Saint Benedict Episcopal Church

Have you ever noticed how much of scripture and our liturgy talks about food and hunger? In Lent we hear about the living water that leaves us without thirst. In our Eucharistic prayer we’re using this Lent, we hear this phrase about Jesus being the “Living Bread” in whom all our hungers are satisfied. “My soul is satisfied” the Psalms say, “as with marrow and fatness, And my mouth offers praises with joyful lips.”

And also the converse is reported. “Like a deer pants (or longs) for water… my soul is athirst for the living God.” Rabbi, they are hungry… you give them something to eat.

So much of scripture points to this idea of hunger or thirst, and that hunger is far deeper than physical hunger.  It is a spiritual condition. This longing we have to know and love God more fully. We long for that completeness, wholeness.

The question our spirit truly wants us to ask is: What do you really want? What do you desire and long for in life?

Yearning runs deep within us like an underground spring. In reality, it is the voice of our soul trying to get our attention. It is our yearning that causes us to stop and listen. Its shifts our orientation from an external focus to an internal one: we are looking for some deep peace in our lives. Lent is that opportunity to empty ourselves enough to see and know that call, that desire that yearning to know God more fully.

At first blush, it is easy to see this yearning as a lack in our lives: depression or perhaps we stuff those feelings of yearning down anxiously racing around or impulsively buying something new thinking that this will fix us or never answering or satisfying that call thus becoming more brittle or afraid to listen to it. Rather than externalizing it, we need to do something deeply counter-intuitive: we need to look deeper within ourselves, acknowledging this yearning; giving it room to expand, welcoming it to come and sit at the table with us.

This kind of hunger and longing is at the heart of Eucharist. We eat together to describe what we long to do in our lives: feed the God shaped hole that is at the center of every human being’s soul.

That deep abiding reality that we name week after week in our feeding together is at the heart of the new direction we undertake as a mission. The hunger we name in our new Mission statement is all about this kind of yearning after the abundant love of God.

All of us come to church hungry for something: to find a place of belonging in a world that is increasingly less communal and more isolating, to know God more deeply and ask questions about our faith and tradition as a Christian people, to give back to others and give thanks for all the grace in our lives. This is what we hunger to do and this is what satisfies our soul like nothing else will.

That favorite professor of mine from seminary had a very astute question he’d ask: So what?

So we’ve named this reality of our call as a community, we’ve begun the process of creating a strategic plan. So what now?

The Strategic Planning group is now done. They give all their work to our Bishop’s Committee. Our BC begins to set priorities and goals. What needs our attention first? What can wait?

We prepare ourselves to go on our annual retreat in March. At that time, we look at this plan, the many ministries in our community, the goals that those ministries have and create our goals as church for the year. We task our People’s Warden this year (as we did last year) with the work of communicating our service as leaders to the whole of the church community.

In doing all of this, we continue to work out of our place of  seeking to satisfy the hunger we have for God in each of us, the hungers of those in our community and in the world.

My hope is that you will find a place at our table that will satisfy the God hunger that is within you. What does God really want you to do? What is your heart’s deepest desire?  And how will you live out in your church community?