On a recent trip to Brazil, a friend of mine (Claudio) told me that he could make a banana cake out of what most of us throw away, the peel. Of course I told him that he was nuts. But sure enough, the day I was leaving, he presented me with a banana peel cake. As we ate the cake he told me a story. When he was in the Dominican Republic he was with a group of women that were low on resources and milk was hard to come by. He proceeded to tell the woman there was a way to make a cake that did not require milk but did require bananas. So one of the women went and got five bananas. He handed each of the the women the bananas and told them to peel and eat bananas. Then he said, “Now we’re ready to make banana cake out of the peels.” They began to laugh. To their amazement and mine, he did just as promised. Claudio showed us something that many of us have forgotten: What we usually consider waste offers us the possibility to create something very beautiful (extremely tasty).
A Option To Use Things That Usually Are Considered Waste (or: Banana Peel Cake)
To Turn The World
From The Editors
Revolution is at the heart of the biblical story. Scripture tells of the liberating God Yahweh who overturns the power of Egypt to accompany a ragged bunch of disbelieving slaves into a barren desert and work with them to build a new social order rooted in covenant and shalom.
This same God inspires prophets whose visions of justice pour down like a terrible wind through chasms of rock – the relentless hope of Isaiah, springing water in deserts; that lamentation of Jeremiah, weeping for the children of Rachel; the amazing dreams of the praying Daniel; and Ezekiel’s heartrending cry for a faithfulness that reweaves dry bones.
Mary’s song heralding her coming child is a manifesto more encompassing and revolutionary than anything penned by Marx – and more immediate, insisting as it does on present tense. It ushers in a Jesus who talks about the reign of God among us this very moment. His passionate stories and teachings evoke a social order which in mustard-seed fashion erodes the powerful rule of Imperial Caesar.
