Wednesday Food Pantry, Sermon, and a Song
A meeting of all Community Services volunteers from Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church was held last Sunday at the BMOC (Berean Outreach Ministry Center), located at 312 Hamilton E. Holmes Dr., Atlanta. The main church is across the street at 291. It was part of the required training mandated by the Atlanta Community Food Bank (and their overlords, the USDA) for people who will be distributing food to qualified recipients. It began with doughnuts, ran two hours, and was followed by lunch. It mainly consisted of common sense advice regarding nutrition, the safe handling of food, and proper techniques for dealing with the beneficiaries of the government administered, but locally delivered provisions. Volunteers who serve principally in the “Clothes Closet” also help with food distribution, so they were in attendance. Also present were the workers whose primary duty is to make sure that all of the paperwork is in order, both for the government and the Atlanta Food Bank.
The new Community Service Ministry Leader is Allyson Dozier. Heretofore I have misspelled her name, but I now have it right. She opened the meeting by telling the assembly that she has been involved in community service since she was 17, and acted as a public relations officer in NYC. She noted that out of the 600 agencies that “partner” with the Atlanta Food Bank, Berean’s operation is the second largest. She said that she is still getting used to the process of buying food for 500 people a week on a shoestring budget. She told us that her predecessor, David Riley, had been trying to pass the reigns of his leadership on for the last two years, but the church was resistant to this transfer. The combination of new leadership, along with the re-colonization of the former and current distribution facility, has put everybody under a bit of pressure.
The graphic for the new set of USDA nutritional guidelines is no longer a pyramid. The pyramid form is fine for representing a hierarchy of food groups. The new graphic is simply a segmented plate, like the kind jails and schools utilize. The exclusion of “dairy” to a satellite location is a weak recognition that, used indiscriminately, this category can be a cesspool of cholesterol and fat. The tip of the old pyramid was inhabited by “fats, oils, and sweets.” The new program does not even recognize the existence of these malicious offenders. A nostalgic look at the old order can be found at this LINK, as well as a glimpse of a transitional pyramid that, graphically speaking, makes even less sense than the “MyPlate” image seen below. In attempting to describe the latest guidelines, a word is worth a thousand pictures.
Former Community Services Ministry Leader Elder Irene Bowden delivered some friendly advice. She explained that the rules dictated that food distribution stick to a previously announced schedule, so the volunteers themselves needed to be punctual. She stressed the need for us to be identifiable to the public by wearing a uniform shirt (this is a stumbling block for me, as in my role my clothing gets filthy through the handling of dust-covered boxes and fresh produce with clods of dirt still clinging to it). She also emphasized the need for “good customer service,” as we are representing God. We needed to be able to graciously adapt ourselves to any situation. She quoted I Corinthians 9:22: “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”
If we found ourselves confronted by someone in a bad humor (I testify that this happens too frequently), Elder Bowden implored us to heed the strategy found in Proverbs 15:1: “A soft answer turns away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” When I first started with the food pantry, I witnessed the arrival of a customer whose belligerence was uncontrolled. A huge amount of cajolery and diplomacy was expended on this individual, just to get him his food, and then get him out the door. The episode ended well enough, much to the relief of the staff. After he was gone, one of the male volunteers exclaimed, “I was afraid I was going to have to open up a can of Jesus on him!”
I received the unwelcome news today that there is a possibility that I may be required to work late at the Food Pantry, at least on alternating weeks, requiring me to miss Wednesday night Prayer Meeting. The 7 p.m. starting time has been my excuse, for the last year, to drop whatever I was doing and go to church. I would miss these services, as fellow attendees represent the 2% of the Berean membership that are inveterate church-goers, and that is a group I aspire to belong to. As I complained before, new responsibilities with the Food Pantry are so exhausting that I now have trouble focusing on Wednesday’s sermons, and this is obvious in the slipshod synopsis below.
The Atlanta Community Food Bank deals with 600 local agencies, but as proudly noted before, Berean Outreach Ministries is the second largest customer. A lot of institutions and homeless shelters do business with the Food Bank, and I suspect one of these is chief recipient. The Food Bank has a fleet of trucks, and will make deliveries to your agency, but Berean is blessed to have a truck dedicated to this service. It holds ten pallets of food, and makes two runs a week to the Food Bank. When David Riley headed the operation, the truck would sometimes be used to fetch leftover food from some of the huge, catered affairs that are held in Atlanta. I don’t know if any current volunteers would be willing to continue to visit these venues, as they often don’t wrap up until after midnight.
Today’s volunteer experience had it’s ups and downs. An up: there was an awful lot of food available to the public, more than some could comfortably carry. A down: there was a serious shortage of bags to put it in. The unusual foodstuff of the day was a few hundred pounds of ground deer meat. There was confusion as to whether Adventists were allowed to consume deer, as it is seldom encountered. I mentioned something from Deuteronomy (12:5, it turns out) about “as of the roebuck, and as of the hart.” I was not sure if a deer was in the same class as these. Nobody else was, either. I have some opinions about folk who kill more than they can personally consume, and then make themselves feel better about it by donating the surplus to charity. I ought not share these opinions, but it seems as if I just did.
Tonight was day 7 of the “Ten Days of Prayer” at Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church, Atlanta. Pastor Austin Humphreys tied his remarks into tonight’s theme, “family.” He bookended reflections on Genesis Chapter 22 (the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham) with incidents from his own life. Note: Pastor Austin Humphreys is a “PK” (preacher’s kid).
When Pastor Humphreys was young, his father would go out of town to preach. Young Humphreys would implore him to “bring me a toy” when elder Humphreys returned home. The toy would be similar, or even identical to one given to the pastor’s little brother. The little brother would invariably covet Pastor Humphrey’s toy more than his own, and start whining about it. The pastor’s father would relieve the situation by telling him, “son, give the toy to your brother. You are going to get it back!” This reminiscence is akin to the kind of faith Abraham displayed when he was instructed to offer up Isaac. He was confident that his son would not be gone for good.
Pastor Humphreys emphasized how long Abraham and Sarah had waited for the “child of promise” (Paul’s term for Isaac in Galatians 4:28), and how his birth resulted in a “strong family in the Lord.” The pastor noted, however, that “oftentimes a blessing is accompanied by a hardship.” The pastor remarked upon the tendency of some to try to negotiate with God, placing some things that they are reluctant to lose as being “off limits” from the table of sacrifice. But this was not the attitude that Abraham displayed. Abraham had been promised by God that he would “father many nations,” so he had no qualms about possible consequences arising from honoring God’s unusual request concerning his son.
Pastor Humphreys told us that some scholars feel that Abraham believed that, having killed his son, God would then proceed to raise him from the dead. Our Tuesday Sabbath School lesson this week deals with the very episode that Pastor Humphreys was relating. I had a hunch that Ellen G. White might be one of the scholars the pastor referred to. Sure enough, on page 151 of “Patriarchs and Prophets,” in the chapter 13, entitled “The Test of Faith,” E.G. White writes, “Isaac was the child of a miracle, and could not the power that gave him life restore it?” All of this foreshadows Jesus, but this is stating the obvious. (“Breath of Life” ex-spokesman, and ex-Berean Lead Pastor Walter Pearson used to often refer to “a writer I admire.” Even before I was an Adventist, I knew who he meant.)
Pastor Humphreys informed us that when we are “obedient to God, the answers will arrive like the ram caught in a thicket.” The pastor stated that “you have to be willing to ask and expect the (ostensibly) impossible from God, and concluded his remarks with another anecdote about his own family. Pastor Humphreys was still a child when his father was called to be pastor at Oakwood (this was news to me, and a pretty big deal: the current pastor at Oakwood is former Berean Lead Pastor Carlton P. Byrd). Pastor Humphreys and his family were anxious about relocating, but he said that “when you allow God in your home, nothing should stand in your way!” And, even though his father died a scant two years later, the pastor would not be where he was today without this providential introduction into the spiritually supercharged ambience of Oakwood. The move was one that the widow and children of the late pastor would benefit from. I have to end this summary with Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
I was getting a jump on this week’s Sabbath School lessons last Saturday on the way to church. The Sunday lesson covers Cain and Abel, and how their well-known history reflects the great controversy. I penned a song about them that is without much artistic merit, but at least it includes all of the major episodes of the laconically documented history of the brothers.
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