Sermons from St Faith's
You are what you eat!
Rev Sue Lucas, Sunday, August
16th, 2015
‘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.’ (Proverbs 9.6)
You are what you eat! It’s a familiar saying –
but a slightly uncomfortable one if, like me at the
moment, you are trying to lose weight! All you
have to do – apparently – is put less in your
mouth. You might also see me at the moment
running round Crosby in my pink gear – I was always
a runner, and I’m trying to get back to it for the
other bit of what you’re supposed to do ‘eat less
and move more’! So watch this space – although
I hope I’ll occupy a bit less of it soon, I do feel
a bit like Lady Jayne in Iolanthe (she plays the
cello, like me!) – ‘there will be too much of me in
the coming by and by!’
The Gospel readings over the last four Sundays have
all been about becoming what we eat – they have
focused on Jesus as the Bread of Life. It has
great and obvious Eucharistic resonances for those
of us in the catholic tradition. And these
meditations on the Bread of Life follow hard on the
heels of two of the most familiar miracle stories –
Jesus walking on water (6.16-21) and Feeding the
Five Thousand (6.9-11) They are stories that
we tell children – Jesus is God’s Son, and he can do
cool stuff!
But it shouldn’t surprise us that there’s more to it
than meets the eye. Throughout, Jesus is
linked with Moses, the Bread of Life that he gives
with the manna God’s people ate in the
wilderness. Jesus is shown as the new Moses,
the one who leads people into liberation and
fullness of life.
Immediately after the miracle stories, and before
the reflections on the Bread of Life, Jesus
withdraws –and people are looking for Jesus. When
they find that he’s gone from Capernaum, they follow
in a veritable flotilla of little boats.
They’re seeking Jesus – energetically and
determinedly – and so, presumably are we.
Isn’t that what’s brought us here today? To
seek him in the scriptures and the breaking of the
bread? And isn’t it exactly what we should be
doing?
So Jesus’ response is a little surprising: he
doesn’t affirm them for seeking him, he tells them
off: ‘you are looking for me not because you saw
signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.’
(6.27)
In other words – the disciples are seeking him to
fulfil their own needs and desires, their own sense
of identity and belonging.
And it is very easy to make our faith – even our
catholic, sacramental faith – into this. In
our late-capitalist, neoliberal world, we are
conditioned to be consumers – to find our identity
in what we consume, to be shaped by what we have –
we take in, and are taken in, because, so one
advertising slogan goes, we’re worth it. Faith
can easily become something else we consume – to
meet our needs, to build up our identity, to
reinforce our sense of our place in the world.
This is not what our faith in Christ crucified is:
for what we are offered in today’s Gospel – and at
the altar in every Eucharist - is a
scandal: the flesh of the Son of Man and his
blood. It was an affront to the Jewish purity laws
to mix flesh and blood – and it was an affront to
the idea of the Messiah that Jesus was crucified – a
method of torture and death reserved for common
criminals.
This scandal then is what we consume and become: for
indeed, we become what we eat: and what we become is
the Body of Christ, the Church – the community
precisely of the excluded, the aberrant, the great
unwashed, the ritually unclean; we’ve seen an
authentic church in recent weeks, in the makeshift
tented church in the midst of a refugee camp in
Calais – here, amongst some of the most marginalised
and excluded people on earth, God has found a place;
truly, they are the new Israel, fleeing, like Israel
from various forms of oppression, and living in
tents. For the Body of Christ is not a safe,
settled community of those like us, those with whom
we agree, those with whom we have chosen to
identify. And it can feel very scary – because
it feels like death; but that is precisely the point
– after all, we are baptised into the death of the
Lord, called to share in the scandal by taking up
our Cross. To feed on Christ in the Eucharist
is to learn to die – to live with our own mortality
and limits without resentment.
Except most of us don’t, entirely; to a greater or
lesser degree, mostly we’re comforted by what makes
us comfortable, by the safety and security of what
we like, and what is like us – including, of course,
our faith. Most of us, most of the time, find
our baptismal calling too difficult.
Thankfully, it isn’t all up to us; thankfully, long
before we are in a place really to seek him out,
Christ comes looking for us; with gentleness, with
tenderness, with understanding for our weakness; but
also with challenge – with a sharp message; and
always, with the relentless, unconditional love that
enables us, little by little, to lay aside the ways
of immaturity, and makes us, eventually, walk in the
ways of insight - able to die, and ready to
live. Amen.
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