“Million Dollar Church Bells & Trader Joe’s Dumpsters”
As I sat down to write this message, a message to cap off hunger month, a revelation hit me…I have had many more years of experience working closely with food production and distribution than I have years of experience in pastoring. My first job, at the very young age of twelve, was in a warehouse stacked with pallets holding 50lb bags of feed for livestock. I would throw these 50lb bags on my young shoulders and place them in the back of pickup trucks and buggies pulled by horses for the Amish.
The next job that I held for over five years before leaving for college was in the local grocery store. There I stocked shelves with gallons of milk, yogurt, eggs, and cheese. I would meticulously check sell-by dates on packages, and fill crates with expired food before wheeling them down a trash chute and tossing them into the void.
During the first two summer breaks of my college years, I returned to my home in rural Pennsylvania and worked at the Pepperidge Farm factory, where I worked in the packaging department for hot dog and hamburger rolls. Each day, I watched thousands, upon thousands of pounds of bread move before my eyes into plastic bags before they were loaded into trucks and shipped off. At the same time, it was my job to throw imperfect bread into blue bins, each bin holding up to one thousand pounds of perfectly edible bread, which would be wheeled down a long hallway and dumped into the back of a trailer to be discarded. During those two summers working at the factory, I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of food I threw away as part of my job.
After graduating college I began working at Starbucks, where the shock of food waste revisited me once again. Every 21 minutes a timer beeps on the silver cubes holding one of four varieties of brewed coffee. After 21 minutes the coffee was no longer considered fresh, and we would pull the cube from the warming station and position it over a sink and hold down the spigot. Each cube could hold upwards of two gallons of coffee. In our training at Starbucks, we learned that one coffee tree will only produce enough beans for one pound of coffee per year. As that coffee plummeted down the drain, so did all the energy it took to grow, harvest, roast, and ship the fruit of one coffee tree for an entire year. This happened for four varieties of coffee, every 21 minutes, every day, for 365 days a year at just one Starbucks location in the SW hills of Portland, Oregon.
There were a few years, although, where I seemed to find myself on the other side of the trash chute. As I sank deeper into the disillusionment with my evangelical faith during my college years, I began gravitating to the crunchier side of Christianity. Soon I found myself hanging out with the edgier folks at my college. People studying much cooler things than youth ministry, things like anthropology. Soon I started attending a church in Philadelphia with them, called “Circle of Hope.” The average age of that church likely hovered around 24 and was made up of flannel-wearing Christian hippies and hipsters who at the close of service congregated outside on the city sidewalk to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes before boarding their fix geared bicycles to ride back home. It was a culture shock for me, but what was profound was that somehow this church was creating space for young people who had found themselves in a new Christian territory.
After one of the services, a young man came up to me to greet me, and said, “Hey, can I get you some spaghetti? I just whipped some up!” As an always poor and hungry college student, I happily accepted. As he disappeared into the back room another congregant shouldered up with me and said, “Did Aaron just offer you spaghetti?” I told them he had and he replied, “just a heads up, Aaron gets all his food from the dumpster. The spaghetti is good, but I just wanted to let you know.”
As I ate the dumpster spaghetti I was intrigued by Aaron and by the end of our conversation I had his phone number and a plan to meet him at a Trader Joe’s dumpster later that evening. I pulled into a Trader Joe’s parking lot around 11:00 pm to see Aaron already standing in a dumpster and placing trash bags full of discarded food onto the pavement.
The dissonance for me only deepened, because in order to get to the trader joes I had to drive by the cathedral-like building that was the site of my weekly internship. An episcopal gathering in one of the richest zip codes in the entire country. Mansions owned by some of the countries most wealthy doctors, lawyers, and politicians literally encircled the bell tower and stained glass windows of this church that I worked at. To give you a perspective of the wealth in this neighborhood and congregation I give you this brief example.
When the congregation decided it was time to update the bells in the bell tower they received a quote that was over 1 million dollars. I remember seeing the announcement for the fundraising campaign in the bulletin one week, and within two weeks the announcement in the bulletin was, “thanks for helping us raise the 1 million dollars for the new bells!” In just two weeks the congregation raised 1 million dollars.
And now, here I was, just a mile away from that reality standing inside a trader joes dumpster. I couldn’t help but think of the two worlds I was stradelling at that moment. There seemed to be two different visions of Christianity held so chaotically in my heart. Abundance: 1 million dollars raised in two weeks for bells. Abundance: produce and sandwiches wrapped in plastic and discarded. On Sunday morning I worshipped with wealthy lawyers and doctors with million-dollar bells, and on Sunday evenings I worshipped with young people in a room above a storefront and was invited to hang out in a dumpster.
The absurdity of it all was just too blatant. While I certainly felt God’s presence in the cathedral, I must say I felt it more in that dumpster. I was living in the paradox of being a Christian in the United States. Experiencing the Kingdom of God while living in an Empire. We are Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.
Those thoughts have never left me, and who I am as a released minister today is informed by that moment.
What does it mean to be a Christ-follower while being surrounded by the absurdity and destruction of Empires? What does it mean to be a Christ-follower under the daily influence of a culture of disposability. What does it mean to be a Christ-follower in the midst of injustice that feels too gigantic to address? What does it mean to be a Christ-follower when it seems like solutions to our problems get tangled up in the bureaucracy of “what-if’s” and statements like “there is a right way to do this…”
If we are followers of the Jesus way live in this paradox. In the Gospel of Luke Jesus is having a conversation with the Pharisees, it says, “20 Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” I love that Jesus addresses this question, dismantling the idea that there are to be some grand events to point to the Kingdom of God coming to earth. No, this new way of living, this new way territory isn’t waiting for us after we die. It is now, it is here, and each and every day we must push up against the impulses, temptations, and injustices presented to us as Empire solutions in a world so desperately in need of Easter absurdity. We are tasked with ironic, improbable, imaginative, disruptive, creative, and profound ways of loving our neighbors.
Here are some queries:
How are you noticing and living within the paradox that we live within the absurdities of empire, while also working to point to another way?
How have you lived into the possibilities of imagination, and creativity to address suffering and injustice?
When is a time that your perspective greatly shifted? What brought about that shift?