Coffee is an act of love

I loved the smell of coffee long before I ever drank coffee. I loved it as a small child, five or six years old, waking up on a cold winter morning in my upstairs bedroom, the smell of the coffee drifting up the stairs. Sometimes the smell of bacon came along with it. Sometimes along with the coffee I heard the door on the wood stove scraping open, and the thunk of wood, and I knew that at least by the time my parents came to carry me out of bed, the fire would be going and I could stand warming by the stove as I woke up. I think back on it, and I see how they carried me and cooked for me and clothed me, all accompanied by the aroma of coffee.

And I also don’t have to go that far back. One of my fondest memories of pastoring is a moment that occurred regularly about 20 minutes after our worship service closed. Sunday is your big performance day when you’re a pastor, and there were all kinds of reasons why Sundays raised my blood pressure. I was usually up until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. working on my sermon, which still wasn’t finished when I rose again at six. So I was racing against the clock until 11 when meeting started, then after meeting, I was in one of our hallways, or pinned behind my office desk, as a line of people wanted to argue with the sermon or praise it, ask me about committee work, make sure I knew what was going on with a relative or, sometimes, with themselves—all very legitimate concerns, and I didn’t begrudge them the time, but dang it, I’d been running for half a day already on half sleep, and I needed caffeine. But I couldn’t get into the kitchen.

Therefore I loved the woman who began to seek me out, in whatever hallway or room I happened to be sequestered, and ask whether I wanted coffee, and what I took in it, and then when she learned what I took in my coffee, and that, yes, I always did want coffee, she simply came to me and put a cup of coffee in my hand, and I loved her even more. It wasn’t really so much about the coffee. It was about the fact that in this particular moment, when I was being asked to give attention and care to everyone around me, she was paying attention and giving care to me. I knew that. I believe she knew that. Occasionally someone would say something like, “Oh, I think he can get his own coffee,” or, “Gee, Dan, we need to figure out some way that you can come have hospitality with the rest of us,” but she never quit bringing the coffee, and I never quit accepting it. Which was about a lot more than caffeine.

Our yearly meeting this year is trying to plan programs around the theme “listening is an act of love.” Which it is. But for me, so is coffee. Coffee is an act of love. And if coffee is an act of love, as I believe it to be, it gives me some hope that somewhere in me I have some small ability to learn to care for my neighbors as Jesus—and Bart Campolo—advise me to do. Because maybe care doesn’t have to be massive and passionate. Maybe it can be small and subtle. Like a cup of coffee.

And I’m probably preaching to the choir here, because if anyone knows about small acts of kindness, it’s got to be the people who work in schools. The people who give lectures and grade papers, make phone calls, fill out forms, stop to talk in hallways, serve on committees, turn light switches on and off, fix plumbing, install software—all of these things not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of all those around them.

Maybe that’s part of the answer, in my life, to the way I felt challenged by some of the things Bart Campolo said when he spoke here a couple weeks ago. Especially his challenge about the church. Which he was clear came out of his personal experience, and which he did not intend as a universal edict. But it resonated with me. He said, “I have a hard time believing anymore that what goes on in church is relevant to our world. When I see that people are getting together in the church basement after services to plan out who’s going to move in with whom after people start to lose their jobs and their houses, when I see that churches are beginning to plan out how they will be eating together, then the church will seem relevant to me. But right now I don’t need it.”

It was a statement which was consistent with the other things he’d been saying all day. He talked about how so much of what Jesus said was aimed at teaching poor people how to thrive in their lives while living under Powers to whom their lives were meaningless and disposable. He talked about how inseparable the activities of loving God and loving people are, about how Jesus even says that these two activities are equivalent: you cannot love God without loving people, and whatever you do to love people—even if you want to leave God out of the picture altogether—is still about loving God.

The difficult part for me is figuring out how to do those things. Sometimes Love just seems so burdensome. The availability required, the willingness to be distracted, the close proximity to Others, to those who don’t think like me or dress like me or vote like me or be church like me. It’s a little bit like agreeing to be dressed down by sandpaper on a daily basis.

So maybe the encouraging thing for me, when I think of the challenge Bart made about what’s absolutely fundamental in faith, is that coffee is an act of love, and no matter how difficult it may be to care for my neighbors when I’m at home, at least when I’m here, on this campus, I’m part of a group of people who really are about caring for each other, every day. Maybe this, right here, is my church that works.