The Long and Short of It

Tonight I am teaching at Meadow Oaks Baptist Church where I’ve been a member for about 4 years. I am teaching about my journey and calling toward agricultural missions and understanding the role food plays in our lives, globalization and justice. This is a pretty concise summation of why food is so important, my theology of mission and how food fits into God’s mission for the world. By concise I mean I had to cut a whole lot of important stuff out. Luckily I have a wife who listens to me ramble and tells me which parts to cut and which parts don’t make sense. So this is both very long for a blog post, but too short to say everything I wanted.

The full text after the jump.

Scarcity and Abundance

The final short chapter of Being Consumed concerns our most basic assumptions about how the world and economics functions. Free market capitalism assumes scarcity. This is the basis of all economic theories and understanding. Supply and demand is based on the idea that there is a scarcoty of one or the other.

God’s economy on the other hand is based on the idea of abundance (Mt 6:25-34). Cavanaugh again turns to the Eucharist as source of abundance. Paradoxically the abundance of this meal begins in the kenosis, or emptying, of Christ, the divine into human form (Philippians 2:6-11).

The act of consumption of the Eucharist does not entail the appropriation of goods for private use, but rather being assimilated to a public body, the Body of Christ. As Augustine reminds us, God is the food that consumes us” (95)

This meal unites us into one universal community and also creates a sort of nervous system in which the pain of others is communicated throughout the body. In Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats Jesus identifies himself with the poor and hungry. “For I was hungry and you gave me food” (Matthew 25:35). The market claims that it will gradually produce abundance through trade and capitalism, though it never seems to arrive. The Eucharist announces the in-breaking of the abundance of the kingdom into the present.

Cavanaugh uses the example of The Economy of Communion Project to illustrate abundant economic life in concrete terms. The profits from these business are divided into three equal parts: direct aid to the poor, education projects that further a culture of communion, and a third for development of the business (99). One participant said this:

It is not merely a question of reaching the right persons and giving priority to the most urgent needs… It also involves making sure that the assistance be part of a fraternal rapport that does not tolerate positions of inferiority and superiority because it sees the other person as “another me,” as a brother, and this is possible due to the fact that we are dealing with persons who know how to share (99-100)

This is what it means to embody an alternative to the world’s order, to base the ordering of our lives on the assumption of abundance rather than scarcity.

Abandoned Places of Empire

I will be teaching the Netzer Co-op May 17th on “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire.” This is the second installment thinking through what this might mean.

Where are these abandoned places? How do we find them? Do we have eyes to see?

The people who first articulated “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire” for the new monastic movement belonged to primarily urban communities. They saw the degradation and destruction that industrialization and gentrification had wreaked on their communities. Many places were little more than wastelands where industrial waste and toxic sludge was dumped in many ways and forms. Nary a speck of green could be seen in these neighborhoods.

Many of these places are also food deserts, where food is not available within a convenient distance. Local grocers have been forced to close or move to better neighborhoods. According to those in power, city planners and officials, these places are eyesores, crime-ridden problems that can best be dealt with by turning them into something else for other people with more money. In other words, don’t deal with the problem just move it somewhere else.

As a church, we must open our eyes to these abandoned places and be willing to hear God’s call to uproot our lives in order to embody the kingdom in thsoe places. I want to take this one step further. We should also expand our ideas about where these abandoned places are. Farm policy since the 70s has steadily destroyed the small farms and with it many communities in America. When the interests of large corporations became the center of our farm policy many people and communities were abandoned and driven off their land.

Perhaps it isn’t as sexy to move to some hick town to serve the poor and abandoned. Nevertheless, these are places that God weeps over just as much as ghettos in urban areas. There may be other areas that have been affected by the Domination System that we have overlooked. We need eyes to see and ears to hear the cry of the oppressed that moved God in Exodus to liberate those slaves in Egypt.

Without spiritualizing this idea, I think we must also look around us and see the effects of Empire in our own lives and our neighbors. Suburbia is also abandoned in that there is also a lack of community and connection in those places. Abundance is an illusion when all of our things are destined for obsolescence and landfills. Empire dominates the entirety of our lives and has taken our imagination so captive that it is sometimes difficult just to see its effects. May we be awakened to the reality of Empire in our midst.

Rethinking Our Thinking

This post will at first seem completely disconnected from food issues, but as always I will have the Jerry Springer moment at the end where I wrap it all up in a neat bow and connect all the dots.

We have been in the process of getting our house ready to put on the market. You may remember we are moving to the World Hunger Farm in May. After that? Who knows? But there is a possibility that we could be overseas with a missions agency for a few years. That’s the context.

My thinking about what to do with our house has been pretty binary: sell or rent. Those are the two options that most readily present themselves and fit with the prevailing way that society functions concerning houses and property and such. Selling seemed like giving up a huge asset that anchored us in a community and had some stability. Renting on the other hand seemed impossible financially and also logistically since we would likely be out of the country.

We have been working tirelessly and lots of projects to add value and make our house attractive to buyers. For weeks now I have watched our two kids all day and then worked for several hours late into the evening painting, grouting or some such tiresome work. Not too long ago I tweeted about how worn out I was saying something like, “I’m ready to be done with all this work and get busy doing some kingdom work.”

That was how I thought… until last week. A couple friends of mine set in motion a conversation and phone calls that now have my gears turning. First a friend of mine responded to my tweet with “Isn’t it all kingdom work?” I quickly brushed aside her gentle jab as good natured ribbing and nothing I should take too seriously. But a seed was planted.

Then maybe a week later another friend told me to call her dad about buying our house. I have met him maybe once. Knowing that I was a good friend of his daughter’s he gave me straightforward advice about our house. Whether or not his advice was right it was honest and it changed the way I was thinking.

I’m actually somewhat embarrassed that I hadn’t thought this way about this decision before. Rather than asking “What should we do with our house?”, perhaps we should ask instead “How can this be used for the kingdom of God?”

Several possibilities emerged, but I know that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

I have long held the belief that being a follower of Jesus meant allowing the kingdom mentality to permeate your entire life. Being “missional” means that the mission of God in the world informs and infuses every aspect of who you are and what you do. It is so easy to miss this and only think about everyday aspects of life in terms that the world sets for us, profit, security, etc. When we allow the gospel and our faith to speak into our everyday lives and decisions it shakes up our world.

Too often I think in terms of getting from point A to point B. Once we sell our house and move to the farm, THEN we will be doing kingdom work. In the meantime the means of getting there don’t always line up with the stated goal. If we are open and imaginative, I believe that the means of getting from one place to another can be infused with that kingdom we are seeking. The means will be consistent with the end. That requires a lot of effort to allow that telos to infiltrate our everyday lives.

And here’s the Jerry Springer moment… This applies to any and all of our problems. We must insist that the vision of a just and sustainable food system inform how we move from our current place ever closer to that vision.

New Blood in the Old Body

Civil Eats has an ongoing series about young farmers and why they farm. The most recent post called Why We Farm, A Young Farmer’s Manifesto ends with these words:

We are the new blood in the old body.

This obviously reminded me of an enigmatic statement someone made about wineskins. The sentiments expressed about how change comes to entrenched institutions reminds me of the incarnation. We enter into the world in all of its messiness, because we are witness to another order, another way of organizing our lives together. This other order has already come, but it’s not yet arrived.

I’ve always wrestled with how change comes. Is it gradually by working within the system? Or do we advocate for revolution, overthrow of the present order? As usual the answer seems to lie somewhere in between. The Third Way recognizes that change inevitably involves some combination of these two. We cannot ignore the present order of things as if it were really possible to simply do away with it and start over. This should not lead us to the conclusion that the way things are is simply the way they will always be. The essence of the Jesus movement is the idea that there is a telos, purpose, towards which history and life is directed, the order of God. The vision of this alternate economy, this new way of living, being and ordering life together in the world is what pushes us forward. The vision of this other way is not simply a progression of the way the world orders things, but in many ways counter to the current state of affairs. The tension between these two is “the new blood in the old body.” This sounds like resurrection. This is the mission of God in the world… and even those who are not followers of Jesus can be part of it.