For Jeremy John, a food justice advocate and coordinator of the Crabgrass Christians Initiative at the Quixote Center, Lent is a time of silence and waiting on God. In waiting and falling in love with ordinary things, John finds, Lent is subversive:
You see, it is dangerous to dwell on one thing too deeply, just as it is dangerous to sit in silence and wait for God. You will be changed, if you allow yourself. This is what Lent is for.
Falling in love with the ordinary leads you into an encounter with systems and structures, principalities and powers that hold us in bondage to malnutrition, poverty and climate change. Systems that we must change by working together.
A great, organized evil is not defeated by individuals, no matter how mighty of thew or hefty of battle axe. U.S. culture has broken the tradition of mutual aid, sustainable cooking and table fellowship, and in order to learn it again, we must pursue it in community and learn together. We must change our church culture. Let’s replace our canned-food drives with vegetable drives, let’s plant church gardens, and let’s fill our potlucks with something other than 20 different meat plates and 20 different desserts.
“How? How?” You ask. Well, I’m working on that. We’re building a web platform to help churches organize farm-to-table events that provides fresh produce to the poorest families and reduced cost. The model is called called a Fresh Stop. I’ve watched the Fresh Stop transform my church, Mosaic, by empowering leaders and volunteers with a mission to serve. We’ve learned to love healthy food and our Fresh Stop provides vegetables to the poorest members of our community.
Read the rest of Jeremy John’s article in the Huffington Post Religion section here.