Eulogy for Jesse by Pastor Brian
Sermons
Eulogy for Jesse
On the heels of her twin brother Bo, Jessica Margaret Blackford arrived on October 5th, 1983. Soon after, her parents, Sherry and Bobby, had their little girl baptized at First United Methodist of Jackson, Tennessee. When she wasn’t at church, Jesse courted adventure in the woods with her dog Rocky, combed the outfield for clovers during T-ball games, and pirouetted in front of the mirror, rehearsing for her next ballet recital.
After retiring her tutu and suffering a traumatic brain injury, Jesse came south to the mountains of Asheville. While natural beauty felt like home, she was often without housing. Inside or out, life was a daily scrape, and she befriended others who shared her scars. Despite the wounds, some things never changed: Jesse’s lavish smile, effortless laugh, inquisitive eyes, uncorrupted vulnerability, and her primary love language—food.
The disciples were decidedly against setting up a buffet in the wilderness. They had just returned from teaching their first Sunday School class, preaching heaven’s invasion on earth, splinting broken limbs, and slaying fiery demons. Back at camp, elated and exhausted by their missionary travels, the twelve searched for the nearest pillow. So did Jesus, ready for a weekend of feet in the desert sand.
But hungry crowds don’t keep business hours, and a line of empty bellies started to form. The disciples muttered, “Send them packing. The kitchen is closed. We can’t feed ten thousand people.” Ignoring their irritation, Jesus turned to his followers and instructed, “You give them something to eat.” After gathering a few barley loaves and fillets of tilapia, he said grace.
Jesus could have conducted the miracle, satisfying the multitude, from start to finish alone. But he didn’t. Therefore, why does he command the disciples to feed the crowd?
Mark 6:32-44 And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.
Congregational Responses:
Nothing communicates grace better than food.
To remind them miracles happen in community.
God can multiply our crumbs.
Sara Miles is the most suspect person to ever minister on the streets of San Francisco wearing a black cassock. She’s the daughter of atheist parents, a queer woman, a single mother, a seasoned sous chef, and the former editor of Mother Jones, a left-leaning magazine. Out of journalistic nosiness, she ventured into St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church. The congregation was gathered around a circular altar when a server offered Sara her first communion. Thunderstruck by the mystical bread, by “someone whose name I’d only spoken before as a casual expletive,” she began to weep. Devastated, she ran out of the service, knowing the “God I didn’t believe in was alive in my mouth.” Soon after her conversion, she gave herself to feeding unhoused people. Today, she directs a pantry that distributes seven tons of food every Saturday. In her memoir, she wrote, “I was… hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all. I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcast are honored.”1
The starving outcasts of ancient Palestine- sex workers, unemployed roughnecks, orphaned daughters, psychiatric patients, and shunned lepers- gathered in the tall grass around a makeshift altar. One by one, each desperate soul was given a bountiful plate, called by name, and waited on like royalty. While Jesus repeatedly abandoned his stately throne for the lowly dregs of servanthood, he, at this moment, stands back.
Nudging his inner circle forward, saying, “You give them something to eat,” wanting them to practice before he’s crucified, Jesus defines the contours of the Christian life. It’s not a shiny offering given at the temple; it’s not a creed to memorize for confirmation; it’s not a political dogma to salute every election cycle. No, following Christ, for the disciples then and now, is inextricably bound up in what we do with food.
I never heard Jesse identify herself as a believer. She didn’t have to. Her spiritual autobiography included stocking the shelves at Whole Foods, balancing pancake orders at IHOP, working the dish room at the Welcome Table, and managing the deli at MAHEC. Days before Popeye died, his body distended with cancer, his steadfast partner picked up his pain elixir of choice- a strawberry milkshake.
Some say heaven isn’t a destination in the sky but a family meal without end. If that’s true, no one’s going hungry because Jessica Margaret Blackford is refilling glasses of sweet tea and handing out dessert for eternity.
1 Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Spiritual Memoir for a Twenty-First-Century Christian, (New York: Ballentine Books, 2007), xiii, 60.