A Christmas encouragement for the Flemington Ark People’s Pantry and any food share project!
Sometimes, heaven’s banquet is set out on wonky old trestle tables. And always, the food is a gift. You know how it goes. There’s the collection of food which would otherwise go into landfill: for nothing is wasted in God’s economy. There’s the sorting, the setting out, the packing, the delivery. There’s the volunteers hungry for food, for work, for meaning, for a people and a place to belong to. And there’s the blessed reality that, through waste redemption and food sharing, all these people are fed.
Our faith is not about some abstract spirituality. It’s about food, real food, and Jesus is all about enfleshment. For Jesus is meat, muscle, sinew, bone wrapped around the Word which was with God, and which was God, and which is the source of all life. We don’t gaze up to heaven to find God, because God came down to us; indeed ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’ (John 1:14).
And this Word-among-us loved nothing more than sharing food. At picnics on hillsides, at a barbecue on the beach, at dinner tables with friends and even enemies: again and again the Word broke bread and fed the people gathered around him.
This passion for feeding was signalled when he was born. For at his birth he wasn’t placed in a cot but a feeding trough; and the trough was in Bethlehem, which means House of Bread. So the story straightaway tell us he didn’t come to be served and waited on, but to offer himself as nourishment.
‘I am the bread of life,’ he said as an adult. ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ (John 6:35, 41). He compares his flesh to bread and his blood to wine, and promises that those who consume him will always and forever be changed. ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood dwell in me, and I in them,’ he said (John 6:56). Those who eat his meal are filled with him, shaped by his spirit into a self-giving body of love.
And this is why we are here today. Two thousand years after Jesus was first laid in a Bethlehem feed trough, we have been drawn together by bread. For we are gathered through faith in the loony idea that, as wonky as we all are, sharing in Christ’s flesh and blood empowers us to be his body; and this body is called to bless and feed others. So we eat of him and are filled with his hunger to bless and feed the world; we feed others, and are filled with the hunger to eat of him once more.
In a few moments, we will break bread and share wine together. And when we do, we will remember the story, and perhaps glimpse the one who is made known in the breaking of bread. But before we do this, let’s look round at each other. Let’s give thanks for Christ’s body of feeding and sharing, and his economy where all have enough: seen right here among you at the People’s Pantry, and wherever the hungry are fed. Ω
Shared with the Flemington Ark Peoples Pantry / Essendon Baptist on 22 December 2024 (an early Christmas) © Alison Sampson, 2024.
Alison and the whale 