You Are What You Eat

sermon by Torin Eikler
John 6:35, 41-51         Ephesians 4:25-5:2

I grew up hearing the words “You are what you eat” … a lot.  I got it from my mother, and I got it from my teachers at school.  But, the image that always comes to mind when I hear it now is the one that came from School House Rock.  That was the series of short cartoons that brought my generation songs like “Conjunction Junction,” “I’m just a Bill,” and “Yuck Mouth” which taught us about grammar, how Congress passes laws, and the importance of brushing our teeth, respectively.  And in the several shorts called “Time for Timer,” School House Rock gave me images to go along with the idea of eating healthy.

Thanks to “The Body Machine,” “You are What You Eat,” and various shorts about healthy snacks, I have comforting animated pictures of cheese and cracker wagon wheels and chicken sandwiches moving through my stomach and intestines to give me the energy and building blocks that I need to turn me into a walking chicken leg or a fish with legs … or at least keep my body a healthy, functioning machine instead of a blob of fat with feet.  Ah, the wonders of Saturday morning cartoons in the 80s.  I sometimes wish they still played those kind of public service messages.  They might even convince me to get cable so that my children could share in the fun!

Well, in this section of his letter to the Ephesians, Paul seems to have been sending his own version of a PSA to a congregation that needs to learn about healthy eating.  In other places he was much more explicit about watching what you eat … literally.  In Corinthians and Galatians, he talked about eating food offered as a sacrifice in Roman temples and how some believers should avoid that if it was a threat to their faith.  Here though, he was speaking about something less mundane and much more dangerous to everyone – the threat of seduction by the surrounding culture.

The Ephesians, it seems, had taken on many of the more … undesirable traits of the people they lived with.  They were lying to one another, holding grudges, gossiping, and speaking hurtful words.  They were even stealing and “brawling” in violation of both the eighth commandment and the spirit of Christ’s teachings about shunning violence and caring for one another.  Those kinds of immorality were common in culture of the time as they are still common today, but they are good food of a body of believers.  Paul encourages the believers to leave them behind in favor of a healthier diet.

Founded on the Bread of Life, that spiritual diet seems to have been just about the opposite of what the Ephesians were eating.  Certainly there were some things that they had been doing right, and Paul simply left those things out – perhaps to save space and perhaps because he trusted their inherent understanding of morality and the power of guilt and shame to reveal what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong.  At the least, his writing at the beginning of this letter showed that he trusted in their faith and the strength of character it took to become a Christian in the midst of a society that was unfriendly to followers of the way.

Still, he found himself compelled to speak about these specific issues that threatened the health of the community.  In place of lying, he encouraged speaking the truth.  More specifically he spoke of sharing the truth in a loving way so that it did not become a tool that caused even more pain.  In place of anger, he encouraged love.  In place of stealing, he told them to commit themselves to work honestly with their hands so that they could share with each other the fruits of their labors.  And in place of hurtful words and violence, he prescribed kindness, tenderness, compassion, and forgiveness.  In that way, he built an image of a healthy community for them that would serve to guide them as well as my cartoons have served me.

As much as I believe that Paul’s letters do have important things to teach us, I have trouble believing that all of this is relevant for this congregation.  I don’t think that many of us have an issue with brawling, though I suppose that the occasional violent act crosses our minds … and maybe finds release.  I also believe that none of us have taken to stealing as a way to support ourselves.  I suspect that most of us do have some work to do in the area of forgiveness and letting go of grudges born of anger or frustration.  Where I do think we have a lot to learn, though, is in speaking truth in love which may be the most important piece in this list of advice since Paul mentions it in several other places.

As it turns out, telling lies – even white lies – is bad for your health.  I found this out on Wednesday from a reporter who asked if he could interview me on the topic for the evening news, and while the final cut of my interview left me feeling a little sheepish, it also got me interested in looking up the facts of the study.

Apparently the average American lies about 11 times each week – which actually doesn’t seem like all that much.  But the stress of it still gets to us.  The strain that comes from worrying if we will be found out triggers our fight or flight responses, and with nowhere to run and nothing to fight, we internalize the pressure for action.  The results can be as minor as tight shoulders and feelings of tension and melancholy or as significant as greater vulnerability to headaches and colds.[1]  Some people even speculate that regular lying could lead to greater risk of heart attacks and strokes based on other studies about stress-related risks.  It would seem that honesty is not only “the best policy,” it is also good for your health.

 Paul didn’t have any access to that kind of information, but he understood other dangers that come from being careless with the truth.  Broken relationships, angry spirits, and even violence can come from lying, but just being honest is not enough.  If we are not careful and caring in our telling, the truth can do a lot of damage. Wielded without thought, it can become a weapon with the power to cut much more deeply than a sword.  It can break relationships, give birth to angry spirits, and incite violence and suffering just as well as lies.  A few poorly chosen words can reach right to the core of a person’s self-image and wreak havoc that spills over into every part of their life.  It can cause pain and suffering that last a lifetime and resist every kind of healing that we have to offer.  Sometimes, it can seem kinder to lie.  The solution that Paul proposes to this dilemma is to speak the truth but only with an eye to easing whatever pain those words may cause – to speak the truth in love.

Speak the truth in love … it sounds like an easy task as first glance, but I suspect that all of us know that it’s not nearly so simple when we actually try to do it.  We feel helpless as we watch someone we love dearly do crazy and even self-destructive things, and we don’t have any idea how to tell them what’s going on without embarrassing them.  We know that we need to let them know, but we’re worried about how they will respond and we don’t want to hurt them.  And the longer we wait, the harder it gets.  How do you tell someone that they are hurting others or betraying their own ethics without driving them away?

There’s no easy answer to that question.  Even experience doesn’t guarantee success. What works once doesn’t always work again … even with the same person because each situation is different and people change.  Jesus, himself, didn’t always get it right.  Though some would argue that he knew what he was doing when he used his truth as a weapon, it seems to me that he might have had more success if he hadn’t called the Pharisees hypocrites quite so many times in public.  He might have won more converts among them if he had used a different approach. 

Still, he did understand the need for compassion with most people.  When he spoke to the rich young ruler, he didn’t condemn him.  In fact, he celebrated the many achievements that the man had made in his struggle toward righteous living before sharing the need for him to share his riches with the poor.  And rather than condemning the woman caught in adultery, he told her, “Go and sin no more.”  Neither of those two people went away from their meeting with Jesus’ truth content and happy, but they both had hope and a reason to work at changing their lives.

It takes practice and commitment to speak truth in love.  It takes the courage to risk mistakes and the humility to ask for forgiveness when we fail.  It’s a learning process … a skill that we must cultivate with care and love … a process of growth and maturing that we need to nurture with prayer and faith if we are to live into our potential as believers and disciples.

A pre-school teacher tells the story of a four year old who was sent to apologize to a child he had hit on the playground.  Several minutes later, he did the same thing again.  When the teacher called him over, the boy explained, “That’s okay.  I’ll apologize to him again later.”  It took the teacher quite a while to persuade the child that hitting someone was never okay and that that’s not the point of apologizing.

When it comes to speaking to each other in love, we are all children with a lot to learn.  There are times when we do it well, and we think that we’ve got it figured out.  And there are times – probably more times – when we do our best and find that we have let loose a punch that we didn’t mean to throw.  But we need to keep at it.  We need to keep trying … keep working at it so that we can find a way to share our own pieces of truth with one another.  Without that sharing, the body of Christ will never become what it could be and we will never grow into God’s vision for us as children of the Peaceable Kingdom.

Our society teaches us that we must care for ourselves and our own above and beyond anything else because no one else will do it for us.  It tells us that it is okay to lie or cheat or steal in order to get ahead.  That’s the meat and potatoes of the American dream after all, and in the past several years, we have seen so many people get away with it that it makes us wonder why we should be any different.

But we have fed ourselves on a different diet.  We have eaten the Bread of Life and drunk the Wine of Compassion – foods that foster an entirely different spirit … that encourage a different kind of living – foods that bring forth love, joy, and peace … kindness, generosity, and faithfulness … gentleness and self-control.  With those building blocks and that fuel powering our “Body Machine,” we have what we need to nurture a different way of living and loving in this world.

We are not yet … may never be perfect imitators of Christ, but we have hope.  We have brothers and sisters, companions in the struggle, friends we know and trust to walk with us on the path, lovingly sharing the truth that we need to hear along the way.  And we have the Bread of Life to sustain us - a stream of spiritual nourishment that will never run out –a source of hope boundless enough to feed all of God’s children.  It is ours … given to us in love … given that we may know life without end.

  

Sisters and brothers, that is hope.  That is grace.  That is the compassion of Christ laid out for us that we may come to know what is the height, the breadth and the depth of God’s love for us – to know and to share with one another and with all the hungry souls of this world.  May it be so.

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[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/07/honesty-healthy-lies-truth_n_1748144.html