During seminary, I met a woman named Jenny while interning in urban Minneapolis. The church staff sent me to visit her, along with Andy, a street-smart student from Chicago. Jenny had recently been released from the hospital after being robbed and having her throat cut. Thankfully, she survived.
We arrived at a public housing high-rise, walked through the parking lot, and entered the concrete lobby. People stopped what they were doing to watch these strangers in their midst.
Jenny was sitting in a quiet corner. She was a tiny woman in her 80s, so unobtrusive she was almost invisible in the crowd. After we finally saw her, she walked us up the dim stairwell and opened the door to her studio apartment.
It was neat as a pin: a bed with a bright patchwork quilt, a small dining table with two chairs, a counter with a sink and small stovetop. And two bananas in a bowl on the counter.
Jenny offered us chairs and perched on the edge of her bed. She began to tell us her story.
She grew up on a farm near the Canadian border in North Dakota. Just Jenny, no middle name. Her people were simple folk; she didn’t need a fancy name.
During World War II, she moved to Minneapolis to work in a factory. Now she was old and alone, never married, and had outlived the rest of her family and friends.
She loved her church. Every Sunday, she rode the bus an hour and a half each way to worship. She stopped for groceries on her way home. Since no grocery store was nearby, fresh food like fruits and vegetables required careful planning and precious cash.
As Andy and I prepared to leave, Jenny’s eyes flicked to the two perfectly ripe bananas in the bowl on the counter—a luxury in urban Minneapolis. And she said, “Please take the bananas home with you. Let me give you the bananas.”
Jenny’s simple offering was more than kindness—it was the breaking in of God’s kingdom. N.T. Wright reminds us: “This is what the kingdom of God looks like. The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious and uproarious, absurd generosity.”
Like the widow’s mite, Jenny’s bananas were a gift from her poverty. They were a gift of glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity. And in them, the power of God was made known.
You and I are recipients of God’s absurd generosity. Day by day, he lavishes good gifts upon us—the sun shines, the birds sing, and we open our eyes to a new day. God is astonishingly merciful, pouring out love and grace even as we know the state of our hearts. Again and again he forgives our sins, never tiring of receiving us back into his warm embrace.
God so loved the world that he came to live among us and, on the cross, gave up his life for us. God poured out his life for the sake of the world.
To trust in Jesus Christ is to live a life marked by joy, peace, and forgiveness. When God’s extravagant love is poured out, he calls his people to lavish generosity in response.
And this is why Christian worship is so profoundly countercultural. When we bow our heads and take to our knees to pray ancient prayers together, we enact a generosity and joy that defy the spiritual powers striving to divide and destroy. When we gather at the altar rail to share the Eucharist, we kneel against the powers and the principalities of this world.
The altar of Christ is a place of sacrifice and thanksgiving, where God’s love, forgiveness, and generosity pour out upon those who do not deserve it.
And from this gift, our mission flows. Filled with the presence and grace of God, we are sent to do in the world what Christ has done in us.
Christ poured himself out for humanity, and the Church is called to pour itself out for the world. Salvation comes, not where things are whole, but where they are broken—where darkness lingers, wounds fester, and enemies prowl.
Through God’s grace the Church becomes what it has received—the body of Christ, broken and poured out for the life of the world. We exist for the world’s salvation, bearing witness to our Savior who not only made the one oblation and sacrifice, but who is also present and active for us in this moment and holds our future in his hands.
The Church’s mission—our mission—is to woo this dear, broken world back to God. Not through power, but through sacrificial love. Through glorious and uproarious, absurd generosity. Through the gift of two bananas.
When we worship, serve, and bear witness to God’s extravagant grace, we become vessels of his love in the world. God pours his generosity upon us, drawing us into his unimaginable glory. And through this, the world is given a foretaste of the kingdom of God—a new creation rising in joy before him.
The Rev. Kristine Blaess, DMin, is rector at St. Paul’s Church, Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She spent her first decade of ordained ministry in rural Idaho serving congregations in majority LDS communities. Her doctoral work emerged from her desire to help congregations flourish as their leaders grow ever deeper as disciples and disciplers of Jesus Christ.
