Ephesians
4:25-5:2 John 6:35-51
I have a friend who likes to
watch baking shows – currently two favorites are “Sugar Rush” and “Just
Desserts”. Teams of bakers compete to
produce cakes and all manner of exotic confections. I myself am not much of a cook – my culinary
talents are mostly limited to opening boxes and operating a microwave – but two
things that are striking in these shows are that once various ingredients are
mixed together, there’s no separating them again – for example, if one of the
bakers reaches for salt instead of sugar and tosses that into the cake batter, there’s
no going forward with that batch of batter; they have to toss it out and start
over. The other thing that strikes me is
the number of ways that baking a cake or creating some other dessert can go
wrong – not enough or too much of various ingredients, wrong oven temperature, not
enough oven time, too much oven time.
In our Gospel reading, we’re
picking up where we left off last week, with some overlap. The crowds whom Jesus had fed with bread in
our reading two weeks ago have crossed the lake to be with Jesus in Capernaum,
in hopes that he’ll feed them bread again.
Meanwhile, Jesus is trying to feed their minds and spirits, but they’re
developing an acute case of mental and spiritual indigestion. When he fed them bread, they were happy to
follow him anywhere. When he invited
them to look on himself as bread, they backed away from the table.
When we hear Jesus offering his
body and blood as true bread and true drink, of course, our minds go to
communion, when we’re told to take and eat the bread, take and drink the cup,
in memory of Jesus, as we did last Sunday morning at about this time. But why do we do that? Because Jesus told us to, of course. But to what purpose? Of course, we know from history that
different Christian traditions have understood communion in various ways –
Roman Catholics believe that the bread and wine literally become the body and
blood of Christ, though retaining their appearance as bread and wine – this is called
transubstantiation, changing from one substance to another. Classic Lutheran language says that Christ is
“in, with, and under” the elements of bread and wine. This is called consubstantiation – that
Christ is with the elements, but that the elements remain bread and wine. Classic Reformed language – that would be our
tradition - emphasizes the role of memory – “do this in memory of me.” A more
recent term, “real presence”, is currently used by a number of these
traditions, along with others, to express ecumenical agreement that Christ is truly
present in the act of taking communion, while allowing for divergent
understandings of exactly how Christ is present. But beyond the details of understanding how
Christ is present, in our reading today, Jesus is stressing the importance of
taking him – his teachings, his way of life, himself – into our lives and our
selves as we take the bread and wine into our bodies, incorporating Christ into
ourselves, so that Christ becomes more and more a part of us, so that
ultimately we are transformed more and more into the image of Christ. And Jesus promises that if we feast on him –
if we incorporate Christ into our lives – he will sustain us in this life, and
grant us eternal life in the world to come.
Elsewhere in Scripture,
eating is also used as a metaphor for receiving wisdom or instruction from God
and making it an integral part of our lives – and Jesus was likely thinking of
these verses when he referred to himself as bread. In Proverbs 9:5-6, Wisdom is said to call to
those with ears to hear, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have
mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.” Jeremiah 15:16 reads, in part, “Your words
were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight
of my heart.” In Ezekiel 3:1-3, the prophet is instructed to eat a scroll
containing the words that he would speak to Israel. This metaphor recurs in Revelation, the
last book of the Bible, chapter 10, verse 9, when an angel gives the writer a
scroll, saying, “Take and eat it, it will make your stomach bitter, but in your
mouth it will be as sweet as honey.” So just
as Jesus was inviting the crowds, Jesus invites us, his present-day followers, to
take him – his teachings, his actions, his way of life – into our lives so
completely that he would become a part of us from that moment forward. Jesus made this invitation, with the promise
that we will never hunger or thirst again, and indeed that we would live
forever.
We refer to the bread of
communion as the body of Christ, broken for us.
We may remember that St. Paul also described the church as the body of
Christ. In a famous sermon, St. Augustine wrote these words, which are in the
newsletter, but I’d like to read them now “So now, if you want to understand
the body of Christ, listen to the Apostle Paul speaking to the faithful:
"You are the body of Christ, member for member." [1 Cor. 12.27] If
you, therefore, are Christ's body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed
on the Lord's table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving! You are
saying "Amen" to what you are: your response is a personal signature,
affirming your faith. When you hear "The body of Christ", you reply
"Amen." Be a member of Christ's body, then, so that your
"Amen" may ring true! But what role does the bread play? We have no
theory of our own to propose here; listen, instead, to what Paul says about
this sacrament: "The bread is one, and we, though many, are one body."
[1 Cor. 10.17] Understand and rejoice: unity, truth, faithfulness, love.
"One bread," he says. What is this one bread? Is it not the "one
body," formed from many? Remember: bread doesn't come from a single grain,
but from many. When you received exorcism, you were "ground." When
you were baptized, you were "leavened." When you received the fire of
the Holy Spirit, you were "baked." Be what you see; receive what you
are.”[1]
And so
Augustine seems to be saying, among other things, that our life together as
church should be as united and joined together as the grains in a loaf of
bread. In a loaf of bread, it’s
generally impossible to pick out this or that individual kernel of grain. The difference between a loaf of bread and,
for example, grains of wheat in a seed packet, is that in a loaf of bread, the
individual grains are broken apart, ground up, combined with yeast, and
baked. In the same way, our life as a
church flourishes when our individual lives are broken open and then joined
together by Christ’s love. Augustine is
also saying that just as we give special attention, sacred attention, to the
elements of communion, we should also give sacred attention to one another and
ourselves as members of Christ’s body, as grains of wheat within the one
loaf. This is very different from the
message of our culture, which increasingly values some lives while viewing
other lives – even other Christian lives - as disposable, depending on race,
nationality, sexual orientation, age, economic status, among other markers.
But, as in the
baking shows, a number of things can happen to spoil the dough, to keep it from
coming together as a loaf of bread as intended.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul warns against some of these
“ingredients” that need to be kept out of the dough: lying, resentment, stealing, evil or
unwholesome or corrupting talk, bitterness, rage, anger, fighting, slander,
malice. And Paul specifies some
ingredients that need to be in the dough:
kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness, and most especially love.
It’s
striking how much attention Paul gave to speech and attitudes. But we should remember that the churches to
which Paul wrote were not long-established, “tall steeple” churches with
venerable histories, hundreds of members and millions of dollars in the
endowment fund. They were new, fledgling
communities, house churches, likely with around as many members as we have here
today, maybe a few less, maybe a few more.
And they were experimental communities, learning by trial and error how
to work together and live together and love together as followers of
Jesus. There was no book of recipes for
creating this kind of loaf, no instruction manual for maintaining this kind of
community. Any kind of discord among the
members would threaten to break up the community, blow up the church – or, to
use the baking metaphor, spoil the loaf of bread, causing it to become
inedible.
Especially
Paul warns against anger – and even in our short reading, Paul is exceedingly careful
in discussing anger, knowing how explosive anger can be. He seems to take for granted that believers
will become angry, and yet wants to set limits on it: “Be angry but do not sin, do not let the sun
go down on your anger, and give no foothold to the devil.” Anger is a natural human emotion, and even
Jesus experienced and expressed anger, on one occasion to the extent of turning
over the tables of the money changers in the Temple. There
is such a thing as righteous anger, as expressed by the Old Testament prophets
in denouncing the injustice and corruption of their society. But righteous anger is something we need to discern
very carefully, because it’s human nature to mistake our own will for God’s
will, and so self-interest can very quickly corrupt our attempts at righteous
anger. Paul is also telling his readers
not to hold onto their anger, but to resolve their differences quickly – he
uses that striking phrase, “do not let the sun go down on your anger”. When we hold onto our anger, it hardens into
resentment and holding of grudges – and it’s been said, accurately, that
“holding onto a resentment or a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting
the other person to die.” In other
words, we harm only ourselves, while the person we hate goes merrily on with
their life. It’s important to name this
because there is so much anger in our society, so much resentment, so much
poison swirling around in the body politic.
In the church, we need to model a different and better way of resolving
differences – both for our own health and well-being, and as a witness to those
around us.
Paul uses a
striking phrase, “do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed
for the day of redemption.” That phrase
sounds abstract, but I think we’ve all experienced it – at least I have. We’re in disagreement with someone and we say
or do something that we know will be really hurtful to them, and as we do it,
we think, “well, that’ll show them.” But
after we do it, instead of a sense of triumph, we feel only guilt and sadness
as we see how our words and actions play out.
And I think that’s at least something of what it’s like to grieve the
Holy Spirit, when we dish out something to wound the spirit of someone else,
but instead our own spirits feel pain.
Paul ends by
saying, “Be imitators of God, as beloved children.” This sounds like a tall order – but for those
of us who are raising or have raised children, we might think of when they
pretend to be a baker or a nurse or a pilot or a fireman or such. Of course, there’s a long distance between
what they pretend to be and what they can actually do. But maybe if they hold onto that dream as
they grow older, they may someday as adults become what they pretend to be as
children. And in that sense we can be
imitators of God, as beloved children. I
don’t think Paul had in mind imitating God’s power or God’s wrath, hurling
lightning bolts at one another, but imitating God’s love, because in his next
sentence, Paul encourages his readers to live in love, to walk in love, as
Christ walked in love and gave himself up for us. Like children imitating their parents, we can
imitate Christ’s self-giving, costly love – and of course, like children, there
will be a gap between what we can do and what Christ did – and that’s ok. It’s a matter of living into Christ’s
example, and the hope is for progress, not perfection. And in so doing, we acknowledge and respect
the sacredness of God’s image within ourselves and one another.
Earlier in
his letter to the Ephesians, Paul
seemingly gropes for words to describe God’s love for us – “God’s love for you
is too broad and too long, too high and to deep, for me even to begin to
describe – and I want you to experience that love, experience every bit of it,
so that you may be filled to overflowing with it. And I want you to show that same love to one
another.” We can’t show others what we haven’t
experienced for ourselves. So I pray we
will be open to God’s love, totally open to God’s love, letting God’s love
overwhelm us, knock us off our feet – so that we can share that same love with
one another and with a world desperately needing to be loved, desperately
needing God’s love whose breadth and length, height and depth are beyond
imagining. Amen.
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