Breaking Bread While Breathing by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Nov. 22, 2009

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Breaking Bread While Breathing

        Thanksgiving approaches, and I am here to confess to you my sins of the season.

        I will ignore my diet plan. I will forget that I have been trying for years, often unsuccessfully, to keep to a vegetarian diet. I will not question my hosts who have prepared and set this meal before me about their local buying habits. I tell you this lest you think I am delivering this sermon from any position above you. On these matters I should come down from this pulpit and stand among you, learning from many of you, as I blunder my way toward ethical choices in eating.

        These sins I confess freely, with some pain but without too much fear that you will sit harshly in judgment of my failings. But there is another confession that I now make to you in great fear and trembling.

        I confess to you that I miss Communion.

         I, a Unitarian Universalist minister, a follower of Ralph Waldo Emerson who left the ministry rather than preside at another Communion ritual which had become meaningless to him – I miss it. I miss the breaking of the bread, the pouring of the wine, in remembrance. The Last Supper.

        I want to be clear: It is not the Communion of my Presbyterian childhood that I’m speaking of. Without intending any disrespect to the Presbyterians, I will say that my primary sense memory of those Communions was this: clack-clack-clack-clack-clack. How many of you know what I’m talking about? That is the sound, best as I can render it, of each person putting her or his tiny little separate goblet of grape juice in the little round holes in racks on the pew backs.

        No, it is not those tiny dollhouse glasses, or the little separate cubes of bread that were offered in those pews, that I miss. It is the Communion that I have sometimes encountered in different places, in a church in Transylvania, a church in San Francisco, a YWCA in Oakland and a chapel in Berkeley, open communion that involved wine or juice in a common goblet, and great, fragrant hunks of bread that were broken by our own hands. Looking into one another’s eyes, offering one another “the bread of life.” Understanding that the bread, the real sustenance, was the connection between us, and among us, and to … something … beyond us.

        Today we consider the Bread of Life. Who gets to eat it? Who doesn’t get enough of it? And here I’m talking about food AND connectedness, because you can’t separate them, not for a minute, any more than you can separate the world food problem from the problem of over-nutrition, which so many of us spend so much time and money and sweat at the gym struggling against.

        Over-nutrition: according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the average American adult consumes 3,790 calories per day – an unhealthy amount, well over the 2,000 to 2,500 recommended for a moderately active person. And our food choices do have an impact on how much food is available for the tables of people in the two-thirds world. It’s not a simple zero-sum game, but a complex chain of cause and effect that sends impacts vibrating through the Interdependent Web.

        Gently and tenderly, we have to allow ourselves to know this. And to know that our food choices also affect the course of climate change. Many of us in this congregation have worked really hard to green our lifestyles and reduce the carbon footprint of our church, but it is practically certain that the change any of us could make that would have the greatest environmental impact would be to stop eating meat. According to one study, if you stop eating animals you will be responsible for using 160 gallons of fossil fuel less per year – 250 gallons less if you go vegan.

        I know what you are thinking: “Oh. My. God. -- She’s preaching vegetarianism on Thanksgiving eve.” I know. Don’t I know? My own choices in this matter so often do not match my best thinking about how I might make an ethical response to the situation of our world today. This is what is on my mind and heart this season, and so I offer it to you.

        Gently and tenderly – God knows I’ve been gentle with myself on these issues, and I hope you will be gentle with me, as I will be gentle with you. But not too gentle. I don’t want to be so gentle with myself that I keep myself from thinking about those people in the two thirds world, and how my choices may impact the availability of food for their tables – those very people whose pictures are on the Guest at Your Table Boxes. As Unitarian Universalists, we believe that all of existence is an interdependent web. We may not see the effects of our actions on people who are part of the web on the other side of the world, but that does not absolve us from being responsible.

        So the first step is to learn about it. On Monday Nov. 30 Green Action is sponsoring a presentation about ethical eating – how to make choices that are humane to animals and easier on our warming planet. You can get the details in Page 2. Here’s a start: think about changing one meal a day, the way you’ve stepped up to change one lightbulb at a time to planet-friendlier compact fluorescents.

        But all these measures, all our individual actions and lifestyle changes, add up to nothing more than a private piety if we don’t use them to firm our collective resolve to demand policies that are life promoting for people and the Earth. Go to Capitol Hill, as five of us from this congregation did this week, to lean on our senators to get to work – now – on a bill that will make meaningful change to arrest the flow of hydrocarbons into our atmosphere. Educate yourself about how our farm policies impact hungry people at home and abroad – and the next time the farm bill comes up, get involved. Think about how our defense policy affects hunger issues, and let that be a spur to your witness for peace. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” I’m grateful to Todd Parola, who posted that quote from Dwight Eisenhower on his blog on our UUCA website this week.

        Eat locally, and let your individual choices be a spiritual practice that hones your voice, the voice you will use to speak truth to power. Help locally too. World hunger is more than any of us can fix in a single day, but in a single day we can support our local food bank. Though we are indisputably connected to the poorest person starving across the globe, it is possible to reach out today and help a person on the street where we live. Even in Arlington, it may be that there is someone on your block who comes to the end of her month and is spreading the peanut butter very thin to make it last to the next paycheck. Even on your block, there may be someone whose health insurance does not pay for all his cancer drugs, and so near the end of his month he is living on pretzels. I’ve heard stories like this. You may know people like this.

        Even if you don’t know somebody personally who is hungry, you know they are here in Arlington, where a minimum wage worker would have to work 48 hours each week just to pay the rent on an average one-bedroom apartment. Like the people Christine Lucas told us about, that doesn’t leave a lot for food.

        Mother Teresa said, you may not be able to feed a thousand, but you can feed one. You can reach out to that person you know, and you can take money or your volunteer time to the food bank. Take cereal boxes, and build a “wall against hunger” like the one organized by the youth group in this church.

        Or you can take bread. “Take This Bread” is the title of a spiritual memoir by a thoroughly agnostic writer named Sara Miles who underwent a conversion experience when she walked into an Episcopal church in San Francisco that practices an open and radically inclusive Communion. At St. Gregory’s in the Potrero District, where I have had the joy of worshipping, nobody is asked whether they believe or accept any particular view of God before communion is offered. Noticing that the heart of the Gospels shows Jesus eating with all kinds of people, including strangers and social misfits, St. Gregory’s makes it their mission to offer Jesus’s meal to everyone, no questions asked.

        When Sara Miles had her conversion experience, it was because of gratitude, not desperation. She felt thankful beyond words, and that gratitude spilled over into generosity. She knew that Jesus meant the radical welcome he extended. And to keep it moving, to pass it further along, she believed, St. Gregory’s needed to open its doors not only to anyone at communion, but with a specific invitation to those who were most in need.

        St. Gregory’s needed to open a food pantry.

        It wasn’t easy. Episcopalians, Unitarians – we have a lot in common. You know, the battle of the flip charts. Why not organize volunteers to give food away at the main Food Bank, safely lodged in another neighborhood? – people in her congregation wondered. Why not organize a food drive to take food to hungry people, somewhere else? Why not raise money for the starving children across the ocean?

        Here’s why: What Sara Miles tasted in that first communion was the bread of life – the bread of connection. She breathed deeply, and felt, she wrote, a wind blowing through her, calling her to begin “a spiritual and actual communion across the divides.”

        This is why I miss communion, because there is in that symbolic sharing a moment of real connection, and in that connection, for that instant, all is possible.

        When you move into Fellowship Hall after this service, savor the communion you will find there. Breathe in the fragrance of the bread, freshly baked for you by children and adults in this congregation. Remember to write your thanks to someone who has made this community a place where you feel welcome and alive.

        And if you are sharing a Thanksgiving meal with friends or family, have a communion there. Taste the bread of connection. Give thanks to one another. As you eat the food that nourishes your body, imagine, for a moment, how you will use your body, thus nourished, to pass on the gift of life, the gift of plenty. The gift of connectedness.

         AMEN.

         The bread of connection is rich and fragrant: breathe deep. Meet your neighbor face to face. Look into their eyes; offer them the bread of life. Make this old world a garden. AMEN.

Photos From the Service

• Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
• Sara Miles, Take This Bread
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Watch Michael Pollan