Those three words hold the key to everything. I don’t mean that food does, important as it is, or that sex does, as delicious as it can be, or even God, especially when that once-powerful word reduces to religious rules.
I mean this: putting those three words together illumines the source of human distress and, at the same time, the hope that can lead us homeward.
Food, sex, and God intertwine at the very heart of Christian faith and spiritual practice. They always have, yet no one told me this when I was a child growing up in the Evangelical Bible belt. I still don’t hear it today, not from conservatives or from liberals.
What I do hear from pulpits and pod-casts sounds one of three themes, sometimes in combination: we have failed and need forgiveness; we need to work harder for social justice; mainline Christianity is over – next!
I mostly agree with each of those declarations, and they don’t say nearly enough. Missing from each is the proverbial elephant in Christianity’s living room. Nearly every Christian sees it sitting there and hardly anyone talks about it – hunger.
Human beings are hungry. We hunger for food in our bellies (essential for survival). We hunger for physical touch (essential for thriving). We hunger for intimacy (the very thing for which God makes us). These are not separate and distinct hungers; they describe the one and fundamental human desire for communion.
Over the last twenty-five years of ordained ministry I have, slowly but surely, come to see what I do and why when I stand at the Eucharistic Table. I stand there and I give voice to a deep and ancient longing, echoing among all the others standing there with me – the hope of communion. Or more precisely, the hope of being at home in our own bodies without shame, at home among others without guilt, and at home with God without any fear all at the same time.
So yes, we all need forgiveness; even more, healing the bodily shame that leads to isolation and violence. Yes, we need to work harder for a more just society; deeper still, for a world freed from the fear of difference. And mainline Christianity? I’m not worried about it. God’s own desire for communion will continue to lure us together, making friends from enemies and families from strangers.
I believe all this more than I might have after spending so much time in ecclesial debates over “homosexuality.” I used to complain – much like Pope Francis just recently did – that those debates merely distract the Church from attending to more important matters. I now see all those years of struggle as a divine gift.
The resilience of lesbian and gay people and the visibility of our relationships in Christian churches have prompted a profound question that we might not otherwise have asked. What do Christians really want to say about sex? I don’t mean only ethically. I mean, what do we want to say theologically and spiritually about sexual intimacy?
The best way to answer that question is to take it with us into a shared meal of bread and wine, to the Table of Divine Desire. Doing that unleashes a panoply of insights, which I try to chronicle in a new book due out next month – Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy.
Of course I hope you’ll buy the book (also available on all e-reader platforms). Even more, I hope it will spark prayerful conversation in Christian communities about hope itself – the world-changing hope catalyzed by food, sex, and God.