Reflection by David for October 2, 2011 - World Communion Sunday

I attended a retreat last weekend at Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat centre in the Cascade Mountain Range of Washington State, directly south of Manning Park by 100 kms or so. It was in a beautiful setting, kind of like that reflected in the Psalm this morning, and had for me many links with the Iona Community on Iona in Scotland. There is a small community that lives in the Holden Village, which was an abandoned mining village that the Lutheran Church bought some 60 years ago. The retreat's theme was "Healing the Planet... Healing Our Lives." It was sponsored by Lutherans Concerned, an LGBTQ and allies Lutheran support network.

The premise of the retreat was that we can't be whole individually without working on the wholeness of the planet. We all need healing and re-creation; and certainly our planet needs it as well. The two retreat leaders were very good, each augmenting the other, one speaking about healing ourselves and the other speaking about the planet... indeed, all of creation. We were all invited to leave Holden Village with a new intention of living in a healing manner in our world.

If we listen to the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, Mother Theresa, poets like Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, and prophets like David Suzuki, Walter Brueggemann, David Hallman, the Dali Lama, Lois Wilson, and Mardi Tindall, our current Moderator—even chaos theory and physics makes the point—what happens in one part of our planet affects us all. We are witnessing that at the moment in the terrible conditions of the Horn of Africa.

I sought my soul
And the soul I could not see.
I sought my God
And God eluded me.
I sought my brother... and my sister
And I found all three.

And again,

Pray not for Arab or Jew, for Palestinian or Israeli,
But pray rather for yourselves, that you may not divide them in your prayers
But keep them both together in your hearts.

Both of these anonymous poems (quoted from Bridge of Stars, London: Harper Collins) are about our universal connection.

Well, this is both a day to celebrate the Mission and Service Fund of the United Church and to celebrate the world-wide nature of our Christian tradition. We celebrate the partners by with whom we seek justice with love and peace with freedom. We celebrate the work of the M&S Fund both in Canada to support the work of healing and around the world to support the work of re-creation, disaster and humanitarian relief, justice with love, and to celebrate our common heritage as human creatures who live together in this vast and wonderful world.

And what better way is there than to break bread together. I remember hearing a story of an overseas M&S Fund supported worker, who was helping farmers fight for justice with respect to multi-national corporations and genetically modified foods like wheat and corn. This was in Africa and the worker helped with community organization and food security, which is the modern term for making sure that everyone has a right to access good, wholesome, and nutritious food. The local farming community was successful in fighting against the likes of Monsanto and other corporations who wanted farmers to use their seeds exclusively. The United Church overseas worker's contract had ended and he and his family were preparing to leave; the local village wanted to thank him and so prepared a feast. As happens around the world, and I've heard this story often enough from different parts of the world including here in Canada, when people want to celebrate, they gather for a feast. The fine china comes out, the best foods are prepared, and seats of honour are made. This was the same for this family in Africa who were leaving their friends, people who had become their family. The feast was prepared, the best foods made, the best cutlery and china brought out. But what this overseas worker noticed was that he and his family had the best plates and cutlery; others made do with old knives and a hodgepodge of cracked and nicked plates and bowls. The worker and his family had the best choices of bread, meat and even a dessert. When he looked around to see what others were eating, he noticed that everyone made do with less, some with no meat and some with few vegetables. He knew that if he made a fuss, he would insult the community. He tells of how his daughter, seeing the discrepancy, was going to pass on the foods that were being served onto her plate; he whispered softly into her ear that to refuse would be an insult. It wasn't a huge feast by North American standards where we eat too much, but it was a feast for the village and an important way to show honour and to preserve dignity. It was about hospitality, which at its very heart, is about healing.

As we gather here today around this table, we gather with those African farmers, with women's support centre workers in Latin America, with justice-making groups, with those on the front lines working to ease disaster in the Horn of Africa, Haiti, Japan and other places around our globe, those standing between armies, those speaking of our global human family. When we break bread later and lift the cup, let us celebrate our common humanity and the work of the United Church's Mission and Service Fund—indeed our work together in healing the planet as we heal our lives!

Amen.