Friends,

When we tried the Lenten Burger Night for the first time two years ago, I thought it would be a one-off thing and we’d be lucky to get a crowd of fifty or so. In general, I like the idea of changing up stereotypical Lenten practices that feel penitential for something like Burger Nights, but we took this approach for a very specific reason. We were at the tail end of the pandemic, and we realized that people were simply having a hard time getting accustomed to being back around people. It was hard to be apart, and it was hard to be back together, so we tried to facilitate being back together by creating something appealing. Instead of selling a Lenten event with something like, “you should probably come to terms with your mortality. Join us for some plain soup and uncomfortable conversations.” We said, “Let us make your life easier. Show up, let us feed you with the burger of the week, drop off your kids, and meet someone new.”

The events were successful! Clearly people were hungry for community and Bradley Lisenby’s famous burgers of the week. Logistically, we had a lot to learn, but by the end of the season, we felt that we had a handle on it. We continued the event last year, partly to provide a framework for our confirmation class, but mostly because we wanted to continue offering fertile ground for our new members to get to know each other. Though the Lenten Burger Nights were meant to be temporary, we continued them this year, and we will likely keep them going for the foreseeable future. These began as a means of creating community after a season of prolonged isolation. While our situation has changed, the desperate need for community and the uphill climb in fostering one, remain. We live in a highly political area, and many of our neighbors are affecting changes happening in the federal government and others are being affected by them. For many, this reality manifests in self-imposed isolation, surrounding ourselves with people who we know are “safe”, and being hesitant to show up at larger community gatherings. This is a hard time to create community, and we want to compel people to give it a shot.

So, Lenten Burger Nights started off with a bang. The first one of the season was two weeks ago and had a record turn out to the point we ran out of food. We prepped for 120 burgers to be rapidly made, but we had a crowd of about 170. The volunteer sign up was sparsely filled, but people stepped up when they saw there was need. One family who has never been to a Church event showed up and waited pretty much the entire evening for food, insisting that others go first. Their kids go to our Day School, and I caught them in the drop-off line the next morning. I apologized for our lack of preparation, but they rebuffed my apology and said they could bring their tow behind grill this week to help. We had a similarly sized crowd this Wednesday, but largely due to the efforts of people stepping up, and an additional grill, everything went according very smoothly. People invited neighbors, and the parish hall and playground were filled with the sounds of voices.

I imagine most everyone going into Burger Night had their own list of things that keep them up at night. When they went home, I imagine they checked the news and had some combination of powerful emotions after reading the headlines. Some may have stayed up reading, while others couldn’t deal with it just then and put their phones away, saving the bad news for the morning. However, while they were at Burger Night, they saw a Church trying their best and saw room to step in and to help. This manifested in Charles washing dishes, Tim optimizing our kitchen for French fry production, Genn teaching others how to assemble Mac N’ Cheeseburgers, TJ showing up with his beautiful tow-behind grill, and the group that naturally convenes a committee to watch the meat get cooked on the grills. Even the kids were eager to volunteer their services by transporting the finished patties up to the kitchen for assembly.

We are not doing Burger Nights for Lent because everything is fine, or that we have reason to celebrate. Instead, we are doing them because the world is very much not ok, and things are often tense in our neighborhood. Offering a respite and encouraging people to get to know one another at a frivolous and tasty event will not make everything ok, but it might help people make it through. For an evening, people showed up, ate with strangers and saw where they might jump in to help. We were working for something greater than ourselves, and peopled toiled together to feed the masses not knowing the politics or religion of anyone else, and it felt a bit like Church.

I hope you join us on Sunday mornings or Wednesday evenings where we hope to welcome in all the sinners and saints. You might expect to judge or be judged if you do join us, but our expectation is that you join us at the table and jump in to lend a hand when you feel called.

Blessings,

Nick