocery store who want practice growing
food at home. We know that the vision isn’t to get people to come and use our
community garden, even to come and find community with us, but the vision for
deeper health is to go to them and get them growing at home, across different
yards, developing the free food movement where they have their vegetables out
front by the curb along with other neighbors growing other vegetables out by
their curbs, where people know they can walk from house to house sampling. Food
as portal to relationships in an era when the old front porch or stoop has
often been lost.
We are speaking of what the bumper sticker says: The most
radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another. Especially people
who don’t look, act, think alike. One way we do that in our place where there
are no venues for entertainment, no movie houses, is to put on community
festivals, and usually we do that at holiday times. This leads me to the miracle
of the Halloween Nachos and the 80 Year Old Woman.
Once we made our missional church transformation and moved on
faith into a rented commercial space twice as big as our original rented space,
we held our second annual Halloween festival for the community and whereas
before when we invited people to our Halloween party inside the space we called
church we had about 20 people who all looked and thought pretty much like us,
now in our new space, not knowing who all would show up, we had more than 200. And
they showed up not just to have fun in costumes and get prizes and treats, but
to eat. We had prepared food in special scary presentation styles, but we also
had just chips and nacho sauce. After the special food was gone in a few
minutes, the chips and nachos were too. Bonnie went to the store and got more
and came back and they were gone. She went to the store and got even more and
came back and they were gone. Our party only was to last two hours too. She
went to the store again and got even more and came back and it was gone too.
That was three trips she had made to the store getting more each time and it
was all gone and the party was half over and people were still coming in for
the first time. Back she went. Three more times each time getting more than
before and it was still all gone by the end of the two hour event. And of the
200 or so people who came, at least half were of different ethnicities than the
majority of us anyway who were putting on the party for the community.
One of those who came, though, was an 80 year old white
woman, who had lived in the community all her life. She sat and watched the
party, and the people feeding on the Halloween nachos, and she was amazed.
Those she saw were her neighbors, living on the street she had literally lived
on for 80 years, all her life; these neighbors had lived around her for
probably five to ten to twenty years, and she was seeing them for real for the
first time. She kept saying afterwards: they were hungry; they were hungry. I
didn’t know we had so many hungry people in our town. She is herself an amazing
person; she is now 88 years old and is still working in child care at her home.
But she is a different person ever since that night. And she talks about when
she does retire how she is going to come volunteer at our free grocery store to
help the neighbors she really met for the first time that Halloween night in
our community center. In fact, this past Thursday at the Grocery Giveaway
Event, in the 100 plus degree heat, she was there, handing out sacks of
tomatoes.
She had not seen the reality of the world around her, and how
her world had changed right around her, as the neighborhood went from the employed
working poor to the unemployed self-working poorer, sicker, and less resourced
people. So, who was fed that night, really?
I close with the ancient miracle story, parable of sorts, one
that is being read and studied in churches all over the world on this day. The loaves
and fishes, or as it is called in The Message version, Supper For Five
Thousand. Interestingly, in the Gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel, the story of
this feeding comes right after a story of the feeding of what today we might
call the One Percent. Herod’s kind of party that was all about the wants and
desires of those few powerful ones who were there in the palace and ended with
the execution of John the Baptist. Right after that, Mark tells the story of
Jesus’ party, his kind of feeding.
The story says:
“The apostles then rendezvoused with Jesus and reported on
all that they had done and taught. Jesus said, “Come off by yourselves; let’s
take a break and get a little rest.” For there was constant coming and going.
They didn’t even have time to eat.
[We know that feeling; often we set the worst examples for
those we wish to serve; we need to remind one another, as Jesus did and as we
try to do, that what we really are feeding one another with is not food and
water, etc., but it is presence of one another which is blessedness enough and
from which all else can grow and flow. We need, as here, to first feed
ourselves with rest and renewal and reflection.]
32-34 So they got in the boat and went off to a remote place
by themselves (the story continues; in most translations it says they go to a
deserted place, an abandoned place of Empire as we might say; not to the
coolest part of town, not to the overserved.] Someone saw them going and the
word got around. [Oh man! There goes the rest. Everytime, it seems, we try to
step away for a day, a week, there is a crisis that seeks to pull us back; we
know that so well.] And yes, From the surrounding towns people went out on
foot, running, and got there ahead of them. When Jesus arrived, he saw this
huge crowd. At the sight of them, his heart broke—like sheep with no shepherd
they were. He went right to work teaching them. [one of the key questions of
the missional church is for whom does your heart break, or for whom would it
break except our society keeps from focusing on them as it should? And let
church be grown in response to that question.]
35-36 When his disciples thought this had gone on long
enough—it was now quite late in the day—they interrupted: “We are a long way
out in the country, and it’s very late. Pronounce a benediction and send these
folks off so they can get some supper.” [probably more concerned about their
own supper, though, their own interruption in their plans, their jealousy that
Jesus wasn’t spending enough time caring about their needs; after all they were
the leaders, the insiders?]
37 Jesus said, “You do it. Fix supper for them.” [There
is the big difference. To the disciples, the crowd was not a community; they
were not neighbors, but needs; the disciples saw them as individuals who should
go eat by themselves, in their own homes. Reminds me, of what another 80 year
old long time member of our community once said about all the meals we held,
all the community connections we sought to create: What’s with them? She said,
of the people coming; Don’t they have homes of their own?” Jesus sees them as
one people, as part of the group, not as us and them. We feed our own because
they are our own.]
The disciples replied, “Are you serious? You want us to go
spend a fortune on food for their supper?” [It is always about what it will
cost us; and the disciples are thinking they have to do a feeding more like in
the mode of Herod than Jesus, to spend a fortune; there is only way to feed
that many, they think; and there is if you keep within the same framework, same
default mode, as the Empire, that it has to be big and impressive, well done,
orderly. To do less might be to shame Jesus, they’d be thinking.]
38 But he was quite serious. “How many loaves of bread do
you have? Take an inventory.” [See, he says, you don’t have to look elsewhere
for your food, your resources; don’t have to bring in food from a thousand
miles away; feeding, church, relationships are really simpler than all that.
There is always Enough. The theology of Enough. The church of the Enough, we
say. For our needs, not our greeds.]
That didn’t take long, they discovered. “Five,” they said,
“plus two fish.”
Jesus got them all to sit down in groups of fifty or a
hundred—they looked like a patchwork quilt of wildflowers spread out on the
green grass! [And here we see the power of growing smaller to do bigger things;
the power of connecting people with one another, in groups they are connecting
not with him as the sole teacher and leader and provider; just re-orienting the
space changes things, makes the miracle possible. Reminds me of the church of
80 that was struggling to survive to pay a full time minister and pay for its
building and programs, and the minister comes in one day, tells the people to
get in eight groups of ten based on who lived closest to whom, and he says this
is your new church; these are who you will meet with weekly and where you will
serve the neighborhoods, and we will get together as a group once a month to
share and celebrate; and what was a very vulnerable situation became a vanguard
church; the minister also took a part time job in a poorer part of town where
his less money could go further, and after awhile more and more of his members
were moving to do the same, resourcing and sustaining both their lives and the
struggling community.]
Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, lifted his face to
heaven in prayer, blessed, broke, and gave the bread to the disciples, and the
disciples in turn gave it to the people. He did the same with the fish. They
all ate their fill. [Community, as the theologian Jorgen Moltmann writes, is
the opposite of both poverty and wealth; Jesus had helped to create community,
how they saw themselves as one, empowering one another; that filled much of
their need that so often without it fuels our greed; some think maybe in the
more connectioal groups formed they discovered more food among themselves; some
think it was a physical miracle of multiplication, making more of what hadn’t
been there before. Both those standard approaches to the miracle of the loaves
and fishes focuses on the wrong thing; like the disciples, the interpreters are
focusing on the physical manifestation, the bread and fish, when we should be
focusing on what has been changed in and among the people.]
The story concludes, driving home this point: The disciples
gathered twelve baskets of leftovers. More than five thousand were at the
supper. [Some might I am sure, and I am naming no party affiliations, today
read this and think see all we have to do is cut back to five loaves and two
fishes, or the equivalency in the food programs for the poor, because the poor
don’t really need more, they just need to be more grateful for what little has
been given to them and see how that will miraculously make them feel better?
But Mark ends it, with Mark’s great irony: After all that, there were twelve
baskets of leftovers. Jesus’ way was to result with more than is needed for
those in need, not less and less. The leftovers are gathered together and will
be used to feed the community at large, those not there, just as the 99 percent
put more proportional resources into the community today than the 1 percent.].
So, in the end, who is fed in the story of the loaves and
fishes? Not only those in need and hungry there, and not only the disciples who
were fed the truth of growing relationships of love and justice, but the whole
community, including those who might have been on the sidelines mocking those
who had gone to such extremes in hopes and trust of being fed both by spirit
and by body.
What feeds us, nourishes us, helps us grow in service with
others and roots our lives in the Ground of Being itself? Love that reveals how
we ourselves are foods of the Spirit for another and for those who follow us. Love
that, as our reading from Wendell Berry said this morning, in words we have
painted outside our community center, reveals the abundance of this place which
will be the health and wisdom and indwelling Light. The very hardship, he
reminds us, the very audacity of our vision to save lives and the life of the
spirit of our community, is its possibility.
