Lent 2025 Day 20

Sara Miles, Writer and Baker
John 6:35-40 | Psalm 39

Sara Miles is a writer, activist, and former journalist whose unexpected conversion to Christianity led to a radical reimagining of faith and service. Raised in an atheist household, Miles spent much of her early life as a skeptic, uninterested in organized religion. But everything changed when she wandered into St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco one morning and took communion for the first time. She describes this moment in her memoir, Take This Bread, as an experience of profound, embodied grace—a call not just to believe but to act.

For Miles, encountering Christ in the Eucharist was inseparable from the call to feed others. She did not stop at the altar; instead, she walked out of the church and started a food pantry, setting up tables of groceries right in the sanctuary to serve the hungry in her community. Her work embodies John 6:35-40, where Jesus declares Himself as the Bread of Life, promising that whoever comes to Him will never hunger or thirst. This passage is not just a metaphor—it is an invitation to radical hospitality, to live a faith that nourishes bodies as well as souls.

Yet, faith is never without struggle. Psalm 39 reflects on the brevity and fragility of human life, a theme Miles wrestles with in Take This Bread. She acknowledges the messiness of faith—the doubts, the imperfections, the tensions between service and self-doubt. But she also insists that God is found not in certainty but in the breaking of bread, in the hands that pass food from one to another. "You don’t get to know anything," she writes. "You don’t get to be sure. But you do get to come to the table and take the bread."

Lent is a season of hunger—of longing for something deeper, of stripping away what distracts us from the presence of God. Sara Miles reminds us that the hunger we feel is met in Christ, and that Christ calls us to meet the hunger of others. Her life and work challenge us to see the Gospel not as an abstract doctrine but as a meal shared, as a table widened, as bread broken for all.

Reflection:

• How does Jesus’ declaration, "I am the bread of life," shape your understanding of faith? 
• Where have you experienced God in tangible, unexpected ways, as Sara Miles did? 
• How might you expand the table—both spiritually and physically—in your own community? 

Breath Prayer: Inhale: You are the bread of life… Exhale: …Feed us and make us whole.

May this Lenten season deepen our hunger for Christ and expand our vision of what it means to break bread in His name.

Amen.