Jesus Freak

Jesus Freak

Reviewed in 2010 for hardback edition published by Jossey-Bass, imprint of John Wiley. Editor
Sara Miles is the founder and Director of the ‘food pantry’, at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, which every Friday gives away tons of free groceries to hundreds of hungry people. This inspiring book describes this hands-on Christian ministry, giving vivid pictures of many of the users and of the ‘hardworking crew of nearly fifty volunteers, mostly misfits and oddballs who’d come to get food’.
Sara is impatient with religion, with the institutional church and with any of the barriers we erect. What matters is community, discovered through the ‘shared work of worship and service’. The chapter on healing affected me more than a lot of my books on the subject on my shelves, full as they are of techniques, of using the correct words and performing the right actions. ‘Healing comes embodied in relationship – with God and with other people,’ Sarah writes. ‘And through relationship, there can be healing in the absence of cure. Jesus doesn’t stop suffering, but promises to be with us in suffering.’
And what is a ‘Jesus Freak’? It’s a matter of living ‘as if you – and everyone around you – were Jesus, and filled with his power’. You just ‘take his teachings literally, go out the front door of your home, and act on them.’ Now there’s a challenge! ‘Jesus has given us all the power to be Jesus.’ If that’s what being a Jesus Freak means, then that’s what I’d like to be!

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