The following sermon was preached at saint benedict’s table on Sunday August 19, 2018. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O Lord, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
“Be careful how you live,” that’s how our reading from Ephesians begins. Life is a theme in both of tonight’s readings. The word “life” or variations like “live” and “living” occur ten times in these two relatively short passages.
In the gospel reading, Jesus says he is the “living bread that came down from heaven… and those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life…. those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Which is a pretty weird thing to say.
Most of us in this room have probably heard these words, or variations of them, only to consume a bit of bread and a mouthful of wine often enough that we forget how shocking they could be.
I have a friend who worked on a Masters thesis on the various ways that the early Christians responded to accusations of cannibalism based on their neighbour’s fairly reasonable assumption that the new fringe group who have arrived on the scene and say they eat human flesh and drink human blood, actually do.
In our time, people may still think Christians are pretty scary, but it’s for very different reasons.
I read Jesus’ words about the life giving properties of his flesh and blood with a sense of relief not horror, because they remind me that the focus of Christ’s message is life, life that is available as a gift, free of charge.
Later in John, Jesus will further expand on this theme by stating that he came so that we “may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10b) Others translations say “that we might have life and life to the full.”
On Wednesday I went to see the movie “Christopher Robin” with my niece. The film, which is really more for adults than kids, is set in the world of the Winnie the Pooh stories and imagines what might have happened to Christopher Robin when he grew up.
And it isn’t pretty.
After leaving his friends behind in the Hundred Acre Woods, Christopher Robin experiences the trauma of living in a boarding school and fighting in a war. He gets married, has a child, and works very hard at a job he doesn’t seem to enjoy.
He works so hard, in fact, that he is hardly ever home and rarely sees his family. He works so hard that he forgets how to play.
In one scene, his wife is upset to learn that he is going to miss yet another family holiday because of a work emergency and Christopher Robin tries to reason with her saying something like, “I just have to work very hard now, for the next few years, and then, then I’ll have made enough money that I can relax and enjoy life.”
And she replies, “Christopher, this is your life, it is happening right now and you are missing it.”
A lot of people, when they hear Jesus’ words about the bread of life and the promise that anyone who eats that bread will never die, make the same mistake that Christopher Robin does: they get so excited about the idea of eternal life, they get so wrapped up in imaging what might happen next, that they miss the fact that Jesus’ words also have something to say about this life right now. They begin to live like Christopher Robin thinking, “I just have to suffer through this life, but the next life, well, the next life will be glorious!”
We all have a tendency to fall into this sort of either/or thinking, this scarcity mentality – I can either be happy now or in the future, not both. But God is always calling us to think bigger, to accept both/and thinking. Jesus has come to give us life now and in the future. We can have both.
Our reading from Ephesians opens by saying that we need to “[make] the most of the time, because the days are evil.” (v.15)
A day can’t literally be evil can it? Time is a neutral construct. But a day can feel evil or contain evil. I can’t count the number of times this week that someone referred to our current weather conditions as “unsettling” or “apocalyptic.” The days felt evil.
The news didn’t help much either – horrifying stories about child abuse in the church, the death of a beloved icon, and really, any news story that began with the words “The president tweeted…”
It doesn’t take much to get the sense that, just as in Paul’s time, our days are evil too.
I spent a lot of time this week trying to puzzle out why Paul chose to make this argument about time by saying the days are evil. He could have said, “Make the most of the time because time is a gift from our good and loving God,” or “Make the most of the time because life is precious and you don’t want to miss out on any of it.” You know, something that’s got a positive tone to it that I could easily back up with a massive pile of scripture.
But no, Paul chooses to be a bit of a downer. Make the most of the time because the days are evil.
At least, Paul may seem like a downer if you only read this one small section of the letter. We’re over halfway through Ephesians at this point, and Paul spent the first half of the letter laying the groundwork for the advice his offers in the second half.
In the first chapter, he tells us that God’s goal (telos) for the world is to bring all things together in Christ. (1:10) In the third we learn that God wants the church to be the embodiment of that promise on earth. (3:10) Paul is calling the Ephesians to be wise and align their lives with that goal.
Ephesians is also a letter that contains beautiful expressions of how much God loves us like, “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (3:18-19) There’s some pretty upbeat stuff in this letter.
But this is also a letter about wisdom, and it would be unwise – foolish even – to pretend that evil isn’t real. It is. So if the days are evil, then Paul needs to say that the days are evil. But we also need to remember that this small fragment from Ephesians doesn’t tell the whole story. The days may be evil, but we also know that the whole world is God’s good creation and we are called to play a part in celebrating that which is good, and redeeming that which is evil. (2:10)
Paul’s words are a call to a realistic sort of hope that is honest about the state of things, including the evil of the day.
While it is an interesting academic exercise to try and determine just why Paul chose to describe the days as evil, I think the important point to glean from his words is this: we need to choose wisely and make the most of the time that we have been given.
And that doesn’t mean withdrawing from the world to wait for a better time to come in the future. And that doesn’t mean ignoring the life that we are actively living in this very moment to focus on a life that will be ours in the future.
I also don’t think that either Jesus or Paul are suggesting that if we eat the bread of life that we will be guaranteed a fat bank account, perfect health, or a choice parking spot. Jesus’ promise was to give us “life to the full,” not merely, “all the things you wished for.”
I think Paul’s challenge to us is to pay attention to our lives, to be aware of what is going on, to be fully alive, rather than just coasting through life on autopilot.
Has this ever happened to you? Someone stops you on Monday morning and asks you how your weekend was and you realize you can’t answer because you can’t actually remember what you did on the weekend?
That’s life on autopilot, and I find it really easy to fall into that way of living, but I’ve also found that there is a simple but powerful prayer that can shake me out of it. A prayer that can help me be more careful with my time.
As a young man, St Ignatius of Loyola was so bored that he became a Christian. Confined to a bed after an injury with nothing to read but a few spiritual classics that he didn’t really want to read, he read them, became a changed man.
In addition to founding the Jesuit order, Ignatius left two gifts to the Christian community: the “spiritual exercises,” an intensive discernment process that takes at least four weeks to complete, and the awareness examen, which can take as little as a few minutes to complete.
Ignatius believed that the awareness examen was the single most important spiritual exercise we can practice. He felt that the examen needed to be done regularly because it “exercises” or develops a discerning heart. He believed that every life experience is accompanied by a movement in your heart and the examen is a practice that helps you to recognize that movement. He prayed this prayer twice a day and encouraged others to do the same.
In fact, he told the monks in his order that if they were in a crisis or too busy to do any other practices, if they were too busy to read scripture or to pray, they could skip everything – every other discipline – except the awareness examen.
It is based on Jesus’s words about coming to give us life to the full and it’s designed to help us make careful use of our time by choosing to lean into the things that make us feel fully alive, and away from the things that don’t.
To practice this prayer you need to take some time every day to review that day and reflect on these questions, “Where did I feel most fully alive today, and where did I feel least alive?’
And that’s pretty much it. Ideally, you follow up on the awareness you gleaned from those questions by choosing to lean into the things that made you feel most alive, and away from the ones that made you feel least alive. It is that leaning into life, that makes this simple prayer so profound.
Living life to the full, feeling fully alive, living the sort of live that Jesus wants us to have, doesn’t mean we will always be happy. Happiness is not necessarily the goal. It’s – sniff – that. Whatever the word for that feeling is. That sense that you are living in a way that is fully how you were created to be.
The examen helps us to notice the good and the bad in our lives and to acknowledge that God is with us in both. Earlier I teased Paul for being a bit of a downer, but truthfully, I am grateful that he was honest and didn’t try to sugar coat his message. If the days are evil, then we need to name them as such.
And when things are good, we need to acknowledge that too. I can sometimes fixate on the bad to the point that I don’t notice the good. Similarly, other people can so repress the bad that they don’t notice the house is burning down around them. The examen provides a balance between the two and helps us to see that God is always with us in both.
In his book Practice Resurrection, Eugene Peterson says, “It is because of God’s way with us as Spirit that we know that everything in and about God is livable – God bringing us into participation with God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not merely truths to be learned and believed. They are to be lived. The church is not primarily a place for education. It is a place, a playing field if you will, to practice God, practice resurrection.” (Practice Resurrection, 204)
This past week at our day camp, I saw a group of people who were practicing resurrection. The kids at the camp were consistently being encouraged to explore different activities and ideas in order to discover which ones made them feel most fully alive – even if it wasn’t always explicitly put that way. “Just try it” was a value that was infused into every part of the day. Not sure that you can run up a wall? Try it. Act in a silly skit? Try it. Get a piece of chocolate from your forehead to your mouth without using your hands? Try it. Didn’t succeed the first time? Try again!
Through all of these things those kids were exploring who they were created to be in a safe environment that reinforced the fact that they were loved. You could see that through the sweat and the scraped knees that they were experiencing that fully alive feeling. It’s such a good thing and I know those kids will remember and be shaped by those experiences throughout their lives.
We are also called to pay attention to our lives, to how we use our time, and to the things that make us feel most fully alive. It can feel a bit silly or scary at first, but it has a transformative power that it worth some initial discomfort.
And when we begin to pay attention to our lives, when we begin to live into the things that make us feel fully alive, we will also experience a deep sense of gratitude. Gratitude to the God who created us in a unique and beautiful way, and gratitude for the chance to experience the moments of being fully alive.
Giving thanks is a sign that we are filled with the Spirit. This doesn’t mean we are to give thanks for evil or pretend it doesn’t exist, but rather we are to dig deeper into gratitude and call attention to the things that we can honestly be grateful for, even in tough times.
Amen.