"...Builds Strong Bodies"
August 3, 1997
Ephesians 4:1-16/John 6:24-35
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Close your eyes and imagine what I'm describing. It's a lovelyday, you come home from work or school and walk through the doorand a wonderful smell comes wafting out. It's the smell of breadbaking in the oven, all yeasty and fresh. Ok, open your eyes.What other memories popped into your head at that moment?Favorite ones, I would wager. Now how about this memory -- red,yellow and blue balloons on a plastic wrapper, with the slogan,"builds strong bodies twelve ways." Wonder Bread? Yes.
Bread is one of the great, universal metaphors. It is, as oneproverb has it, the staff of life. The memories associated withbread baking are incredible. I am told that if you want to assistin selling a house, bake bread before the people come through.Wonder Bread, on the other hand, points to a whole differentdevelopment in the American food culture. It's among thebeginnings of convenience food linked to the invention of amechanical bread slicer in the 1930s and the adding of vitaminsand minerals to super-refined white flower. I remember aphilosophy professor of mine referring to Wonder Bread as"pictures of bread pasted on dough." I can't walkthrough a store bread section without thinking of that phrase.His point was that it was bread, but not quite. We see that againin the `bread of life' discourse in John's Gospel.
In the Gospel reading today Jesus confronted a whole group ofpeople who had been with him at the multiplication of the loavesand then tracked him down to the town of Capernaum. They werehungry, hardscrabble people who had seen something incredible --on the order of the manna given through Moses -- and they didn'twant it to stop. They wanted convenience...not real food. Truthwas, they didn't even know what they were hungry for.
What they had witnessed was a demonstration of God's abundantcare for humanity. Instead of seeing the physical sign pointingto the spiritual, which by the way all of the signs in Scripturedo -- they point us to what really matters, they get focused onthe physical. Taking this point of view they limit themselves andcome to Jesus to ask all the right questions, but for all thewrong reasons. The tragedy is that we continue to do the samething. So, like them, we often end up getting far less than Godis prepared to give. We get so focused on the good we don't getthe better and the best. Or, as in the case of Moses' manna,having experienced the better we grow complacent and content anddon't move to the best: exhilarating freedom in Jesus Christ.
These dear people were like children. So literal minded andthinking that they knew what was best for them. Almost like BillCosby talking about how his kids conned him into giving themchocolate cake for breakfast because it had all the same stuffpancakes did. Or Augustine's powerful observation in hisConfessions about how we still play the same games as adults thatwe did as children, save that the counters are different. Insteadof being nuts or fruit they become houses or gold. The crowdswere hungry in a way they didn't understand. And the hunger theyknew is present in every generation -- even when we've breadaplenty. The hunger they knew was the one Augustine talked aboutwhen he wrote, "You have made us for yourself and our heartsare restless until they rest in you, O God."
This is what the psychologist C.G. Jung observed sixty yearsago in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:
During the past thirty year, people from all the civilizedcountries of the earth have consulted me. . . .Among all mypatients in the second half of life -- that is to say, overthirty five -- there has not been one whose problem in the lastresort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It issafe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lostthat which the living religions of every age have given to theirfollowers, and none of them has really healed who did not regainhis religious outlook.1
Years later, the findings of sociologist Wade Clark Rook inhis A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the BabyBoom Generation are virtually the same. Roof sees a wholegeneration in search of transformation, needing to realize thatthere is and they can be something more. What I see fromscripture to Jung to Roof and to many others is the old Frenchproverb: "plus ca change, plus ca de la meme chose"[themore things change -- the more they remain the same].
Looking for transformation, but can't see it. The literal mindhas gotten in the way. Jesus uses metaphors and they get hung up.We hear the same metaphors and try to figure our HOW it couldhappen: we want science and reason to rule. As a consequence, wedon't open ourselves to the reality of the transcendent presentin the immanent. We, like the people in Capernaum, make avariation on the old saw: we're so earthly minded we can see noheavenly good.
Jesus invites them, and us, to experience the bread fromheaven -- true wonder bread -- the food of participation in God.This bread is offered through the Incarnate Word -- Jesus himself-- who is the bread, the staff of real life. The bread continuesto be offered through his teaching, through the Scriptures, andthrough what the Puritans called a "visible Gospel" theSacraments. Every time we get together, especially to share inthe Holy Communion, we are invited to partake and to participate.As you have heard me quote before, Augustine told us "we arewhat we eat." Receive the bread of life, Christ, and thenbecome him in the world.
This wonder bread of heaven builds strong bodies and buildsthe strong body: the body of Christ, the church. This bread takesdisparate people -- people from every race, generation, economicstatus, geographic location and even time -- and makes themfamily. This bread binds us together, because it first binds usto God. Paul understood this and told the newly baptizedChristians at Ephesus to act like what you are: you're thechildren of God, let it show. I like what the Biblical scholarLionel Swain has written:
If they [the Ephesians] are caught up in God's holiness theymust not only be like God, they must also be God in the sensethat they are the channels and the vehicles of God's love.Because they are holy with God's holiness they must not be apartfrom anything. On the contrary, they must be one with creation,they must give to, and communicate with others. And all this isthe actualization in their own lives of the holiness of God.Christian holiness does not involve a separation from the world,except where this is necessarily evil (4:22). It implies acommitment, a mission to the world. In other words, being holymeans sharing in God's concern for his creation. It is preciselythrough men, living within the ordinary social structures of thisworld, that God's loving concern is realized.2
It's easy to see how, reading Paul, the Puritans would havecome to their concept of sacraments as the "seals of thecovenant" : signs of something already at work. What we doin worship, in spiritual life is to be reflected in the everyday.
So there are concrete points of behavior that Christians aresupposed to observe: humility, patience, forbearance (which meansto bear with one another -- St. Benedict's comment was that onewas to "bear with each others infirmities whether of body orcharacter"), maintaining unity of the Spirit in the bond ofpeace. Why? Because, "There is one body and one Spirit, justas you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, oneLord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, whois above all and through all and in all."
The strong, mature body of Christ is built by coming to knowChrist and then through the study of scripture, prayer,participation in the sacraments, and service. Building the bodybrings us from spiritual childhood, and its accompanyingfickleness which likes something one day and "hates it"the next, to true maturity. The goal of the life in Christ is tocome to authentic human personhood.
So, true faith is not concerned with rules, regulations, and"have tos." Rather, we look to open participation infaith -- if it's real, it's going to show itself as real. Thus,the emphasis on the covenant, a lived-out experience, which saysI will do as I profess.
The Lord's table in this meeting house of God's freelygathered people is freely set. It is his table, not ours, towhich you are invited. You come because you are able to seal thecovenant and live as a follower -- not because we all agree onall of the theological niceties.
We are invited, today, to a meal which is more than a littlepiece of bread and a cup of juice. We are invited to fullparticipation in the life of God and to know through it what itmeans to be truly human. What we do today and how we live as weleave builds strong bodies in many ways.
1C.G. Jung Man In Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace& Co., 1933), p. 264.
2Lionel Swain Ephesians vol. 13 in The New Testament MessageHarrington and Senior eds. (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1980),p. 81.
