Unexpected Solidarity - A Living Encounter with Theology

Last night we made a fabulous meal. Homemade Kung Pao Chicken. It's one of our favorites, but for some reason we hadn't made it in a while. It's a simple dish to make, if you've got the right ingredients. Natalie went to mixing the sauce and then started to brown peanuts and cook the chicken and peppers in our cast iron skillet. I grabbed a freshly sharpened blade out of our Henckels knife block and began to chop scallions and garlic and grate fresh ginger. Some edamame was cooking on the top burner, and the aromatics were brilliantly beginning to fill up the room.

As we poured the sauce and the chopped scallions into the skillet, I noticed that something was missing. RICE! Now, this was an Asian meal. Rice is a staple part of this feast. In the midst of our busyness and preparation of the chicken dish, we forgot the foundational member of the meal. All of the sudden, we were more than a little perturbed. The chicken would be ready in about two minutes; cooking our TJ's jasmine rice would take nearly an hour. So, what should we do?

At the end of the day we made the frustrating but unavoidable call to skip the rice and go without our grains. Natalie and I dolefully dragged our plates to the table, not even thinking about grabbing our Thai chopsticks out of their canister, and sat down. MJ was blissfully ignorant and chomping away at some broccoli and chicken.

As it so happened it was my turn for the pre-meal family prayer. Melaina was unexpectedly ready to pray with us. (She's hit and miss, depending on how hungry she is. Let's just say the girl loves to pray, but she also loves to eat! The spirit and the flesh duke it out on that one! :-) ) Looking back, I wonder if with that strange children's intuition she might have sensed our disappointment and frustration and been ready to pay attention to how our prayers and our "incomplete" meal would collide. Maybe she was ready for the unexpected intrusion of the God, but I wasn't.

As we grabbed hands, bowed heads, and began to pray, a single vision flooded my brain: "silent tsunami." Here we were, the privileged of the world, with freshly bought and prepared food, with an overflowing table, forlorn and dejected over the missing rice, while around the world millions are suffering from the lack of their most basic staples. The poorest of the poor are being threatened by an ongoing food shortage that is driving up costs of staple grains and "plunged an extra 100 million people into poverty."

The catalysts for this perfect storm are many: shortsightedness regarding using staples as an alternative fuel source and the subsequent allocating of crop fields for bio-fuel production, skyrocketing costs of fossil fuels, and increase in demand from those in the middle class around the world who are being hit by increasing financial pressures in other areas of life. This is just to name a few factors.

Yet, here we were, faced with a choice: continue to eat in our frustration or recognize a little bit of solidarity with those who didn't have a choice to buy rice last night. Now, even in saying that, I recognize that our table was still an overflowing feast, especially compared to those in such dire straights right now. I am not diminishing their plight and say that our lack of foresight in meal prep is close to their condition. That would be a grievous sin on my part. Instead, I found myself forced to remember at table the plight of those who didn't have a choice of whether or not they would eat rice. I was brought, for a moment, into communion with them, if only in thought and in prayer. My frustrations and concerns slipped away, as I was reminded of them.

It was an unexpected solidarity, a forced encounter with a theology I so often want to leave confined to the realm of words and pages and books. Last night, I was drawn into an experience that forced me to encounter a very small part of the reality of other's lives, wrestle with it, and bring it into the presence of God.

This is not always something we do well in my middle class church. In some ways we're blue collar, but in others, we struggle to embrace the realities of the world the people leave to enter worship and into which they return after the benediction. (For a great discussion on this, read the transcript of Bill Moyers' interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.) Of course, I read and experience life as a privileged person, who has never really known want, even during the seasons of family unemployment during the oil crisis of the 80s. Yet, tonight I was reminded of what I try to teach, that the world of the biblical narrative must encounter the world of our lives. It was a holy frustration, a crash forcing solidarity.

Today, I read this prayer from Walter Brueggemann's Prayers for a Privileged People.

"Water That Does Not Come Bottled": On reading Psalm 104

Creator God, we celebrate you:
you make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
giving drink to every wild animal,
the wild asses quench their thirst.

You send rain and water the earth, it springs to growth,
we eat and are satisfied,
we thank you and easily push back from the table.
In our comfortable plenty,
we notice drought here
and famine there, the work of human hands.
The lacks seem remote from us,
but in solidarity we register the loss,
and the fear,
and the death.

We count on water and rain and growth and bread.
We count on your regularities,
but then we look for peace but find no good,
for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.

We do not expect failed rain,
or failed bread,
or failed peace,
or failed healing.
The failure lies deep in the fabric of our common life.

We turn away from that self-destructiveness . . . back to you.
You--Creator, beginning and end,
first and last.
You--seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter.
You--whose patience we try.
You--whose sovereign will for good
overrides our capacity for self-destruction.

Look to this world of need: restore,
recreate,
enliven,
give rain,
give food,
give peace.
For there is no other source.
None except you in your sovereign reliability.

God, forgive us and restore our hearts of flesh, so that our hearts may break with your heart for the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless, the poorest of the poor.