Easter 5C

The 5th Sunday of Easter Year C May 19, 2019 This past week, I was spending some time preparing for our upcoming move by going through a bunch of our stuff that has been stored in our garage for the last two years. In and among untold numbers of books that have been hidden away in boxes, I re-discovered one in particular of which I am quite fond. It’s title is Being Dead is No Excuse (and if that isn’t intriguing enough, the subtitle is): The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. The book was written by Episcopalians and natives of the Mississippi Delta—Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays. The book is full of recipes and anecdotes about funerals and characters from the authors’ small town of Greenville, Mississippi. And the emphasis throughout the book is on how food can both unite and divide the community. While chapter one signifies the unifying force of good funeral food (it is titled: “Dying tastefully in the MS Delta” and concludes with a top ten list of funeral foods), chapter 2 captures the division that can be created by different visions of what is appropriate in good funeral food. It is titled “the Methodist ladies vs. the Episcopal ladies.” The opinionated, Episcopal authors have this to say about the local Methodists’ funeral food: “Though a number of old planter families still hew to the religion of the Wesley brothers, and there is certainly no spiritual or theological animosity, the culinary competition between the Episcopal ladies and the Methodist ladies is cut-throat. Episcopalians are snooty because they spurn cake mixes and canned goods, without which there would be no such thing as Methodist cuisine. Methodist ladies do great things with the contents of cans and boxes. If a survey were done of the winners of Pillsbury Bake-Offs, ten to one the majority would be Methodists. The casserole is the most characteristically Methodist foodstuff…The Methodist culinary genius might be summed up this way: “Now you’re cookin’ with Campbell’s. (See also [Chapter 5] “Comfort Foods: There is a Balm in Campbell’s Soup p. 141.)”i Our Acts reading for today gives us one of the most pivotal moments in the early Christian movement, when Peter has a vision where the voice of God tells him that he no longer needs to worry about being bound by the Jewish dietary laws that he has followed all his life. In our reading for today, we have the second telling of this same story, which happens when Peter has returned to Jerusalem and is justifying his actions of eating with Gentiles to the other Jewish followers of Jesus. Food has been the number one thing that this early church has been fighting over, namely the question of whether the Gentile converts to Christianity have to convert to Judaism and follow the dietary laws. Because of this vision given to Peter by God, Peter becomes converted in his thinking and in his response, and we see that he recognizes that he does not want to stand in the way of the work that God is doing. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Luke tells us of Peter’s critics, “When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’” Food which has divided this community since its very beginnings, is now no longer an impediment to belonging and to following Jesus. Over the last few months, the Church Development Institute (CDI) team from St. Thomas (that is me, Tracy Edgar, Mary Haley, and Rick Lantz) along with the vestry have conducted interviews of various parishioners about the gifts and challenges of St. Thomas. Folks were pretty much unanimous in their assessment that one of our strongest gifts is hospitality—how we use food (and drink!) to create community and welcome others. One of the greatest challenges that folks have generally articulated is the desire for us to attract new members. As a part of our work with CDI, we are supposed to plan and implement a project over this summer. After looking at the responses to the interviews, we began trying to figure out how to capitalize on our gift for hospitality in order to attract new visitors to our congregation. We had a number of different ideas, but through various conversations, we have begun working more intensively on a particular idea. It is a project called “CAST” which is short for Co-op At St. Thomas. Our vision is to create a gathering place for our community of Isle of Hope and beyond on our church grounds once a month beginning in September and running on a trial period through December. We plan to begin reaching out to local vendors from other farmers’ markets, local artists, food trucks, musicians, a local pet-grooming truck, the people who catch and sell shrimp and crabs, anyone we can think of who could help us create this festival on the first Friday night of the month from 4 pm to 8 pm. We also want to have a featured charity who we would promote and who would help us promote the event and who we could raise money for that month. We’ve also talked about having activities for children centered around our newly re-vitalized playground. We have a vision of creating a community gathering space for people to bike, walk, golf-cart, or drive over, shop and picnic on our grounds listening to live music and enjoying each other and our beautiful home. All this would be centered around locally grown, caught, or cooked food--Food as a way to unite us here in Isle of Hope. We would also look to have some soft advertising for the different things going on here at St. Thomas as a possible bridge for folks who might be interested in joining us for worship or other events. I want you to be thinking about the following questions. We’ll be collecting feedback from you in the comings days about this idea of CAST—Co-op At St. Thomas. Here are the questions I want you to be considering: What do you think? Do you have any ideas/suggestions about this? What are your concerns? Would you like to help with this endeavor? How might God be calling us to expand our vision of how we use our gift of hospitality to promote unity and community? i. Metcalf, Gayden and Hays, Charlotte. Being Dead Is No Excuse: The official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. Miramax: New York, 2005, p 34.